Patterns in Unstructured Data
The future, say some (well, me and William Gibson, at least), lies in pattern matching. This is a very nice twelve page article that gets into the details of how pattern matching is used to generate search results using latent semantic indexing. It's worth taking some time to read this, because this is the secret recipe behind such things as Google News. More...

200 Million Smart Phones in Active Use in North America Alone
David Nagel, Campus Technology, February 28, 2014
It's the end of double-digit growth in smart phone usage in developed economies. This will lead to increasing price pressure, which makes Apple seem like the outlier. When this last happened, Apple recovered by introducing iPhones and iPads to replace their sagging computer market. More...

Research on Distance Education for First Nations/aboriginals, from IRRODL, Vol. 15, No. 1
Tony Bates, online learning, distance edcuation resources, February 28, 2014

Tony Bates reviews an article from the latest issue of IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) dealing with the impact of distance education on Firts Nations / Aboriginal communities in Canada. More...

Pitbull’s school: Star promotes a radical idea for at-risk kids
Neely Tucker, Washington Post, February 27, 2014

Take the concept of MOOCs (with star professors) and charter schools (with private funding and mandate) and combine them and you get this inevitable result: pop-star charters. More...

DS106 Assignment Bank Theme: Now With Syndication Options
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, February 27, 2014

Everything is better with RSS syndication - even assignment banks. "The work yesterday was to redesign the options for setting up syndication to bring examples for an assignment into the site. More...

Quotes from from Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi (Part 3)
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, February 27, 2014
You can probably deduce that there is a part 1 and part 2 as well. But this is the one that caught my eye. "
Everyone agrees that necessary as it is to listen to the unconscious, it is not sufficient. More...

Learning to Code
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, February 27, 2014
What is the best way for a teacher to learn how to code? If you're new at it, I think I would recommend CodeAcademy, because it allows you to write code and see the results right away. More...

MOOC experts surprised by how they're evolving
James Breiner, News Entrepreneurs, February 26, 2014

I would hesitate to call the three commentators in this article 'experts' but I do think their reflections on their initial exposures to MOOCs are interesting. More...

Cheating students punished by the 1000s, but many more go undetected
Holly Moore, CBC News, February 26, 2014
A CBC survey says that "thousands" of students in Canada were caught cheating (though admittedly that means maybe one percent of theem). Of course, many more people may actually be cheating than get caught. Other studies have found around half of all students admt cheating (a figure that is interestingly consistent with the poll at the bottom of the article). More...

The Great Facebook Email Experiment Is Over
Mike Isaac, Recorde.net, February 26, 2014

You probably didn't know Facebook had an email service. Don't worry - nobody else did either. That's hwy it's shutting down. More...