Kirkpatrick Model Good or Bad? The Epic Mega Battle!
Will Thalheimer, Clark Quinn, Will at Work Learning, 2015/04/14
The Kirkpatrick Model is a mechanism for evaluating learning programs; you can read about it here. The idea is to take evaluations of learning events beyond the 'reaction sheet' and to look at the actual results, including "to what degree targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training event and subsequent reinforcement." More...

California’s multi-million dollar online education flop is another blow for MOOCs
Ryan Derousseau, The Hechinbger Report, 2015/04/15
According to this article, "the Online Instruction Pilot Project has become another expensive example of the ineffectiveness—so far, anyway—of once-vaunted plans to widen access to college degrees by making them available online, including in massive online open courses, known as MOOCs." More...

The numbers game
Steve Wheeler, Learning With Es, 2015/04/15
The assignment of a numeric value to student work is a technology. It's actually a relatively recent technology. Why did we adopt it? Steve Wheeler asks the question and the closest he comes to an answer is in saying "marking of students' work is... about how their work measures up against standards." In the wider scheme of things, though, surprisingly few assessments are made this way. More...

Against close reading
Alex Reid, Digital Digs, 2015/04/15
There are some really good observations in this post. The practise of 'close reading' as it is widely taught involves "the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text." A common criticism of social media and online reading is that students "find nuance, complexity, or just plain length of literary texts less to their liking than we did." I don't think they ever found it to their liking, but let's assume they do. More...

Keybase
Website, Keybase, 2015/04/15
OK, honestly, I don't understand all the details, but I think this - or something like this - is pretty important. Keybase is a website where you can "get a public key, safely, starting just with someone's social media username(s)." I used it to create my own public key and associate it with my accounts on Twitter and Github. More...

Open Web Presentation for BC Campus
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2015/04/17
Alan Levine introduces and enmbeds a video entitled The Open Web (a) Lost (b) Reclaimed (c) Co-claimed (d) All of the above? He writes that it "was meant to get at what we see as un-necessary dichotomies in ed tech (and also to poke at multiple choice). More...

The OER15 conference
Grainne Conole, e4innovation.com, 2015/04/17

Grainne Conole summarizes two of four keynotes at the OER15 conference taking place in Cardiff, one by Cable Green and the other by Josie Fraser. More...

VR and consciousness – some truly freakish ideas
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2015/04/17
I experience the arbitrariness of consciousness every day. I put on my glasses, and my whole world changes. More recently, I have enjoyed the altered consciousness of being completely immersed in sound by means of my MP3 player and some quality earbuds. More...

Kifi
Website, Kifi, 2015/04/17
I have two major things to say about this site. First, analytics and recommendations are becoming commoditized. This is one of a number of services revolving around the concept of learning about you and recommending resources. More...

How Critical Thinking and Media Literacy Efforts Are ‘Backfiring’ Today
Tony Wan, EdSurge, 2018/03/08
I certainly agree with danah boyd when she suggests that the focus on using critical thing as a means to "find the truth" is mistaken. She suggests that this approach to critical thinking has been "weaponized". More...