WeChat reaches audiences conventional media in China cannot
Mia Shuang Li, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/01/12
It's an interesting time in the world of social media. News agencies today are reporting that Facebook is changing it's news feed to show you more content from family and less from news sources (many of which were untrustworthy). They, along with Twitter and Google, are also being called to account for extremist content. More...

Task Analysis or “How DO you do that?”
Brett D. Christensen, Workplace Performance, 2018/01/12
Today's new word is "scalaring", not only new to the author's colleagues but to me as well. It is part of the process of analyzing a task to see what the person actually has to do. More...

Can a Test Ever Be Fair? How Today's Standardized Tests Get Made
Stephen Noonoo, EdSurge, 2018/01/12
This post interviews Mark Moulton, who works for Educational Data Systems, a company that makes exams in California. It's a good discussion of how bias can enter into testing and how it's detected. I appreciate the discussion of how difficult the problem of biias in testing can be. More...

Robo-Advisers Are Coming to Consulting and Corporate Strategy
Thomas H. Davenport, Barry Libert, Megan Beck, Harvard Business Review, 2018/01/12
What will the Harvard Business School do if its graduates are replaced by robots? It might not be long. More...

On 'Experiential Learning'
John Kijinski, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/01/09
The comment thread is far and away the best part of this article. Working without data or evidence, the author argues that in-class learning is more valuable than experiential learning. More...

Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak in Foreign Accents?
Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic, 2018/01/09
With the recent news that Disney will acquire the lion king's share of American cultural assets it becomes relevant to ask about the messages it uses this content to send. History does not reassure us. From the ideology of Donald Duck to the sexism of Disney princesses to their issues with dark skin, Disney has been sending messages of dubious ethical value to children for decades. More...

EVE Online
Mark Richard Johnson, Robert Mejia, Aleena Chia, Ian Gregory Brooks, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2018/01/09
I thoroughly enjoyed this special issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (JVWR) focusing on the massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) Eve Online. The game is set in space and is generally a free-for-all of space mining, pirates and corporations. More...

Laptops in Class are the New Second-Hand Smoke
Paul A. Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2018/01/09

Paul Kirschner's schtick is promoting the idea of compkete focus on learning with no distractions (which he believes cause extraneous cognitive load). More...

High Quality PBL Framework on the Horizon
Ben Lenz, Getting Smart, 2018/01/09
According to this report, "a steering committee of 25 PBL experts and organizations has created a framework called High Quality Project Based Learning, or HQPBL."  The actual framework won't be released until this coming March; in the meantime we have titles like "authenticity", "public project" and "collaboration", among others. More...

5 AI trends to watch in 2018
Ben Lorica, O'Reilly, 2018/01/09
One thing that caught my eye here was the use of the word 'pedagogy' to refer to machine learning. I'm thinking they should maybe have used the term 'machinagogy' or 'aigogy' instead. Anyhow, most of these predictions are of the "current trends will continue" sort. More...