How to Escape the Community-College Trap
Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic, December 28, 2013
One of the key lessons I learned teaching in northern Alberta was the role community support plays helping students overcome family and financial hurdles during their education. Life in the small towns and First Nations communities could be rough; I remember women showing up to class with black eyes. It was the outreach of programs like the Sunrise Project in Slave Lake that kept them coming back to class, and led them to future success. More...

What’s Our Vision for the Future of Learning?
David Price, MindShift, December 28, 2013
The premise is this: "Once the possibility exists for students to study informally, at online (and offline) schools, compiling their own learning playlist, putting together units of study that appeal to their passions, the one-size-fits-all model of high school will appear alarmingly anachronistic." Hard to argue. More...

Bootstrapping A New Landing Site
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, December 28, 2013
Web redesign is in the wind again and the snappy new WordPress templates of the 2000s will look as dated as old Geocities sites after the transition to the dynamic Javascript and CSS enabled sites of the 2010s powered by applications such as JQuery and Bootstrap. More...

Unravelling -> a model for an open course?
Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, December 30, 2013

I like that Dave Cormier is trying an open course using a slightly different model. He's basing it on the P2PU platform, including the unhangout platform for live sessions. More...

New Models for a New Year
Paul Stacey, Musings on the ed tech frontier, December 30, 2013
"Most people struggle to understand what open is and its implications," writes Paul Stacey. Understanding comes only in stages - he describes seven, ranging from awareness to trying it out to adopting it as a cornerstone of practic. More...

The Truth About Being A Great Manager
Kyle James, .eduGuru, January 31, 2013

Useful lesson of the day: "to manage is to serve." I don't have much more to say about this that that. If they get that, everything else follows. More...

Designing eLearning For iPads
Amit Garg, Upside Learning Blog, January 31, 2013

Very good slide deck with a lot of relevant data on the importance of understanding learning on tablets and some of the design elements that prove to be important (including my fave, 'fat fingers'). Tablets aren't just big mobile phones (or small computers) - they will be used, for example, more often to read or study, but also, used this way in more mobile environments (and often outside the range of connectivity, such as in airplanes or on older city buses or trains). More...

Rules are Rules. Sort of.
Chris Betcher, Betchablog, January 31, 2013
Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, maybe it's because I understand perfectly the logic behind posting speed limits with the expectation that people will drive 20 or so km faster (depending on he place, the road conditions, the time of day, the risk of moose on the road, etc.) but most of all, I think it's because I understand that when you say "rules are rules" you misunderstand the logic of both rules and the regulation of behaviour. If you are a rules literalist, then you encourage people to follow the letter of the law, often contrary to the spirit of the law. More...

Is “Why every researcher should sign up for their ORCID ID” Grammatically Incorrect?
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, January 31, 2013

The use of the singular with a universal quantifier is problematic in a world with two genders. the use of either gender alone has political implications, the use of both (a la "his/her") is awkward, and the use of the plural is grammatically wrong. There's where the options end for most people. But there is a way out: drop the universal generalization, and use your noun to indicate scope. Instead of saying "Every researcher should use their..." say instead "Researchers should use their..." Of course, you may think you've lost your punch. But now that you've changed your noun,  world of possibilities opens up, as in "All researchers should use their..." or "Mindful researchers should use their..." or even "Gender-neutral researchers should use their..." In general, when you want to make a point that applies to more than one researcher (or anything else), don't use the singular form of the noun. More...

Examining the true meaning of Davos
Don Tapscott, Globe, and , Mail, January 30, 2013

Don Tapscott writes in the Globe and Mail about how people misunderstand Davos (if you've tripped the paywall after reading the Globe's defense of the one percent, I'm sorry, though you can always read the paper they lifted the content from directly(cite)) and that they shouldn't comment from afar ("much like someone describing what is happening on the surface of Mars when they’re not there"). More...