Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future
Cade Metz, Wired, March 20, 2014
Interesting. I remember when Facebook was PHP (I actually saw the code once, because of a dropped format declaration). Their new programming language "lets programmers build complex websites and other software at great speed while still ensuring that their software code is precisely organized and relatively free of flaws... the new language is called Hack." It has some nice features - it's statically typed (which means you declare what all your variables are before you use them) but compiles at run-time, which means developers can immediately see the rsults of minor changes. More...

‘Closed’ v. ‘open’ systems of knowing
Scott Mcleod, Dangerously Irrelevant, March 20, 2014
Just to add yet another definition of 'open' to the mix: "A closed system is one in which the knowables are fixed. Examples of this kind of system would include any in which most of its answers are either yes or no, right or wrong, clearly and without any other possibility." Cited by Scott McLeod, this is from Teaching As a Subversive Activity. More...

Study
Freeman Murray, Jaaga, March 19, 2014
It's not online learning - students work on their program 40 hours a week in residence in Bangalore - but it draws from free and open online learning resources "by studying classes from CodeAcademy, TeamTreeHouse, CodeSchool, Udacity, Programmr.com, CodeLearn.org, Stanford, Harvard and MIT & Installing open source software and going through the tutorials." The tuition of 1 Lakh (100,000 Rupees) is deferred until after graduation, and studetns pay residential costs by doing freelance work. More...

Another Day, Another EdTech Giant Acquired
Rip Empson, TechCrunch, March 19, 2014

There's some churn in the background in the education technology industry as last week Renaissance Learning was acquired by a private equity firm for about a billion, and this week Skillsoft was acquired by another priovate equity firm for $2 billion. More...

Emerging Best Practices for Using Storify For Archiving Event Tweets
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, March 19, 2014

Part of the hook of this post is that it takes us outside the 'archiving event tweets' dicussion to consider the nuances of being 'open', and in particular Sheila MacNeill’s post Why the Opposite of Open isn’t Necessarily Broken. One important point is that despite the popularity of MOOCs the battle for 'open' hasn't been won, and isn't nearly over (not even in the world of MOOCs!). More...

When MOOC Profs Move
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, March 18, 2014
I'm going to teach a lesson in this post. But first, let me set it up. In this article, the question of the ownership of MOOC materials is raised. Who owns the materials when faculty move to a new institution? MIT of course says "we've found the answer." Meanwhile, Cathy Davidson, who is moving from Duke to CUNY, declares this: "I own my own course content. No one at Duke (or anywhere) can teach with my videos without my permission. I can reuse my videos and course materials at CUNY, but need to acknowledge that they were produced at Duke." Now for the lesson. I am using this video to teach it. More...

‘It’s against all principles of scientific reporting’: Thousands of medical papers cite Wikipedia, study says
Tom Blackwell, National Post, March 18, 2014
This alarmist "the world is ending" headline is typical of the National Post, but the sentiment against citing Wikipedia is far more widespread. So what's the issue? "There is no guarantee the information at any given time is, in fact, wholly accurate, and a Wikipedia entry cited by a journal paper one day may be quite different soon after, unlike a conventional article or book." This of course misrepresents how a wiki operates. References to Wikipedia cite specific dates and times viewed, and this version never changes - when someone makes a change, a completely new version of the page is created, and the old one stored as an archive. So we can indeed see exactly what was cited. More...

The particulars of "When a Paradigm becomes a Paradogma"
Paul Kirschner, March 18, 2014
So a couple weeks ago Paul Kirschner posted an item called When a Paradigm becomes a Paradogma in which he protested that a colleague's paper was rejected from an unnamed journal on grounds that, as one reviewer said, "the research is not consistent with current theory, research, and practice in STEM fields of endeavor." Wrote Kirschner, "There are politically correct scientific paradigms and you had better be / become / look like a ‘believer’ in that paradigm or you will not be published in that journal." Now I haven't seen the article, but I have observed in the past that Kirschner is in error in matters of fact about how science is actually practiced. More...

Crows Understand a Fundamental Part of Logical Reasoning
Jason G. Goldman, Animals, March 30, 2014
David Hume wrote, "It is certain that the most ignorant and stupid peasants — nay infants, nay even brute beasts — improve by experience, and learn the qualities of natural objects, by observing the effects which result from them." We see this over and over again; this link adds to that evidence, as we see crows using heavy objects to raise the level if water in a glass in order to reach food floating in it. More...