UBC Strategic Plan
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2018/01/16
Alex Usher captures an item of significance in UBC's new strategic plan. "Under Draft Strategies for Transformative Learning (page 14) it says: ”Reframe undergraduate academic program design in competencies rather than credit hours: we will move towards competencies as a primary metric of program structure and completion." I think this is areflection of a wider trend. Usher advocates caution. More...

How we scaled professional recognition for staff working with Learning Technology at the University of Edinburgh
Santanu Vasant, ALT, 2018/01/16
This is a quick case study combining professional development with the University of Edinburgh's strategic digital plans describinbg “a digital culture that will culminate in a university where: every core service is fully digital; every educator is a digital educator; and every student is a digital student.” I'm actuallyu hoping the students will be real students. More...

A New Citation Database Launches Today: Digital Science’s Dimensions
Roger C. Schonfeld, 2018/01/15
According to this article, the company Digital Science has launched "a new product that includes a citation database, a research analytics suite, and streamlined article discovery and access." Called Dmensions, it is intended as direct competition for Elsevier's Scopus, as well as analytics suites such as Elsevier’s SciVal, Clarivate’s InCites and Essential Science Indicators, atop their citation databases. More...

Meltdown
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2018/01/15
Good technical description of the recent security flaws in compter chips explaining why we haven't seen the end of them. Out-of-order instructions (such as a speculative calculation) "introduce an exploitable side channel if their operation depends on a secret value." The impact is permanent. More...

Alibaba's AI Outguns Humans in Reading Test
Robert Fenner, Bloomberg, 2018/01/15

Systems from both Alibaba and Microsoft outscored humans on a a Stanford University reading and comprehension test. More...

Scientists Put a Worm Brain in a Lego Robot Body - And It Worked
Fiona MacDonald, Science Alert, 2018/01/15
It's not an actual worm brain, of course. It's simulated, based on the OpenWorm project that "mapped all the connections between the worm's 302 neurons and managed to simulate them in software." It also uses digital sensors in places of the worm's senses. I find the demonstration (there's a video) interesting conceptually. More...

The Rise and Fall of Baby Einstein
Ruth Graham, Slate, 2018/01/15
This is a case study that will probably be repeated for some time. Baby Einstein launched more than 20 years ago with the proposition that selected videos could propel children into advamced achievement. It was acquired by Disney in 2001. More...

Building a trusted skills network in the humanitarian sector with Open Badges
Don Presant, Open Badge Factory, 2018/01/12
This post looks at the issue of accrediting people who work in the humanitarian sector but who receive only informal training through workshops and on the ground experience. It's a way of helping people affected by crises play a bigger part in responses. It's a problem identified by ALNAP, a global network of aid providers. More...

Making Virtual Reality a Reality in Today's Classrooms
Meredith Thompson, THE Journal, 2018/01/12
This afrticle shares "three vignettes of three different approaches: a social studies class in a suburban school district, a district-wide perspective from an urban school district and a class designed entirely around understanding and implementing VR for other classrooms." More...