Inclusive Citation: How Diverse Are Your References?
Maha Bali, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/02/23
I do pay attention (and always have) to diversity in the references in this newsletter and in my work in general. But I do it a bit differently than suggested here. In one sense, I have to - over the years I've referenced thousands of authors. So I can't spend time figuring out wherether they're gay or black or indigneous - how could I? It's not like people put race/gender/orientation/identity metadata in their posts. More...

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
Kai-Fu Lee, MIT Technology Review, 2018/02/23

"It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots," writes Kai-Fu Lee. More...

MOOCs are not dead, but evolving
Diane Peters, University Affairs, 2018/02/23
“The numbers suggest MOOCs are, in fact, here to stay,” said Arshad Ahmad, vice-provost, teaching and learning, at McMaster University. As Diane Peters notes, " There are more MOOCs than ever, and some courses are indeed massive, with enrolments in the hundreds of thousands." No, they did not replace universities in ten years, but nobody seriously expected that. More...

Space as a tool for analysis: Examining digital learning spaces
Michelle Harrison, Open Praxis, 2018/02/23

I once gave am presentation on the use of space as an analogy for learning environments, so this article resonates with me. More...

“Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War
Maya Kosoff, Vanity Fair, 2018/02/23
This article has one of the best tech put-downs I've ever read: "Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, 'you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.'" Oh, ouch. More...

Do Our “Least Restrictive Environments” Help Kids?
Elizabeth Stein, Middle Web, 2018/02/23

The content in this post is pretty light but I liked the juxtoposition of least restrictibve environment (LRE), co-teaching, Friere's banking model, and teaching learners to understand how thinking works. More...

The End of the Gatekeeper
Joshua Singletary, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/02/23

Good article about (what we hope is) the changing role of IT departments in the institution (your mileage may vary). More...