Padlet’s Price Update Riles Teachers, Raises Questions About Sustainability of Freemium Models
Tony Wan, EdSurge, 2018/04/05
I have long argued inside government circles that we should be setting up and offering services like this as part of our overall support to education. This is the approach that has been undertaken with success elsewhere and the approach that underlies support for things like BC Campus and Campus Ontario. In this article, we see clearly why. More...

Facebook Scans Your Messenger Conversations and Sometimes Humans Read Them
Justin Pot, How-To Geek, 2018/04/05

My view is: just stay away from anything related to Facebook. More...

Announcement: Spectrum goes Open Source!
Max Stoiber, Spectrum, 2018/04/05
I love rabbit-holes. Here's one. This post announces that Spectrum has gone open source. "Spectrum makes it easy to grow safe, successful online communities that are built to last." There's definitely a need for this, so I logged in, created my account, and started exploring. I created a community for MOOCs and joined a one-member community for e-learning. More...

5×5 R’s of Ours (An OER17 Flashback)
Brian Lamb, Abject, 2018/04/05
The premise is simple: "We knew that the 5 Rs were a useful and powerful shorthand to capture the permissions inherent with open educational resources… But were there other Rs that captured the messy, energizing, frustrating and life-affirming elements of being a live human being that is learning?" ooo, I want to play; here's a set for idealists: recognize, reclaim, restore, raise, reify. More...

8 French Startups Revolutionizing Career Counseling
Camille Pons, Nina Fink, Actualités EducPros, 2018/04/06
This is a short English version of a slightly longer article in French. What I like is that each of the eight companies takes a different approach to career counseling. Pixis uses a constellation of 731 careers. Impala has an interactive career map that adapts to user responses. Studizz Bot uses high school students’ academic profiles. More...

Meet the 'Study Tubers': The YouTubers making studying cool
Sophie van Brugen, BBC News, 2018/04/06
This is a short BBC video profiling 'study tubers' - people who are in school and record study tips and share advice with their friends. The videos are called 'revision videos', as in "revision for school exams". The speaker is named Jade and here is her YouTube channel (BBC doesn't link to it for some reason; I had to search for it). Here's one called Revision With Eve. Also Ibz Mo from Cambridge. More...

Magic AI: these are the optical illusions that trick, fool, and flummox computers
James Vincent, The Verge, 2018/04/06
A Reddit item on designing chess pieces cites this article from last year about something called 'adversarial images' - these are patterns that can fool an artificial intelligence into thinking one thing is something else.  See also. It might make a face recognition system think you're the pope. Or it might cause a system to identify something as a weapon, or worse, an accordion. More...

What if we connected education to the needs of our economies?
Efosa Ojomo, Christensen Institute, 2018/04/06
I think a lot about why we are teaching as well as about what we are teaching and of course how we are teaching. This post suggests (as we have so often heard before) tying education to the economy. Education, writes Efosa Ojomo, is depicted as a means to gain employment and climb the economic ladder, but "we see, time and time again, is that when education is disconnected from the needs of the economy, this promise falls flat." But what are, I ask, the needs of the economy. More...

Forged in wildfires: Lessons from California student-reporters
Anne Belden, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/04/04
I'm not recommending that we send students into wildfires in order to improve their education. But the lessons learned by these student journalists will never be forgotten. “I was flipping between journalist mode and ‘that’s-my-home’ mode,” said one student journalist. More...

Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better
Rachel Thompson, Mashable, 2018/04/04
I have written in the past (in Speaking in LOLcats) how internet users have created a new online language of their own using (for example) images. This article describes how English-speaking internet users (not just 'millennials' and not all 'millennials') have reshaped some of the conventions of written language as well, using punctuation, capitalization, and abbreviation in non-standard ways. More...