Peeragogy
Jay Cross, January 16, 2013

Jay Cross introduces a new handbook and resource guide authored by a group of people including himself and Howard Rheingold called Peeragogy. "This project seeks to empower the worldwide population of self-motivated learners who use digital media to connect with each other, to co-construct knowledge, to co-learn." It's a nice concept, and something that has been at the core of the work we have been doing here on MOOCs. More...

Toward Better Conversations
Anil Dash, A Blog About Making Culture, January 15, 2013.

They're probably getting publicity just because they're from the right circles (ie., Princeton) but the concept is sufficiently sound to pass along - with some caveats. The idea here is to build better conversation - something the web has been short on recently. What we want is a way to create and (just as importantly) manage online conversations. More...

Telling Everyone to Just Uninstall Java was a Terrible Idea

John Fontaine, , January 15, 2013.

Here's the background: Java applications were shown to be vulnerable to malware, so the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommended that people uninstall Java from their desktop. I agree with the author that the recommendation was overkill, but only just. I generally run my browser with Java (not Javascript, which is different) turned off. More...

Unthinking Technophilia
Jennifer Cost, et. al., Inside Higher Ed, January 15, 2013.

A collection of Six community college faculty members have taken it upon themselves to denounce MOOCs on the grounds that "MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering." I thought about writing a reply, but I thought instead about this article, also in Inside Higher Ed, which states (to quote the newsletter) "Union College in Kentucky typically loses half its freshman class before the second year begins, so its new president has made students a promise: If they stay, work hard, and get involved, they won't see a bill for their last semester before graduation." And I'm thinking, who exactly are the profiteers here. More...

500 Open Courses on UMW Blogs
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays , January 15, 2013.
Jim Groom points to 500 courses on the system free and open to anyone hosted at UMW. No doubt someone will have something to complain about - the courses, say, aren't perfect, aren't completge, are only in blog form, aren't always read all the way to the end, or don't guarantee academic success. More...

A Bad Start to Lifelong Learning?
Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn, January 14, 2013.

The diagram, above, of engagement in school through the years is a depiction of failure - not failure of students, but failure of the system. Jeff Cobb comments, "As the writer of the Gallup blog post on the poll argues, you would hope these numbers would be exactly the opposite – that students would become more engaged as they go through school." I wonder what a similar diagram would look like, one documenting social engagement with society at large through online means. More...

The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck
Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, January 14, 2013.

We'll use the word 'science' a little loosely here, but meanwhile there's an interesting survey on the consequences of comment trolls: "it appeared that pushing people's emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs." The author offers an explanation, "the psychological theory of motivated reasoning," akin to Hume's dictum, but I think the interplay between thoughts and feelings (if they are even distinct things) is a lot more complex than that. More...

Why Aaron Swartz's Ideas Matter
Will Knight, MIT technology Review, January 14, 2013.
I don't want to write a long post about Aaron Swartz, because that's been done already by a bunch of people who actually knew him, but his career and mine intersected one or twice and I always recognized him as a brilliant and generous contributor to our field. His suicide is a tragedy and a loss and touches close to home to many of us. More...

Could a MOOCI Contribute to the Education of the World’s Most Impoverished Children?
John Connell, Weblog, January 9, 2013.

Let's map out the core dilemma that produces the idea (quoting from the text):

• good-quality teaching should be central to good educational provision, and most especially for the education of young children
• there is a massive shortage of good-quality teachers across the developing world