Moralities of Everyday Life
Paul Bloom, Coursera, February 2, 2014
I'm looking at the Moralities of Everyday Life course being offered by Paul Bloom of Yale (it's a bit too strong to say I'm taking it). Mostly the course is readings and videos with some quizzes (there are 'office hours' but that's really a ridiculous concept for a course with 60,000 people). Anyhow, it links to an essay from Steven Pinker called The Moral Instinct. Now I find the idea that we have innate moral principles ridiculous, but there's room for a moral sentiment. More...

Strands of Standards is an Anti-Pattern
Tom Hoffman, Tuttle SVC, February 3, 2014
Although Liping Ma's article is a critique of the reorganization of mathematics instruction, it offers lessons applicable to the redefinition of learning into the acquisition of competencies in general. Tom Hoffman summarizes it nicely: "Ma's argument is that American elementary school mathematics was profoundly but nearly imperceptibly transformed by the switch from what she calls a 'core-subject model' to a 'strand' model. The difference to Ma is that a 'core-subject' '...is a collection of skills or a self-contained subject with principles similar to those of the discipline of mathematics." Now a strand isn't the same as a competency, but the problem is the same. More...

Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Charles Oppenheim, Open, Shut, February 4, 2014
Richard Poynder writes, " the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University in the US, Kevin Smith, published a blog post challenging a widely held assumption amongst OA advocates that when scholars transfer copyright in their papers they transfer only the final version of the article." More...

Anant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matter
Anant Agarwal, TED, February 1, 2014
This TED talk was referred to me by email and I viewed it on Saturday. "Through blended courses Anant Agarwal is pairing online education with face-to-face student-faculty interactions, reshaping the university campus experience." As I've stated before, my first experience with this sort of learning was in 1986 studying philosophy of mind with John A. Baker at the University of Calgary. The key isn't that it's active or self-paced or any other other things he says. More...

Share This With All the Schools, Please
Glennon Doyle Melton, Momastery, February 2, 2014
OK, I really dislike this style of writing, but it is obviously appealing to a very large audience (this item from a couple days ago has 1277 comments as of this writing). And it contains some really good stuff in between the fluff and hyperbole. More...