Three issues with the case for banning laptops
Robert Talbert, The Chronicle: Casting Nines, June 17, 2014
I am often present in meetings and sessions where the request is made that people close their laptops. I don't do it. For me, the laptop is the machine I use to help me think; I engage with the ideas being presented in real-time, and create a record I can search and integrate into later work. More...

Curation: Creatively Filtering Content
Sue Watters, The Edublogger, June 17, 2014
I think this is a good article and well worth a look because it encourages the revival of a disappearing activity online these days: reading and writing about other people. This of course is the central activity of OLDaily, so it's close to home for me. But I reject the term 'curation' to describe what I do and what others should do. More...

Are All Experiential Learning Opportunities Created Equal?
Ailsa Bristow, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, June 12, 2014
Co-op learning and work placement are good means of ensuring authentic learning experiences, but to be effective they must reach those students who would benefit most from them. This is what is not happening, reports the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. In general, university participation rates are lower among aboriginals, students with disabilities, and the poor. More...

New Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, June 12, 2014

Digital News Report 2014
Nic Newman, Reuters, June 12, 2014

The disruptions to news reporting caused by the internet and social media are just beginning, according to this report released by Reuters. Facebook is vital worldwide for news distribution, Twitter in the US, UK and Spain, and WhatsApp in many other parts of the world. Sharing is widespread in the US, Brazil and Spain (though much less so in the UK. So, in related news, we are seeing that the next five years will see a major revenue shift for news agencies. More...

Adapt Learning
Adapt Learning, June 12, 2014

Interesting effort devoted to, as their website says, "create, as a community, the leading e-learning authoring tool for producing responsive content... to develop a freely available authoring tool for organisations that wish to develop their own responsive e-learning content... [and] to encourage a large, global community of end users and developers." Version 1.1 of their framework has just been released. More...

'Can I Tweet That?'
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, June 13, 2014

Summary of a conference session on the issues raised with respect to professors' use of social media. Normal rules of online postings - such as, for example, a disclaimer stating that the views of the professor are not those of the institution - do not work when there are only 140 characters to work with. More...

#YesAllWomen and Ed-Tech Conferences, or Why ISTE is Unsafe
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, June 13, 2014

I'm still dealing with backlog, so I didn't see it when it came out 9 days ago, but it's important enough to pass along. Audrey Watters writes, "Ariel Norling published an incredibly brave article — an incredibly difficult to read article — chronicling predatory behavior and sexual assault at last year’s ISTE conference." She then relates her own experiences in the field, and the "utterly dismissive, if not utterly disgusting" response offered by ISTE's Brian Lewis. More...

Stop Blaming Professors
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, June 10, 2014

This study makes me wonder what's happening outside campus. In a nutshell, it suggests that interaction with diverse views through engagement with academics causes students to moderate their political views, while interaction with similar views through student groups causes them to radicalize their views. More...

My Last Day as a Professor
Priya J. Shah, Office Hours: gender, feminism in everyday life, June 10, 2014

The praise for academia in the next post notwithstanding, there are things it could do so much better, at least in its North American incarnation, and that is in the employment of adjunct (or in Canada, sessional) instructors. I was in that world for a while. More...