Internet Pioneers and Leaders Tell the FCC: You Don’t Understand How the Internet Works
Frederick J. Baker, et.al., Pioneers of Net Neutrality, 2017/12/12
I don't know how much damage the end of net neutrality in the United States would cause, but over the long run, it's probably significant. This is in large part because it is based on a flawed understanding of internet technology. In this email Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, and other internet pioneers release a short letter linking to their earlier submission to the FCC (53 page PDF) in opposition to the ending of net neutrality. More...

Weaving quicksilver: ‘We-searching’ for a pedagogy of small
Tanya Dorey, Small Stories, 2017/12/12
I've been on Mastodon for just over a year; my first post was last December 3. Since then I've written small stories, discussed theory, documented 1500 km of bike rides, and engaged in general banter. What I like about it is that it is a small and informal community I can share with. Some people call it a pedagogy of small. Others call it a pedagogy of slow. If it's a pedagogy at all, it's a pedagogy of harmony (which really, at long last, may be my answer to Friere). More...

Shaping the university in a networked era
David White, Digital - Learning - Culture, 2017/12/12
I mentioned in a tweet the other dat that David O. White is new to me. But he's not in fact new; he is the same David White who introduced us to the 'visitors and residents' terminology back in 2011. This explains his placement on a panel with Marc Prensky. I've added his feed to my aggregator but since he posts infrequently don't expect to see a lot. More...

The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
John Hilton III, David Wiley, Jared Stein, Aaron Johnson, Brigham Young University, 2017/12/12
In the ongoing discussion on OER repositories David Wiley suggested today that "While many people are aware of the 5Rs framework for thinking about the legal openness of OER, but far fewer people are aware of the ALMS framework for thinking about the technical openness of OER." It was introduced in 2010 in Open Learning, a Taylor & Francis journal that throws up a subscription barrier if I want to read it. More...

Is Alison The Answer To The World's Education Needs?
Peter High, Forbes, 2017/12/12
Forbes is reporting Alison's oft-debunked claim to have created the world's first MOOCs. It's hard to read this article as anything other than an advertorial (again, I caution people against trusting the traditional media where commercial interests are concerned). I have written to Allison in the past about this but there appears to be no legislation or constraint requiring that they represent themselves honestly. More...

Open Education and OER - A guide and call to action for policy makers
Maren Deepwell, Martin Weller, Lorna Campbell, Joe Wilson, Association for Learning Technology, 2017/12/12
This short paper (8 page PDF) is a "call to action for policy makers to mandate that publicly funded educational resources are released under open licence to ensure that they reside in the public." Interestingly the document cautions that "the 'open' in MOOCs is very different from the 'open' in OER," though this is the opposite of our intent back in 2008 when we first created them. More...

Ethically Aligned Design, Version 2
The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, 2017/12/12
The term 'Autonomous and Intelligent Systems' (A/IS) stands for what we would commonly call AI and this is an extensive effort to describes the ethics of A/IS system design.   This document (266 page PDF) will take some time to read. Take the time. I applaud the good intentions of the IEEE here but just as you wouldn't want a philosopher to design a bridge, a document that reads to me a bit like "Ethics by Engineers" feels wrong. More...

Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines 
David Mellor, Center for Open Science, 2017/12/11
I think this is an interesting idea, but the presentation is some of the worst I have ever seen. I've reproduced the basic standards in a post, here. In a nutshell, the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines are intended to describe different levels of openness (disclosure, requirement and verification) regarding data sources, algorithms, and other factors (eight in all) related to scientific research. More...