OwnYourGram
Aaron Parecki, 2018/09/28
Pretty simple concept: "Sign in with your domain, connect your Instagram account, when you post to Instagram, the photos will be sent to your site!" Signing in with your domain requires IndieAuth (the modern-day answer to "whatever happened to OpenID?"). More...

IndieAuth.com: Sign in with your domain name
2018/09/28

It's a bit complex but it's simpler than OpenID was. I'm still looking into it. More...

Open Design Kit
2018/09/28
This is "a living collection of guides and best practices to help you to make and design openly. The Kit was originally incubated at Bocoup and became a community-owned project in Summer 2017." There's a dozen or so 'methods' with links to activities and applications. More...

Aperture
Aaron Parecki, 2018/09/28
Think of it as like a reader for microcontent. " Aperture is a Microsub server. Microsub is a spec that provides a standardized way for reader apps to interact with feeds. By splitting feed parsing and displaying posts into separate parts, a reader app can focus on presenting posts to the user instead of also having to parse feeds. More...

MastoView
2018/09/28
This displays the most recent posts on any instance of Mastodon you care to name, or (even better!) allows you to select a random one (be warned - some random Mastodon instances have content not suited to everyone). It's from unmung.com, which demonstrates a bunch of distributed web stuff, including various other Javascript applications. More...

Can Education Keep Up with Technology?
Wayne Skipper, EDUCAUSE Review, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/09/28
My first thought on reading the question was, "probably not," but of course in a certain sense everything both does and does not 'keep up' with technology. Anyhow, what we have here is a good article with a lot of links covering some of the more important recent trends in technology: machine-readable learning, common building blocks, machine teaching, self-driving organizations, and change. More...

“Your Child Is the Product”: The Cost of Opting Out of Edtech
Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside, 2018/09/25

This article came out the same day as another on Why I'm Done With Chrome, which complains about the Google browser's new policy of automatically signing you in when you land on Google services. More...

Where Will the Current State of Blogging and Social Media Take Us?
Jacky Alciné, jacky.wtf, 2018/09/25
This post wanders a bit and never really gets around to making its main point, but the core message is that it's better to own your own online presence (and, therefore, your own stuff) than it is to be forced to rely on content silos like Twitter and Instagram. More...

When Education Research Training Is Like Giving a Power Saw to a 5th Grader
Frederick Hess, EducationNext, 2018/09/25
I've had my issues with education researchers too, but I don't think I've ever taken my criticism to this level. The issue, writes Frederick Hess, is that "Too many grad students are training to be education policy scholars in programs that cultivate expertise in research methods but not in the stuff of education." He should know, I guess. More...

One Thing Missing in Most E-learning Courses
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2018/09/25
I've been working on the design of my upcoming E-Learning 3.0 course, so I'm paying a bit more attention to instructional design articles than usual. So what's missing in most courses? It's a bit of a clickbait headline, isn't it? "What tends to be missing," writes Tom Kuhlmann, "is the more complex decision-making interactivity." By this he means activities that prompt hypothesis-formation and testing. I'm not sure it's that rare. More...