Seeding is believing: McGill launches crowdfunding platform
Megan Elizabeth Martin, McGill Reporter, June 6, 2014
McGill University in Montreal has launched a crowdfunding platform to encourage donations. "McGill donors can now choose specific projects to support – projects that really speak to them – and watch as their support helps change our landscape of learning," said Ayesha Mayan, Director of McGill’s Annual Fund. More...

Scientists, Calculate Your Chances of Success in Academe
Andy Thomason, The Chronicle: The Ticker, June 6, 2014
I can only imagine this program would predict my complete and utter failure as a researcher: "The probability of becoming a principal investigator, according to the researchers behind the article, hinges mostly on three variables: the number of articles, the “impact factor” of the journals in which the articles were published, and the number of papers receiving more citations than the expected number for that journal." The report, of course, was published in a journal. More...

What is Schema.org?
Phil Barker, Lorna M. Campbell, CETIS, June 6, 2014
Schema.org has been around for a while. But if you're not familiar with it, and need to know about web page indexing on a technical level, this is an important read. More...

MOOCs Won’t Replace Business Schools — They’ll Diversify Them
Gayle Christensen, Brandon Alcorn, Ezekiel Emanuel, Harvard Business Review Blogs, June 6, 2014
This idea here is that MOOCs are effective advertsing vehicles that will help these schools attract the demographics they want, especially since they have a global reach. More...

College Credentials by Condé Nast
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, June 4, 2014
Would you trust a college degree issued by Wired Magazine or Architectural Digest? Maybe not, but that's not stopping some colleges from teaming up with Condé Nast to offer degree programs, even Masters'. I can see it now - an MBA from the Vanity Fair déCollage. More...

Skills and Higher Education in Canada
Daniel Munro, Canada 2020, June 4, 2014
Interesting and very detailed report from an institute called Canada 2020 on education and skills development. It underlines the importance of education in social and economic development, and focuses on two challenges - excellence, which it defines as "producing the right skills" (their emphasis), and equity, which focuses on the distribution of skills. More...

Reclaiming Education
Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, EDUCAUSE Review, June 4, 2014
I guess everybody knows I'm a fully paid up subscriber to this vision, and I really appreciate Jim Groom and Brian Lamb's statement of it: "Starting now. A technology that allows for limitless reproduction of knowledge resources, instantaneous global sharing and cooperation, and all the powerful benefits of digital manipulation, recombination, and computation must be a 'bag of gold' for scholarship and for learning." Be sure to look at the very top of the article for the link to case studies - otherwise you'll miss half of what's there. More...

The Secret Formula to Becoming an E-Learning Pro
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid eLearning Blog, June 4, 2014
I don't do the same things as described in these examples, because my idea of e-learning is very different, but I do practice something like the (not-so-secret) formula to becoming an e-learning pro:

• e-learning pros practice their craft
• e-learning pros show examples of their work
• e-learning pros share what they do and learn. More...

Are we faking cultural literacy?

Anna Maria Tremonti, CBC | The Current, June 3, 2014

I listened to this interesting segment on CBC Radio this morning while receiving dental treatment. It featured Alexandra Samuel from Vision Critical, Theresa Moritz of the University of Toronto's Woodsworth College, and the Mozilla Foundation's web literacy lead Doug Belshaw. The discussion centred around the idea that there is some common core of cultural materials that make a person culturally literate - that is, educated well enough to understand the references in newspapers and magazines, a social Rosetta Stone, as it were. More...

Learner Control in Personal Learning Environments: A Cross- Cultural Study
Ilona Buchem, Gemma Tur Ferrer, Tobias Hölterhof, Journal of Literacy, Technology, June 3, 2014
According to the authors, "research on learner control in context of PLE has moved beyond computer assisted programs, intelligent tutoring systems and learning management systems towards authentic learning contexts mediated by technology in which the learner may have a greater control of either tangible or intangible elements of a learning environment." This paper develops that research, looking at degrees of perceived personal ownership in cross-cultural settings. More...