Knewton Releases $44 Adaptive Digital Textbooks
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/01/25
OK, there's some merit to the idea of selling software-enhanced textbooks directly to students. But I am sceptical as to whether these represent an advanced on the 'programmed texts' of the 1970s. More...

Implement OAuth in 15 minutes with Firebase
Michael Dowden, Martine Dowden, Michael McGinnis, O'Reilly, 2018/01/25
This is a glimpse at the underpinnings of the modern web. OAuth allows you to use your login from one website on another website. When you see those boxes saying 'log in with Google' or 'log in with Facebook' you're seeing OAuth. Firebase is a no-SQL database application. It allows for free-form data storage. The article is "a start-to-finish example with Angular and Typescript." Angulay is a Javascript framework that manages web applications. More...

A Network of Experts: From Content Curation to Insight Curation
Joe Arets, Bob Danna, Charles Jennings, Laci Loew, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/01/25
This is a pretty interesting article and is worth reading in its own right. But I want to digress in this post with a comment that is really only periphrial to the article. The author writes, "evidence suggests that teams containing or connected to experts always outperform even the best and brightest of individual experts, particularly when enabled with software or technology." Yes. I have no reason to doubt this. More...

Why true equity in learning depends on proactive, not reactive, design
Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute, 2018/01/25
Julia Freeland Fisher did not hear my pitch for affordances, not outcomes, in innovation, but there is an overlap between what she says in her column here and what I said yesterday." The risk of oversimplifying personalized learning on the front end is that we may fail to successfully leverage what works, for which students, in specific circumstances; especially in light of messy human relationships, political dynamics, and histories of discrimination," she writes. More...

PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn't)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/01/25
My history intersects with that of Plato, but this intersection is short. Plato was, indeed, a computer0aided instruction (CAI) system, even as late as the 1990s when I looked at it. That made it innovative (though by 1990, not that innovative). But what it wasn't, in any way sense or form was open. A school like ours would invest either in Plato or in the internet; there wasn't a middle ground. More...

Relationships Can Be the Solution, Even to Difficult Challenges
edCircuit, 2018/01/25
I don't think that "healing" is the right response to the school shootings that are a weekly event in the United States. I think the response should be anger and rage and a determination not to "heal" until the technologies that enable these senseless slaughters are eliminated from society. More...

What is innovation and how can businesses foster it?
Hajra Rahim, The Telegraph, 2018/01/23
This is a fairly decent article that summrizes some of the major streams of thought regarding innovation." Innovation means creating value from ideas," says John Bessan. People often confuse innovation, which requires the creation of value, with ideation, which is the process of thinking of new products or processes, he says. More...

Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help
Susan Dynarski, New York Times, 2018/01/23
I was sent this on Twitter today. You can get the gist of the argument from the headline. I've seen this sort of article before. This is irresponsible journalism. More...

The One Answer to All Questions in Education
George Couros, 2018/01/23

Just so you're not hanging in suspense: "The answer to all questions in education keeps pointing me back to one thing; leadership." Well, no. More...

Higher Education's Top 10 Strategic Technologies and Trends for 2018
EDUCAUSE, 2018/01/31
Educause has a bunch of 'top 10 lists for 2018' and it's a bit hard to keep track. But I think this is the over-arching one. In any event, it's the most recent. The top 'strategic technology' for 2018 is "Uses of APIs," which would accord with my own thinking. More...