Why I, Too, Killed My LinkedIn Account
Luis Suarez, E L U S A, May 7, 2014

OK, that's just the title, I haven't deleted my LinkedIn account, Luis Suarez has. But my own social media deletions are probably nor far in the future, though. Here's Heather Bussing: "I don’t agree to their Terms of Service, and I don’t need LinkedIn enough to put up with it." The terms give them permission to sell my information, to control who sees my information and to block competitors. More...

A to Z of Learning
Donald Clark, Big Dog, Little Dog, May 7, 2014

From aLearning to eLearning to zLearning - a good idea, but I think Donald Clark missed the mark on a few letters. Like rLearning, which he says must be 'Redundant Learning', really (it seems to me) would be better suited for 'Rote Learning'. vLearning he calls 'Various Learning' but it should obviously be 'Virtual Learning. More...

Writing Instructor, Skeptical of Automated Grading, Pits Machine vs. Machine
Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2014
It's one of those stories the Chronicle loves to print - grizzled gadfly argues against computers in education - but in this case the critic has a point. Les Perelman, who in the past has had heated exchanges with promoters of automated essay grading, has authored a computer program that writes essays composed of gibberish but which score well in automated essay graders. More...

A world of pervasive networks
Harold Jarche, May 5, 2014
Harold Jarche applies McLuhan's tetrad to the world of pervasive networks. McLuhan's original model (not a 'lens') suggests each new technology has the potential to: first, extend a human property, second, obsolesce a previous technology, third, retrieve an older technology, and fourth, have the opposite effect when pushed to its limits. More...

How to Know When Your Great Idea is Ready for the World
Tim Kastelle, The Discipline of Innovation, May 5, 2014
Over the last couple years as I have been more involved in things like business plans the abbreviation TRL made an increasingly frequent appearance. It stands for 'Technology Readiness Level' and is a scale devised by NASA and the US Department of Defence to rank innovations; it ranges from 1 - 'basic principle observed and reported' - through to 9 - 'flight tested'. More...

Mass Customization of Education by an Institution of HE: What Can We Learn from Industry?
Robert Schuwer, Rob Kusters, International Review of Research in Open, Distance Learning (IRRODL), May 5, 2014

So this seems like a good time to restate a distinction I've been using for some time now:

• personalized - a common product is adapted for use by an individual
• personal - a unique produced is created for and possibly by the individual

A similar distinction appears with similar terms. So, for example, a custom car is one that was built especially for you, while a customized car is a production-line car with features adjusted to your specification. More...

MOOCopoly: The Game
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, May 5, 2014
Just for fun (and as part of the Daily Create challenge 486 - make a board game) Alan Levine created this fun version of MOOCopoly. "I came across a Monopoly template in Photoshop," he writes, "found within a 2008 blog post by Brad Frost. Yep, a self hosted blog strikes again. More...

Understanding and learning outcomes
May 9, 2014µ
Gardner Campbell examines "the seemingly endless fascination with 'learning outcomes'" and the ingenious idea that "teachers should think about what they believe should happen in the student as a result of the class." But this, he says, leads toward a behaviourist paradigm and away from "the cognitivist turn" that has characterized education in recent years. It leads toward 'specific knowledge'. "Two of the words we must never, ever use are 'understand' and 'appreciate.'" - we are told that these are vague words, when (as Chronicle blogger Robert Talbert says) we should specific words to describe outcomes. Mushy objectives can't be measured. But it's not so much that they're mushy (and here I'm reading into him a bit) but they're complex. The paradoxes that seem to abound in learning are actually reflective of the underlying nature of learning. More...

A new talk sketched daily, by fan Stefani Bachetti
Kate Torgovnick May, TED Blog, May 6, 2014
I actually like this Tumblr feed featuring a sketch of a new TED talk every weekday (at a certain point the author has to run out of TED talks but that will be a while). I think that what really shows up in these diagrams is the essential similarity between TED talks - the compelling story, the one-line message, a few compelling figures or data sets, the emotional strings. More...

Disrupting Colonial Mindsets: The Power of Learning Networks
Catherine McGregor, In Education, May 16, 2014

This paper offers an example of "how one particular teacher-learning network—the Aboriginal Enhancement Schools Network (AESN) in British Columbia, Canada, offers a powerful example of how teacher learning networks can enable deep and transformational change among participating teachers and leaders." It merges the concept of the community of practice with the need for non-hierarchal and inclusive leadership. More...