Whatever Happened to the Coalition of Essential Schools?
Larry Cuban, National Education Policy Center, 2018/01/02
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was an initiative launched in 1987 that "spread rapidly across the nation throughout the 1990s (see here, here, and here)." Based on a set of ten principles (listed in the article) the coalition sought to encourage a matery-based and personally-supportive mode of education based on a generally constructivist pedagogy. More...

An Impressively Detailed Philosophy Paper Grading Rubric
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/01/02

This article from lasty May showed up (deservedly) in a year-end wrap-up. As the title suggests, it is an impressively detailed rubric for grading philosophy papers. More...

Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Is Completely Busted
Eric Ravenscraft, ReviewGeek, 2018/01/02
"Facebook has no idea what you want," writes Eric Ravenscraft in this scathing review of the social network site's news feed. It tends to focus on recently added friends andf frequently-posting people as well as controversy (as signified by engagement) and, of course, advertisements (a.k.a. "promoted posts"). More...

Frontend in 2017: The important parts
Kaelan Cooter, LogRocket, 2018/01/02
I'm generally three or four years behind in frontend technology (that's the technology that makes your website do stuff in your browser, like CSS and Javascript, but now much more complex). That's because the lifespan of a lot of them is about equal to the length of an undergraduate computer science education. More...

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I am committed to keeping all my services and resources free, and will not add a subscription to any part of my website, ever. That's a promise. So if you help me provide this service, I'd be happy to recognize your contribution, as thanks, on my Donation Page. More...

Tear down this paywall: Germany’s taz newspaper launches a reader revolution from Berlin
Anna Rohleder, ijnet, 2018/02/02
There's no reason why this model couldn't work for academic or educational content as well. "Berlin-based daily Tageszeitung (taz for short) has more than 10,000 supporters who make recurring donations to fund its operations; 50,000 subscribers to its print and digital editions; and more than 17,000 reader-owners who pay a minimum of EUR500 to join the taz cooperative." Access to the content is free; no paywall. More...

Canada’s SOPA Moment: Why the CRTC Should Reject the Bell Coalition’s Dangerous Internet Blocking Plan
Michael Geist, 2018/02/02
Michael Geist is arguing against a proposal this week from Canadian telecom and media companies that would allow them to block websites. "The coalition’s proposal raises serious legal concerns," he writes. "It envisions the creation of a new, not-for-profit organization that would be responsible for identifying sites to block... The courts would remarkably be left out of the process." And the telecoms have a history of overreach. More...

Information affordances: Studying the information processing activities of the core Occupy actors on Twitter
Sikana Tanupabrungsun, Jeff Hemsley, Bryan Semaan, First Monday, 2018/02/02
In research and design my focus is more on creating affordances than outcomes. This allows for the creation of different outcomes by different people, in different contexts. It's also, I think, a better basis for the study of media. This paper offers a good example. It examines how the affordances offered by Twitter influenced leadership and activism in Occupy Wall Street. More...

Reflections on 20 Years of Open Content: Lessons from Open Source
David Wiley, OER18, Association for Learning Technology, 2018/02/02
David Wiley candidly admits that this history is written from his own point of view, which is a good thing, because my experience of these events was very different. For example, in the mid-1990s, when Wiley was working on an ISP startup, I was working on a FreeNet. I had been using and creating non-commercial shareware (including most especially extensive BBS systems and MUDLibs) for years by the time open source advocates gathered to launch the movement in 1998. More...

Return of the MOOCs
Mene Ukueberuwa, City Journal, 2018/02/02
This article offers a bit of a history of MOOCs but is mostly (starting about a third of the way in ) an article about the Modern States "freshman year for free" project (no explanation why they couldn't use the long-established gender-neutral term 'frosh', as in 'frosh year for free', or even 'first year for free'). It's marketing. More...