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By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The hidden costs of success are too high for low-income students
Alyssia Fogarty, University Affairs, 2015/03/26

As a low-income student when I was a student, I can personally attest to this: "paying for event admissions, society membership fees, travel costs for conferences and for food and drinks at informal social gatherings. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Ultimate Guide to BPMN2
Unattributed, SourceForge Resources, 2015/03/26

I'm not enamoured of Creative Commons's recent initiative to license 'open business practices' as outlined here, because it seems to legitimize the nidea that business practices can be licensed, which seems wrong to me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CMI-5 Course Structure
Various authors, GitHub, 2015/03/26

So as soon as I get a handle on things, there's a new thing. Today's it's this: "CMI-5, a soon-to-be standard which is also conformant to the Experience API (xAPI)." Sigh. This is a link to the GitHub version of the specification. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Foundations for OER Strategy Development
Nicole Allen, Delia Brown, Mary Lou Forward, Cable Green, Alek Tarkowski, Google Docs, 2015/03/26

Document circulated at the conference on Open Educational Resources I am attending (see http://halfanhour.blogspotcom for some content summaries). I haven't ready this in detail, but it appears to be an effort to create a single unified implementation strategy for the OER movement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Innovative Efforts for Universal Quality Education
Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, OECD, 2015/03/26
This report summarizes "an international workshop on 'Innovative efforts for universal quality education'." It states: "If education systems are to provide disadvantaged groups with quality education, the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired by students need to be relevant to the environment, improve their employability and be aligned with their work aspirations." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Content Discovery Tools
Luigi Canali De Rossi, Robin Good, 2015/03/25

Robin Good is back and posts "I have put together and just updated a full categorised mini-directory of the best tools to find new, quality content, in just about any area you are interested in." Good list. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yik Yak and Online Anonymity Are Good for College Students
Rey Junco, Wired, 2015/03/24

Rey Junco argues that the dangers of online harassment though anonymous messaging sites like YikYak are overstated. "Do issues of harassment happen on Yik Yak?" he asks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eCampusAlberta Quality Rubric for Online Courses
Tricia Donovan, eCampus Alberta, 2015/03/24

We're just now waiting for the final report from this group which has been looking at quality in online courses. They launched the eCampusAlberta Quality Suite 2.0 in 2014. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 7 reasons: Why we need to kill boring ‘learning objectives’!
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2015/03/24
I'm not really a fan of learning objectives either. For the record, here are Clark's seven reasons:

• Objectives make a poor first impression
• Stating objectives defers learner engagement
• They also cause people to stop paying attention
• They are a misapplication of Gagne
• The rule that objectives must be stated is overly prescriptive
• It's difficult to write good objectives, and few master it
• Stating them is a waste of time

From my reading, these sever objections are really just one objection stated over and over. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Binaries, Polarisation and Privacy
Frances Bell, Francesbell's Blog, 2015/03/24
How do you get nuance in a world of binaries? David A. Banks argues, according to Frances Bell, that "the ‘binaries’ of up-voting and down-voting are inadequate for dealing with ambiguity and divisive topics. They are a tool for polarisation not a means of going beyond it." She also looks at the binary of public/private, a binary that has dominated a lot of recent discourse. More...