By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, March 5, 2013
Unlike the Nobel Prize, which rewards people for work they've done, the TED Prize is basically startup money for work they're going to do. This with the 2013 prize, which gives Sugata Mitra about $1 million to develop something called  School in the Cloud. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Auti-sim lets you experience the horror of sensory overload
Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, March 5, 2013
What is it like to be autistic? Most of us can't experience sensory overload directly, but with a simulation developed during Vancouver's Hacking Health weekend hackathon we can begin to approximate the sensation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Naming Conventions For Institutional Repositories: Lessons from CORE
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, March 6, 2013
As Brian Kelly summarizes, "The CORE (COnnecting REpositories) project aims to 'facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems'." From the web site, the basic services offered by CORE are:

• CORE Portal - Allows to search and navigate scientific publications aggregated from a wide range of Open Access Repositories (OARs)
• CORE Mobile - An Android application that enables you to search and download open access articles.
• CORE Plugin - A Plugin to Open Access repositories that enables them to search for related scientific publications.
• CORE API - Enables external systems and services to interact with the CORE repository.
• Repository Analytics - A tool that enables to monitor the ingestion of metadata and content from repositories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re-thinking Workplace Learning: extracting rather than adding
Charles Jennings, performance.learning.productivity, March 8, 2013
Typically when people think of workplace learning they think of the learning as something added to the work. That's the sense of the phrase "on the job training" - as though training weren't something you would notmally be doing. Charles Jennings recasts that way of thinking in what I think is a compelling manner - instead of learning being added to the work, it's something extractedfrom the work. Now this isn't 'knowledge capture' or some similar information mining technique. The idea here is one of supporting staff to learn more from their day-to-day work activities. This approach creates challenges: "It can’t be managed and controlled in the way discrete training and learning injections into the workflow can be, [and]most of the learning processes are opaque to HR and L&D." [Link] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Numbers Exist
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 4, 2013
People just take their existence for granted. But on Sunday I got a bug in my head about why they exist at all, and I couldn't get past it. So all work had to be set aside until I had worked it out. Sometimes it's rough being a polymath.

[Link] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jalopnik reboot hints at new era for Gawker where readers become writers
Tim Carmody, The Verge, February 13, 2013
One of my long-time objectives is realized in this development. It has always seems to me that comments on webstes, along with things like posts on discussion lists, should become blog posts in their own right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dangerous Curves
Zack Budryk, Inside Higher Ed, February 13, 2013
Sometimes your students are not only smarter than you imagine, they are smarter than you can imagine. "Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A... [students] decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A." Fröhlich was forced to honour the grades. More...