How Microlearning Will Shape the Future of Work
Alex Khurgin, Association for Talent Development, 2017/08/31
This post explores the timing of microlearning in the workplace. It's a good point. The centrepiece is the pair of diagrams of mis-aligned and aligned microtraining. More...

German publishers are joining forces against the duopoly
Jessica Davies, Digiday, 2017/08/31
On discussion lists recently the subject of personal identification schemes has resulted in considerable debate - should, for exam ple, ORCID be required by funders, or should the principle of an open, distributed and non-proprietary scheme be encouraged. More...

Education and employability: Can the gap be closed?: CIBC report
Benjamin Tal, Royce Mendes, CIBC, 2017/08/31
According to this report (5 page PDF), "students are starting to get the message as more enroll in high-demand, high-paying fields of study but momentum is hindered by rising tuition and an inflexible system." programs leading to higher-paying jobs are beginning to cost more as tuiotion fees rise. More...

Warsaw
Stephen Downes, Flickr, 2017/08/31

I'm back from Poland and have stuff to share. For today, it's photos from my visit - Warsaw, where I spent most of my time, but at from short side-trip to Krakow and Lodz. Enjoy! :). More...

Explained simply: How DeepMind taught AI to play video games
Aman Agarwal, Medium, 2017/08/30
I think the concept here is a good idea - take a complex paper on AI and rewrite it so most people can understand it. And it more-or-less works. We certainly get a sense of the accomplishment: they trained an AI to play different games by using only the game as input - no rules, no hidden data, just game input. More...

Assessing Learning Outcomes: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking and Written Communication Skills
Vera Beletzan, Melissa Gabler, Paula Gouveia, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2017/08/30
When I think about my own intellectual history I can think of several keystone events in which I received explicit guidance in critical thinking (and writing) which advanced my thinking significantly. One was reading Eleanor Maclean's Between the Lines. Another was reading Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics. Another was a close reading and analysis of one of my papers given to me by Jon Bordo, a philosophy professor. More...

All the routine jobs
Kate Bowles, Music for Deckchairs, 2017/08/29
This is a lovely post that looks at the (unattributed) nature of routine work. It's a bit like the art derived from Google book scanners, showing how the work of the invisible is essential to the product(s) we see today. More...

International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729)
International Standard Name Identifier, 2017/08/29
While publishers are pushing standards like ORCID, this is the ISO standard for names. "ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more." It's a distributed system. More...

Hypercard Archeostackology
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/08/29
"Can I say," asks Alan Levine, "that like Ward Cunningham, experiments in Hypercard led me to the web?" Probably. More...