Social Finance pilot projects: Interim report
Kelsey Brennan, Brian Carriere, Sheila Currie, Shek-wai Hui, Boris Palameta, Sopcial Research and Demonstration Corporation, 2018/06/01
Social Impact Bonds (SIB) in education is a concept "whereby private investors pay up front for training and are repaid by the government if the training is successful in achieving pre-established outcomes." This report (92 page PDF) is an interim report on some SIB projects. More...

Let's Stop Talking About The '30 Million Word Gap'
Anya Kamenetz, NPR, 2018/06/01
A number of years ago the government ran a series of ads saying, basically, "talk to your baby". But it isn't the number of words that's important, noe indeed is it clear that there was ever a 'gap' in the number of words some babies hear. More...

MOOC Expert Fiona Hollands Makes A Suggestion and a Prediction
Henry Kronk, eLearningInside News, 2018/06/01
The suggestion is to change the name MOOC because "they might be small, they might not be open, and they might be wholly different from the MOOCs first offered by Stanford professors in 2011, not to mention the earlier iterations in 2008." More...

Cognitive Biases
John Manoogian III, Buser Benson, Visual Capitalist, 2018/06/01

This is just a placeholder to allow me to associate cognitive biases with critical literacies should I ever getting to writing more about the latter in the future. More...

Drafting #IndieWeb Principles for the Rest of Us
Greg McVerry, IntertextRevolution, 2018/06/01
The author of this post correctly points out that the original indieweb principles were too technical for most people. He thus drafts a second set of indieweb principles that are also too technical for most people. But this page gives us a nice set of starting principles (quoted):

• When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.
• Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone.
• You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you.

The third principle has the potential to be problematic, but I read it this way: you are responsible for your own posts. More...

Separating Fact From Fiction: The Reality of Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing, and Education
Michael Geist, 2018/05/31

Some useful data on the relation between the Canadian higher education sector and licensed publications. As the title suggests, the facts are different from the marketing we read from the lobbyists. More...

Internet Trends 2018
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Partners, 2018/05/31
Mary Meeker's annual oracular tome has come out and this year it's a heavy 294 page PDF. What I'm seeing here is a mixed bag - some areas of growth are slowing and even stopping as the market approaches essential saturation. More...

‘Marshmallow test’ may not pick out successful kids, after all
Jordan Bennett, Futurity, 2018/05/31
The 'marshmallow test' is a classic case of what happens when psychologist try to do educational theory. Essentially, they correlated a child's ability to defer gratification (to eat two marshmallows later rather than eat one marshmallow now) with future educational outcomes. More...

The Theranos Story and Education Technology
John Warner, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/05/30
John Warner compares the promises made by AI and personalized learning vendors with tne owner of the blood testing 'vaporware' product Theranos. "Through a combination of secrecy, lies, flattery, and intimidation, she maintained a fiction about having developed a truly revolutionary piece of technology." There was no requirement that the product actually work; her customers were venture capitalists, who only need to be sold on the idea. More...

Can the universities of today lead learning for tomorrow?
Catherine Friday, Lucille Halloran, Ernst & Young Australia, 2018/05/30
The authors offer (36 page PDF) four scenarios for the university of the future: the champion university; the commercial university; the disruptor university; and the virtual university. The context is Australian but the trends are global. "Demand for learning is shifting to a fundamentally new paradigm," write the authors. More...