Moving Towards a Culture of Learning #MOOCs
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, January 28, 2013

Miguel Guhlin (citing Lisa M. Lane) divides MOOCs into three categories:

• Network-based MOOCs - "the goal is not so much content and skills acquisition, but conversation, socially constructed knowledge, and exposure to the milieu of learning on the open web using distributed means."
• Task-based MOOCs - "emphasize skills in the sense that they ask the learner to complete certain types of work."
• Content-based MOOCs - "the ones with huge enrollments, commercial prospects, big university professors, automated testing, and exposure in the popular press..."

People haven't really been talking about the task-based courses, but these are probably the most interesting of the bunch, as the tasks can be automated, and the system can step you through a series of actvities. More...

MOOC-Covered Towers? Online Education's Coming Impact on Traditional College
Scott D. Miller, Huffington Post, January 28, 2013

I tend not to link to Huffington Post articles because the pages have so many widgets they're unpleasant to read. But I wanted to like to this item, the upshot of which is "The challenge is to figure out how to embrace MOOCs and other technological innovations so that they best complement, not replace, that primary and original learning experience." Fair enough, but as Lydia Cline points our in an article, Udacity recently sold a MOOC to San Jose State University, and she suggests (in this LinkedIn thread) that "what I see happening is the flagship MOOC providers (the ones run by Ivy League profs) selling canned courses to all other schools, and the profs at those schools being turned into TAs for the courses. Or just fired and replaced with cheaper TAs." Of course, thus has ever been the lament of traditional faculty regarding online learning. More...

The New Intelligence
Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, January 25, 2013

Long article from Steve Kolowich on the subject of learning analytics. "What if a professor teaching algebra could look out at her students and, in the blink of an eye, see exactly what each student understands, and what they don’t?" he asks. More...

Can Virtual Classrooms Recreate a Traditional College Experience?
Kate Freeman, Mashable, January 25, 2013

My first thought on reading the headline of this Mashable article was, "why would they want to do that?" Personally, I think it has been pretty well established that online learning has captured the essentials of traditional education - access to learning materials, interaction, educational outcomes - without may of the distractions, such as commuting. More...

Twitter Announces Vine. But How Could Higher Education Use 6-second long Videos?
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, January 25, 2013

Twitter's response to the popularity of animated GIFs is the six-second long video. I'm not sure they really capture the essence of the format (it's not the short length; animated GIFs are sometimes quite long, it's that they can be sent and embedded anywhere, most manifestly not like Twitter content these days). More...

A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the Next Google
Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review, January 25, 2013

You just know that someone is going to decide that this is illegal (even though Google and Internet Archive and who know who else has been doing it for years): "A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own web crawler and making a giant copy of the web that it makes accessible to anyone." The thrust of this MIT article is that the new data may spawn the next Google search. More...

Commerce Weekly: Analytics for people, the next big thing in retail
Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Radar, January 25, 2013

I think the challenge in the future won't be to manage privacy - in many cases, privacy is already dead - but how to manage the data that is collected. Take this article about the latest trend in retail marketing: tracking people as they go from store to store by tracking the address of their smartphone via ambient WiFi. More...

Purely Digital for Distinct Skills, Knowledge and Competencies
Professional Examination Service, January 24, 2013
In my email today was this press release (useless adjectives excised): "Professional Examination Service today introduced the credentialing industry’s first  comprehensive system to create, deliver and display digital 'badges,' the ProExam Digital Micro-Credential solution. The new service is being shown for the first time at the Association of Test Publishers’ annual Innovations in Testing Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Feb. 3-6, 2013. The ProExam Digital Micro-Credential adds psychometric soundness, exacting assessment and one-click secure verification to the emerging open badges environment, which is being driven by efforts and organizations such as the Mozilla Open Badges project and the MacArthur Foundation." What's most interesting in this to me is the recasting of 'badges' as 'micro-credentials'. More...

Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit
Tamar Lewin, New York Times, January 24, 2013
We continue to move incrementally toward a reconfiguration of the educational system. "Dozens of public universities plan to offer an introductory online course free and for credit to anyone worldwide, in the hope that those who pass will pay tuition to complete a degree program." So, basically, you get and pass your intro course for free, get credit, and maybe purchase the whole package from the institution. More...

Guerrilla Connectivism: 10 Tips for Taking Control of your Education
Kevin Stranack, January 24, 2013
I have long been  a fan of guerilla tactics to take control of your own learning and education, so I'm totally sympathetic with Kevin Stranack's post. Stranack writes, "We, as students, don’t need to wait for our instructors to do this for us, and instead, we can take control of our own education by following a few connectivist-inspired tips" and then proceeds to list a number of  them. More...