Secure mail for everybody!
Tutanota, 2017/12/25
Tutanota is a fully encrypted email service. According to the website, "In the future Tutanota will be our replacement for Gmail with a calendar, notes, cloud storage - everything encrypted by default!" The service is free with one gigabyte of storage with plans for more. More...

Harmony and hope as pedagogies for 2018
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2017/12/25
Jenny Mackness summarizes some of the recent discussion around the idea of a 'pedagogy of harmony'. She links to Kevin Hodgson's video of a 'found poem' from Laura Ritchie's post (definitely required viewing). Harmony doesn't seem to be enough, she suggests. More...

Dynamicland
Dynamicland, 2017/12/25
This is not a product but a vision of a product. In a nutshell: it's paper, but where every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a computer. The idea is to allow us to create large surfaces (like the surface of a table) where we collaborate using these scraps. More...

Permits to teach not a long term solution
Grant Frost, frostededucation, 2017/12/25
In Nova Scotia an agreement has been reached that "would allow people without teaching degrees to work as substitute teachers in the region’s largest board." Obviously this is far from ideal, and it sounds like the measure was adopted very reluctantly. More...

Inequality in nature and society
Marten Scheffer, Bas van Bavel, Ingrid A. van de Leemput, Egbert H. van Nes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017/12/25
Something to think about for the holidays. The authors identify "striking similarities between patterns of inequality between species abundances in nature and wealth in society." Then, in a kicker, they "demonstrate that in the absence of equalizing forces, such large inequality will arise from chance alone." The only way to respond to this is through some sort of regulation; in the forest, this might occur through natural factors, but in society, unless there is some sort of regulation, the inevitable result is massive inequality. More...

Expectations make the difference
Matthias Melcher, x28s new Blog, 2017/12/22
Maybe nothing will come out of the idea of the 'pedagogy of harmony', or maybe I have at last found a worthy response to the idea of the pedagogy of the oppressed and even the pedagogy of hope. In any case, Matthias Melcher has teased out one fascinating strand, the idea that our exopectations make the difference between whether we are in harmony with the world of whether things sound a note of dissonance. More...

The Year We Found Out Everything We Thought We Knew About the World Was Wrong
Umair Haque, Eudaimonia, Medium, 2017/12/22
To my mind, this is the same argument I've been having with David Wiley. "The necessity to buy back the basics of life that citizenship should entail from the highest bidder, while selling one’s self to the lowest bidder, is not really much freedom at all, compared to the simple, humble, gentle right, ability, capacity, to live a sane, healthy, happy, and full life, that hurts no one, and lifts up everyone." More...

The Propaganda behind Personalised Learning
Benjamin Doxtdator, A Long View on Education, 2017/12/22

This is a more recent article from Benjamin Doxtdator on personalized learning (the previous one cited was from July). More...

Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students Better Evaluate Scientific Claims
Leah Shaffer, Mind/Shift, 2017/12/22
So much of what people are calling "critical thinking" and even "digital literacy" revolves around the idea of evaluating claims. This article in Big Think is a case in point, describing efforts to engage students in assessing articles and thinking like a scientist. More...

The World's Best Film School is Free on YouTube
David Pierce, Wired, 2017/12/22
Wired is prone to grand overstatements, and that's probably the case here as well. Having said that, the phenomenon they point to is real. The article points to YouTube advice channels such as Every Frame a Painting,  VSauce, CGP Gray and Lessons from the Screenplay. The article talks about the "YouTube Film School", but it's just a concept, not an actually existing thing. More...