Bravery is Neither Created Nor Destroyed
Bud Hunt, Bud the Teacher, 2018/03/08
Nice post from Bud Hunt on his experiences during a student protest against guns. "It’s easy for me to forget, in the humdrum of spreadsheets and TPS reports and invoices and administrivia, that there are real fights to fight, and real struggles of the head and heart and hands that require my, and many others’ attention," he writes. More...

The free online courses that are putting college in reach
Nicole Freeling, University of California, 2018/03/08
Back in the days when people were debating whether online learning was as good as in-person learning I would make the argument that for many people the choice wasn't "online versus in-person", it was "online versus nothing". And for many people, as this article makes clear, that's still the choice. More...

Physarum Polycephalum
University of New Hampshire, 2018/03/08
So far as I know, this is the first slime mold to hold a faculty position at a university. The faculty page says " Physarum Polycephalum, a plasmodial slime mold, researches important problems from a non-human perspective, and enhances intellectual life on campus by helping students and colleagues to think about the world without human biases." This Vox article fills in the details. More...

When is an OER an OER?
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2018/03/08
David Wiley argues that we shoul revise the definition of 'open educational resources', changing the criteria from requiring 'free access to the resource' to requiring only 'free access to the rights to reuse the resource'. This allows the resource itself to be not available for free, and yet still be an open educational resource. More...

Delivering digital change
Sarah Knight , JISC, 2018/03/07
"Digital used to be an add-on to core business but those are days behind us, now," writes Sarah Knight. "It's time for universities and colleges to stop treating digital as an accessory and to integrate it fully within all aspects of their business activities." This is in the context of introducting a new 'senior leaders briefing paper' entitled Delivering digital change: strategy, practice and process (8 page PDF, with a lot of white space and images, because senior leaders don't read long things). More...

A quick and simple definition of microservices
Mac Slocum, O'Reilly, 2018/03/07
This article "covers some of the basics of microservices: what they are, how they work, and what you need to keep in mind before implementing them." These are small autonomous services. The idea is that they work together in groups to produce ensemble effects. More...

More than 120 live online trainings just released on O'Reilly's learning platform
O'Reilly, 2018/03/07
I don't normally post list of course offerings like this (so don't ask) but I wanted to highlight the business model here (I also wanted to complain bitterly about the use of the word 'trainings' as a plural noun - the English language groans in agony). More...

Twitter Linguistics: A Study
Serena, Google Docs, 2018/03/07
I hope that one day the author (apparently a high school student) gets appropriate credit for what is an insightful and clear study on five elements of Twitter linguistics: the keyboard smash, phrase capitalization, period insertion, excessively long ellipses, and comma ellipses. More...

Reflecting on the Original Big Idea for MOOCs
James DeVaney, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/03/07

The announcements yesterday from Michigan and Rice have actually been in the works for a long time. More...