How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Sarah Aswell, SplitSider, 2018/02/09
"Facebook is essentially running a payola scam where you have to pay them if you want your own fans to see your content," writes Sarah Aswell (language warning in this article, sorry). The criticisms of Facebook are valid, and yes it's just one more reason not to use the AOL of the 2010s. More...

Three Higher Ed Design Trends for 2018
Ben Bilow, Abby McLean, Shannon Lanus, Ben Conley, Higher Ed Live, 2018/02/09
That's actually more authors than there are trends, but OK. This list seems to me to be a bit more eclectic than most, because they are focusing exclusively on user-experience (UX) design. More...

Learning Analytics
e-learn, 2018/02/09
Blackboard's e-learn magazine has a special issue on learning analytics this month. The lead article by Priscila Zigunovas features multiple photos ofTimothy Harfield, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Blackboard Analytics (by a window, with a horse). More...

New Higher-Ed ‘Matchmaking’ Event Aims to Bridge Education Technology Silos
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/02/07
Jumping into the crowded event space are Micharl Feldstein and Phil Hill. Readers will recognize these names as their e-Literate blog is often cited here. More...

Student learning with permissive and restrictive cell phone policies: A classroom experiment
Alexander L. Lancaster, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07
It's hard to know what conclusions you can draw from a study of 31 students in a Midwestern university class, but this study (13 page PDF) tries. According to the authors, banning cellphones did not improve the students' results in the course. More...

Observing and Deterring Social Cheating on College Exams
Richard J. Fendler, Michael C. Yates, Jonathan M. Godbey, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07
This article (11 page PDF) contains a pretty good literature review and summary discussion on cheating. It "introduces a unique multiple choice exam design to observe and measure the degree to which students copy answers from their peers. More...

Open Education Resources (OER) Applications from Around the World
Rory McGreal, Contact North, 2018/02/07
This is a set of thirteen OER case studies from around the world. The descriptions follow a common format, describing the opportunity, innovation, benefits, challenges and potential in turn. A contact person is provided for each. Some of the descriptions become fairly detailed. More...

John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018
Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2018/02/08

I met John Perry Barlow at Idea City in 2003; I said nice things to him about his work and he urged me to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he co-founded. More...

Talking Killer Whales? Gullible Science Journalists More Likely
Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/02/08
We talk about literacies of various sorts but the enterprise begs the question: what counts as language? Geoffrey Pullum doesn'tt really tell us - though it has something to do with "the communication of simple ideas between people." But he's clear about things that are not languages. Music. Food. Sounds made by Orcas. " The claim that information transmission was demonstrated in the music is patently ridiculous," he writes. More...

‘Instagram for classwork’ Seesaw in 1/2 of US schools
TechCrunch, 2018/02/08
According to this article, " half of all U.S. schools have teachers using Seesaw, up from one-quarter in June 2016." The service offers " iOS, Android, Kindle, Chromebook and web apps where kids can share photos, videos, drawings, notes, links, files and blogs, and record voice-overs explaining their work." The idea is that if they're showing their work to a wider community, they'll work harder and pay more attention to it. More...