By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Attention Nonprofit #datanerds
Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog, March 27, 2013
I wondered about this. "Updates from Google's service, which pledges to notify users every time new search results appear for any keyword they might like to track, have trickled to a halt in recent months." Beth Kanter follows the logic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education
Laurie Essig, The Chronicle: The Conversation, March 26, 2013
The article is tongue-in-cheek and meant as a reductio, but let's analyze the implications. In the Chronicle (where else?) Laurie Essig writes, "MOOAs are the perfect solution to the rising cost of higher education. We take superstar administrators and let them administer tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of faculty at a time. The Ivy League and Nescac colleges could pool their upper management as could, say, Midwestern state colleges." OK, fine, completely unreasonable, right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Shared Story
Stephen Collis, Happy Steve, March 26, 2013
Stephen Collis could have expended many more words in this sparse post to make the point, but he is on the right track. The advice is as follows: "Every problem is a people problem, every space is a people-space. Beware my temptation to construct an illusory simpler world that operates by forms, templates, emails, rules, lesson plans, the bizarre fictions called 'outcomes', timetables, compliance, deadlines and data." But the idea that we understand the world by recognition rather than buy induction (rather than by counting or measuring) is I think a correct one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. False frontiers
Steve Wheeler, Learning with 'e's, March 26, 2013
I'm not so intersted in the 'false frontiers' aspect of this post (which asserts the boundaries "are blurring between formal and informal learning") as I am the statement off the start, to wit: "Collaboration is where two or more people work together to achieve a common objective. In education, the common objective is usually to learn specific content, skills or competencies within defined areas." the definition is correct, but the depiction of 'shared objective' is not. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gender Through Comic Books
Christina Blanch, Canvas Network, March 26, 2013
Frank Lowney sent me this link which raises the question of what exactly some universities and course providers mean when they use the word 'open', as in 'Massive Open Online Course'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata
Clinton Forry, A List Apart, March 26, 2013
This is a look at some of the third-party metadata that can be attached to content. In this case, 'third-party' refers to the source of the metadata schema, it being a third party such as Facebook or Twitter, specifically Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and Twitter Cards. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOC provider EdX goes open source – with an interesting choice of licence
Scott Wilson, OSS Watch, March 26, 2013
It's well-known that EdX recently open-sourced its MOOC software. Less well known is the unusual license it chose to do so: the Affero GPL. More...