Second Draft: A Continuum of Personalized Learning
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2018/09/27
This is one of those articles where a diagram would have helped a lot. Well, mostly because it would have shown how the idea of a 'continuum' here is incoherent. But still. Here's Larry Cuban's description of the continuum: "At one end of the continuum are teacher-centered lessons within the traditional age-graded school.... At the other end of the continuum are student-centered classrooms, programs, and schools." OK, so what's in between. More...

A portal into a decentralised universe
Doug Belshaw, Thought Shrapnel, 2018/09/18
This is one of these thinhgs that has been in development for a number of years and will suddenly arrive everywhere. The IPFS - InterPlanetary File System - is a distributed network of hash-addressed resources that you store and share with your IPFS application. More...

Should Students Listen to Background Music While They Read?
Daniel Willingham, Science & Education, 2018/09/18
This is interesting because it represents Daniel Willingham backing off a bit from a strict and unthinking application of the cognitive load theory. The idea of cognitive load is that we can only handle so much information at a time, and so in the past we've been told we should eliminate any distraction - extra content, background music, whatever. More...

Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2018/09/18
I have been investigating Crypto-Kitties as part of my wider work looking at distributed ledger technologies. So I found interesting to read Eric Hellman's discussion of our digital feline friends in the context of digital rights management. "What if were possible to 'CryptoKittify' ebooks?" he asks. More...

The MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab Launch the Knowledge Futures Group
MIT Press, 2018/09/26
While I'm sure the people at the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) are supportive of any initiative to get research into the public sphere, I'm sure they would be surprisaed to learn that MIT's new Knowledge Futures Group (KFG)  initiative is "a first-of-its kind collaboration between a leading publisher and a world-class academic lab to transform how research information is created and shared." Maybe MIT means "first in the US" or perhaps "first at MIT. More...

The mutating metric machinery of higher education
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2018/09/26
"The narrative," writes Ben Williamson, "is that HE has been made to resemble a market in which institutions, staff and students are all positioned competitively, with measurement techniques required to assess, compare and rank their various performances." It's an unsettling narrative, he writes. More...

Amid Low Adoption, DoD R&D Will Keep xAPI Alive And That’s Good News
Cristian T. Duque, Moodle News, 2018/09/20
I'm not worried about the future of xAPI, even if the adoption rate has been low thus far. The value proposition of xAPI becomes apparent once you begin using multiiple e-learning applications and want a single activity record. That's not so clear a value when you only use one LMS, but as the technology landscape becomes more distributed, the benefits of xAPI (or something like xAPI) will be come much more clear. More...

John Hancock Will Only Sell Interactive Life Insurance with Fitness Data Tracking
Suzanne Barlyn, Insurance Journal, 2018/09/20
I read a post from Ryerson this morning that began "It’s getting more and more difficult to make a case for privacy when so many people are willingly sharing so much of their personal information online." The answer had hardly begun to form in my mind when I encountered this item from the BBC which makes it clear as crystal. More...