The Future of Ed-Tech is a Reclamation Project
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, May 28, 2014

Quite a good talk from Audrey Watters a few days ago in Edmonton. This post is the (sparse) slide deck and the (rich) text transcript. The gist. More...

BoardThing
BoardThing, May 27, 2014

BoardThing looks like an organized person's Pinterest: "Create cards with text or images.Move and arrange cards with collaborators on a shared board. Organize cards into groups.Export your board as HTML, plain text, or outline (OPML)." It's still in private beta. More...

CNIE session on campus engagement
D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman dot net, May 27, 2014

From the recent CNIE conference D'Arcy Norman shares "some of the campus engagement stuff we did as part of our long LMS replacement project. I tried to stay away from the technology itself, and focus on the engagement process. Full slide deck is available online, and fuller reports describing the engagement and findings are still available online, as well as the GitHub repository of LMS RFP requirements1." I know that the CNIE conference came and went recently - is it me or is this conference beginning to change focus. More...

Why Unizin is a Threat to edX
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, May 27, 2014
e-Literate a week or so broke a story on Unizin, an initiative from the Indiana University designed to, as Michael Feldstein says, "run the table" on online learning technologies. In this post he adds more; it's an oddly personalized look at the initiative: "If you want to understand Unizin, you really have to understand Brad Wheeler.... Unizin has his fingerprints all over it." Well, maybe. More...

Who Gets to Graduate?
Paul Tough, New York Times, May 27, 2014

So this is part of what we're up against when we're trying to support a more egalitarian system of education: "whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make.... it will always be the case that the kids who have need are going to have been denied a lot of the academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation that the affluent kids have been given." More...

Defending Commencement Protest
Michael Rushmore, Inside Higher Ed, May 27, 2014

I have never attended any of my graduation ceremonies and have no idea who spoke at them. I would probably have disapproved; I think that universities often celebrate the wrong people (the selection for this year's University of Calgary speakers makes my point: the outgoing Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, a science journalist, the CEO of the Calgary Stampede, and an executive in the grain and energy industries). More...

Developing world MOOCs – A workshop on MOOCs in Africa
Tony Carr, e/merge Africa, May 26, 2014

From Tony Carr: "Are you curious about MOOCs or already developing or running MOOCs in Africa? From Tuesday 17 June - Friday 27 June 2014 we present "Developing World MOOCs - a workshop on MOOCs in Africa" led by Sukaina Walji, Andrew Deacon and Janet Small from the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town, South Africa. More...

Cooperation and Collaboration
Stephen Downes, May 26, 2014, International Workshop on Mass Collaboration and Education, Tübingen, Germany

In this presentation I revisit some of my work on 'groups and networks' to draw out the distinction between cooperation and collaboration for this mass collaboration workshop. I argue that mass collaboration may be impossible to achieve, and show how we employed a principle of mass cooperation to support massive open online courses (MOOCs). I also introduced new terminology, using the term 'collective' to describe what I have been calling 'groups', and 'connectives' to describe what I have been calling networks.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]. More...

Digital Research Methodologies Redux
Stephen Downes, May 26, 2014, E-Teaching.org, Tübingen, Germany, online via Adobe Connect
This is essentially the same set of slides as presented as 'Against Digital Research Method', though the presentation addresses research on MOOCs more specifically.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]. More...

Amazing Starling Flocks Are Flying Avalanches
Brandon Keim, Wired, May 20, 2014
I'm giving a talk on MOOC research on Friday, and while I've previously documented my thoughts on research methods (or the lack of same) the question nonetheless occurred to me, "how do you research chaotic systems like MOOCs?" Analytics aren't really useful, as numbers and quantities are essentially meaningless. Then I wondered, how do scientists research murmurations? These are flocks of songbirds that act as one fluid whole, like a network. More...