How Canadian student newspapers are going digital
Audrey Carleton, J-Source, 2018/03/09
As a long-time former denizen of the student newspaper office I'm still interested in what they're up to, and these days (for the last few years, actually) they're moving to digital. It only makes sense. More...

Who spreads fake news? On Twitter, humans are more likely culprits than bots, new study suggests
Matthew Braga, CBC News, 2018/03/09
Reports of this study on the spread of fake news are all over the media today. There are several major threads (and it's interesting to see which news outlet points to which). First, humans, rather than robots, are the ones that really spready fake news. Second, fake news spreads much more quickly than real news. Third, it reaches more people than real news. More...

The Empathetic School
Carol Ann Tomlinson, Michael Murphy, ASCD Express, 2018/03/09

Strictly speaking, 'empathy' is the capacity to feel what someone else is feeling. That's not how it is used here. More...

What are the expectations of disabled learners when participating in a MOOC?
Paul Feldman, JISC, 2018/03/06
I think this is a good question to ask but I'm really not sure it was asked properly in this report. We read, for example, that " disabled learners appear to be more interested in these subject areas: Society, History and Arts and Nature and Environment." Does that have anything to do with their self-identification as disabled learners. More...

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”: A Toolkit That Can Help You Scientifically Separate Sense from Nonsense
Josh Jones, Open Culture, 2018/03/06
I link to this “Baloney Detection Kit” to contrast the accounts of critical thinking that depend a lot on source and authority. Sagan (like most scientists) isn't having it. More...

What We Can Learn From Glosses And Research Into Glosses
Philip Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2018/03/05
A gloss is "‘a brief definition or synonym, either in (your first or second language) which is provided with [a] text’ They can take many forms (e.g. annotations in the margin or at the foot a printed page), but electronic or CALL glossing is ‘an instant look-up capability – dictionary or linked’". It's where the term 'glossary' comes from. More...

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
MIT Technology Review, 2018/03/05
I have always felt that great wealth is prima facie evidence of criminality. But this study (24 page PDF) suggests that another factor is involved: luck. It's certainly not intelligence, skill or hard work: there's no correlation between those factors and wealth. This article reportswork by Alessandro Pluchino and colleagues at the University of Catania in Italy. More...

Open Educational Resources in TVET
UNEVOC, UNESCO, 2018/03/05
Simple but very useful OER source list: " On this page you find a commented list of platforms and services that provide or give access to openly licensed content for Technical and Vocational Education and Training." Three dozen sources are listed with short descriptions. More...

Over Sharing
Garett Sloane, Ad Age, 2018/03/05
This item comes in the context of reports that people are sharing less content through social media - "social sharing of content has been cut in half since 2015." It describes the phenomenon of people quitting Facebook because of fake news, relentless advertsing, and a general lack of value in a service that isn't even a record of anything. More...