Course o’ the Week – PRDV103 Available on iTunes U
Marissa Citro, The Saylor Journals, January 22, 2013
I think maybe we need a vocabulary reboot, because it seems to me that if you are downloading something from iTunes, whatever it is, it is not a "course" (it might be a "video lecture" or some such thing). More...

“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind”
Abject, January 21, 2013

One of the questions I ask myself on a regular basis is whetehr I should abandon low-level scripting in languages like Perl and managing my own server in favour as, as Boris Mann calls it, the new hack stack. The old hack stack is and was called LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl (or PHP). But these days servers are constructed in environments like Ruby on Rails or Django and services are often plug-in, hosted elsewhere and accessed via APIs, like MailChimp for mailing lists or Amazon Web Service for data hosting. More...

Nowhere to Turn
Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, January 21, 2013
A while back I wrote something along the lines of, "the financial crisis for higher education is slowly developing, through when it arrives it will seem like it happened overnight." Well, it's just about dawn, according to this article describing a Moody'sreport saying essentially that traditional revenue streams for the sector are drying up and will not return. More...

Post-Publication Peer-Review Already Exists, Already Has Incentives, and Is Already Robust
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, January 21, 2013
Kent Anderson responds to Wired's Dan Cohen, who argues "that OA can’t be effective if post-publication peer-review isn’t made as robust as possible." According to Cohen, we already have a mechanism that performs this function: awards. More...

eTextBooks Europe eTextBooks Europe
Phil Barker, Phil’s JISC CETIS blog, January 21, 2013

Phil Barker summarizes a recent meeting for stakeholders interested in the eTernity (European textbook reusability networking and interoperability) initiative. More...

Lessons learned from wrestling with a MOOC
Robert Talbert, Casting Out Nines, January 18, 2013

I think it's useful to include opportunity cost when calculating the cost of an eductaion. A case in point: the free MOOC. Robert Talbert reports, "this week has me reconsidering the notion that MOOCs are “free”. They may not cost anything, but there is an expense, namely time. That '3–5 hour workload' estimate turned out to be wildly underestimated, at least for newbies like me." It makes me think of my own university experience - while other people used weekends to socialize, work on projects and network, I was pulling my two weekend night-shifts at 7-Eleven. More...

My Philosophy and My Context
John Spencer, edrethink, January 18, 2013

John Spencer writes about his philosophy of education. He writes, "As a teacher, I become a guide to help them become the connective, critical, creative problem-solvers that a democratic society needs in order to flourish." It makes me think about what my own philosophy of education might be - an especially pertinent question, given that I'm a real philosopher and all. More...

The Learning Technologist Becomes A Luddite
Lanny Arvan, Lanny on Learning Technology, January 18, 2013

Lanny Arvan has never learned to write concisely (I've written to him about this - he says it's his style) so you'll have to wade through mounds of verbiage to get to the essential point. Which is this: "you're a Luddite if you are ok in using the technology but think it largely should be a complement to face-to-face instruction, not a substitute for it." He's responding to a post by Nathan Harden in American interest touting the end of the university as we know it. More...

#diffimooc Launches next week: Differenting instruction in a MOOC
Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, January 18, 2013

Vicki Davis introduces a post describing a new MOOC from the frozen north: "Next week will be the official start of the Differentiating Instruction through Technology #diffimooc offered by the University of Alaska Southeast. This class is designed to help pre-service, in-service, formal or informal teachers in gaining strategies to differentiate student instruction through the environment, through process and through product. More...

Implementing strategies to encourage deposit
Rebecca Kennison, Repositories Support Project, January 17, 2013

Recording of a webinar (Adobe Connect) on strategies to encourage faculty to deposit resources into an institutional open access repository. Presented by Rebecca Kennison, Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University. More...