How to Live Stream on YouTube
Anthony Heddings, How-To Geek, 2018/09/07
It's funny to read that "YouTube’s live streaming support has gotten much better and is now a solid competitor to Twitch" but I guess it's true. I've been exploring the game-streaming world using YouTube with xSplit for the last few years. That's how I stream my talks. More...

Building a body of knowledge work
Jim McGee, McGee's Musings, 2018/09/07
This is a bit of slice-of-life I guess, but I enjoyed the account of learning by doing (case studies). This is something I've discovered over time as well: "If I was to eventually create a case study that would work in the classroom or extend our understanding of this issue, I needed to get my thinking out of my head and available for inspection, by myself first and foremost." It aids in the whole process of pattern recognition that is crucil to knowledge creation. And of course there's a whole discipline devoted to this. More...

Making E-Textbooks More Interactive
David Raths, Campus Technology, 2018/09/07
When I'm thinking of 'making textbooks more interactive' these days I'm either thinking o using them toconnect with a community, or to work with editable programs and live data, or both. But I think the idea of 'interactive' in this article takes us back to the days in the 1990s when 'interactive' meant 'you can push a button to play a video' or some such thing. Anyhow, all this 'interactivity' requires an Apple platform to operate. More...

Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet
Julia Reinstein, Buzzfeed News, 2018/09/04
Most of them started as teacher-bloggers, but through websites like TeachersPayTeachers and Instagram feeds these teachers have been supplementing their often-meagre income marketing props, aids and classroom supplies. “Some come just to share to help other teachers and to make a little extra pocket money,” said Freed. “And then some of them actually become extraordinary content creators, and they really become almost mini-publishers.” I'm glad that some teachers are able to use the internet to make some extra money. More...

How to effectively build and leverage a personal learning network (PLN)
Paul A. Kirschner, Mirjam Neelen, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2018/09/04
It's interesting top see an article about networking from the prototypical proponents of direct instruction. But here it is. "We define," they write, "a PLN as a trusted network of current and former colleagues or other people that are valuable to you as a professional or in other areas of your life.... The value of a PLN lies in the fact that the people in it provide access to the knowledge and expertise necessary for you to better perform your role." So, OK then. More...

Plan Now for a Year of Social Success (2018 Version)
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2018/09/04
This is the time of the year teachers make decisions about social media, but this year the decisions are harder than usual. I actually reported this post when it was first published back in 2012. Doug Peterson offers what would usually be good advice: grab that class hashtag and start using it on Twitter. And tie this into your classroom blogging. More...

Learning’s first principle – the most important thing i learned this year
Aaron Davis, 2018/09/03

Aaron Davis pulls together three links with a common theme: the idea that learning depends first on the learner wanting to learn, on motivation. This is for me an important ground for endorsing learner-led learning. More...

Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms
Gabriele de Seta, First Monday, 2018/09/03
First Monday has devoted this month's issue to the Emoji, from which I select two articles to highlight. This article looks at the blending of emoticons, emoji and stickers under the heading of 表情 - biaoqing - in Chinese culture. More...

I second that emoji: The standards, structures, and social production of emoji
Bethany Berard, First Monday, 2018/09/03
First Monday has devoted this month's issue to the Emoji, from which I select two articles to highlight. This article describes how candidate emoji are propossed and approved by the Unicode Consortium. " Unicode’s codespace has 1,114,112 code points. While Unicode Standard 11 contains just over 137,300 characters, there are a finite number of code points." This has led over the years for the encoding not only of minority languages, but also for the inclusion of a wide set of cultural touchpoints in the unicode emoji specification itself. More...

Building badge value with Endorsement
Don Presant, Open Badge Factory, 2018/09/03
This item introduces two major concepts to the badge ecosystem. The first is the idea of 'endorsement', which "promises to resolve recurring questions about the “credibility of badges” by providing third party validation that can be formal (like accreditation) or informal (“fits our purpose”). More...