PoodLL A\V Recording Plugin For Moodle Gets Deep Into HTML5 With Latest Update
Moodle News, 2018/01/30
Yes, it's pretty incredible that you can record live audio and video directly into your Moodle website. It is also, thanks to HTML5, relatively straightforward. From the developer side of things, it is a lot like uploading a file. It's just that you're uploading the file as it is being created, using the capture="camera" command in the input element. More...

People with tetraplegia master brain implant in minutes
Kevin Stacey-Brown, Futurity, 2018/01/29
Stories like this illustrate why I can be so positive about technology. A tetraplegic - unable to niove at all - is able to control a computer with thoughts alone. By focusing on "training the computer, not the user" designers are making the easy to learn and to use. More...

Return to Roots
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning Solutions, 2018/01/29

"To me, THIS is why I use social media and networks," writes Helen Blunden. More...

Overwhelmed by size, underwhelmed by quality: A review of EdTech’s largest show, BETT 2018

Junaid Mubeen, Medium, 2018/01/29

This review of BETT by an educator left me with the impression of a reviewer completely convinced by the value of pedagogy and utterly unable to fathom the idea of people creating learning for themselves. Consider this: "They (the exhibitors) fell utterly silent when pushed on pedagogy. More...

Facebook Only Cares About Facebook
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, 2018/01/29
This is a good article with a poor title. The overall gist is that it is Facebook, and not the user, that controls the algorithm. So whether or not changes to the algorithm eliminate fake news (spoiler: they won't) there isn't really anything the user can do about it. Enter a "provocation" created by Zuckerman and colleagues:  gobo.social, a customizable news aggregator. More...

ePortfolio Assessment Instrument
University of Queensland, 2018/01/29
This is a look into the inner workings of an e-Portfolio assessment system. The 'instruments' themselves are "are rubrics that also contain settings for who will mark the assessment task and when the results will be released to students." The page (this isn't an article or anything like that) provides access to the ePortfolio system help documents as well. More...

Edraak.org launches new platform for school learners, teachers
The Jordan Times, 2018/01/29
This article describes an expansion of the Arabic MOOC platform Edraak. "Developed with the support of a $3 million grant from Google.org, and complemented with engagement from Google employees to provide product design expertise, the platform has launched with Mathematics materials for grades 7 and 9, including more than 1,200 educational minutes of bite-sized video lectures." Critics might not like the idea, but I can't say enough about the value of making basic knowledge freely available to people through platforms such as this. More...

What's behind the soaring cost of college textbooks
Kathy Kristof, CBS, 2018/01/29
Digital technologies have made just about everything cheaper and more accessible, but textbook publihers have managed to use it to make education more expensive for students. That's the overarching message in this news report from the United States. More...

Things Experienced Speakers Wish They’d Known: Tips For First-Time Conference Speakers
Sophie Koonin, Medium, 2018/01/29
This sort of article is usually awful but this one is pretty good. I'm including it here because it suggests "tech folks might also like to try out Reveal.JS, which lets you write fully responsive slides in HTML or Markdown (perfect for code snippets!)." This remined me of things like Jupyter notebooks, which embed code into documents; it doesn't look like Reveal takes you that far, though. More...

Living and Learning
Emmett Hall, L.A. Davis, Connexions, 2018/01/05
Subtitled "The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario" this document dates from 1967 and was mentioned in a post from Doug Peterson today. In 1967 I was in school would move to Ontario the following year. So I am the outcome of this policy, to some extent. More...