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By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard’s “Modern-Day Pragmatism” K-12 Trend Report
Jon Kolko, Blackboard Blog, 2015/04/27
So today's newsletter takes a tour around some of the companies active in the field of online learning - the good, the bad, and the ugly. This post starts with some of the good. It is a report freely available from Blackboard summarizing some of its recent research on personalizing education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Education and Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, Apr 23, 2015, Open Education Global, Banff, Alberta
In this presentation I outline major aspects of the learning and performance support systems (LPSS) program as it relates to open education environments. In particular I focus on understanding OERs as words, aggregating and analyzing OERs, data representation, and learner production and sharing of OERs. I conclude with a number of brief case studies of how work in LPSS supports this perspective.  Full paper available here: http://www.downes.ca/files/docs/Open_Education_and_Personal_Learning.docx. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google is making a giant change this week that could crush millions of small businesses
Jillian D'Onfro, Business Insider, 2015/04/21
I've long been meaning to redesign my website to make it mobile-friendly -- all I need to do really is use JQuery and Bootstrap and do some basic design work. But, you know, I've been busy. But this might spur me to make the change. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IMS Global Announces Initiative to Establish Digital Badges as Common Currency for K - 20 and Corporate Education
Press Release, IMS, 2015/04/21
Knowing IMS, the phrase "common currency" was probably very carefully chosen, and it brings to mind Doug Belshaw's proposal the other day to issue badges using Bitcoin-like encryption. So I wonder whether IMS is thinking that far ahead. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Patient Zero of the selfie age: Why JenniCam abandoned her digital life
Emma Reynolds, News.com.au, 2015/04/21

The subtext of this item is that there is something wrong with sharing your life online, because after all the original "cam girl", Jennifer Ringley of JenniCan, gave it up after seven years and not has no social networking presence at all. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Being There: Heidegger on Why Our Presence Matters
Lawrence Berger, New York Times, 2015/04/20
On reading the headline I immediately thought of Terry Anderson. He writes of the importance of 'presence' in learning "that views the creation of an effective online educational community as involving three critical components: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education shouldn't be a zero-sum game
Andrew Parkin, Academica, 2015/04/20
Is Canada really over-emphasizing university graduation? It has one of the highest rates of university and post-secondary education completion rates in the world: "In Canada, 50% of the adult population has completed tertiary education, easily the highest rate in the OECD." But a recent report for the Canadian Council on Chief Executives recommended cutting back on university degrees. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Harvard Business School Has Learned About Online Collaboration From HBX
Bharat Anand, Jan Hammond, V.G. Narayanan, Harvard Business Review, 2015/04/20
I think I have to file this under the category of "catching up" as the 'lessons' learned by Harvard Business School have long been known and studied in the wider online learning and distance education communities. Indeed, some of the recommendations they make - like having people begin by introducing each other in an online discussion, or that "norms of online collaboration can be shaped" - had become clichés long before HBS 'discovered' them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Open Publishing Revolution, Now Behind A Billion-Dollar Paywall
Tina Amirtha, Fast Comnpany, 2015/04/20

Mendeley, as the author notes, built a piece of software "aimed at helping researchers organize their papers, annotate them, and share them with each other." In 2013 the company was acquired by Elsevier. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The OER15 conference
Grainne Conole, e4innovation.com, 2015/04/17
Grainne Conole summarizes two of four keynotes at the OER15 conference taking place in Cardiff, one by Cable Green and the other by Josie Fraser. According to Green (Conole writes) "it was time for an OER implementation strategy, and in particular a focus on what is needed to achieve change and mainstream OER. More...