Twitter Announces Vine. But How Could Higher Education Use 6-second long Videos?
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, January 25, 2013
Twitter's response to the popularity of animated GIFs is the six-second long video. I'm not sure they really capture the essence of the format (it's not the short length; animated GIFs are sometimes quite long, it's that they can be sent and embedded anywhere, most manifestly not like Twitter content these days). More...
A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the Next Google
Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review, January 25, 2013
You just know that someone is going to decide that this is illegal (even though Google and Internet Archive and who know who else has been doing it for years): "A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own web crawler and making a giant copy of the web that it makes accessible to anyone." The thrust of this MIT article is that the new data may spawn the next Google search. More...
Commerce Weekly: Analytics for people, the next big thing in retail
Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Radar, January 25, 2013
I think the challenge in the future won't be to manage privacy - in many cases, privacy is already dead - but how to manage the data that is collected. Take this article about the latest trend in retail marketing: tracking people as they go from store to store by tracking the address of their smartphone via ambient WiFi. More...
Purely Digital for Distinct Skills, Knowledge and Competencies
Professional Examination Service, January 24, 2013
In my email today was this press release (useless adjectives excised): "Professional Examination Service today introduced the credentialing industry’s first comprehensive system to create, deliver and display digital 'badges,' the ProExam Digital Micro-Credential solution. The new service is being shown for the first time at the Association of Test Publishers’ annual Innovations in Testing Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Feb. 3-6, 2013. The ProExam Digital Micro-Credential adds psychometric soundness, exacting assessment and one-click secure verification to the emerging open badges environment, which is being driven by efforts and organizations such as the Mozilla Open Badges project and the MacArthur Foundation." What's most interesting in this to me is the recasting of 'badges' as 'micro-credentials'. More...
Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit
Tamar Lewin, New York Times, January 24, 2013
We continue to move incrementally toward a reconfiguration of the educational system. "Dozens of public universities plan to offer an introductory online course free and for credit to anyone worldwide, in the hope that those who pass will pay tuition to complete a degree program." So, basically, you get and pass your intro course for free, get credit, and maybe purchase the whole package from the institution. More...
Guerrilla Connectivism: 10 Tips for Taking Control of your Education
Kevin Stranack, January 24, 2013
I have long been a fan of guerilla tactics to take control of your own learning and education, so I'm totally sympathetic with Kevin Stranack's post. Stranack writes, "We, as students, don’t need to wait for our instructors to do this for us, and instead, we can take control of our own education by following a few connectivist-inspired tips" and then proceeds to list a number of them. More...
We'll take it from here: letting the users take charge of the evaluation and why that turned out well
Cosmin Munteanu, Hélène Fournier, Jean-François Lapointe, Irina Kondratova, Bruno Emond, Academica.edu, January 24, 2013
Slide presentation from a number of my colleagues at NRC describing the MINT project - Multimodal INteractive Trainer - they developed in cooperation with the Canadian Forces. The project set out to build "a low-cost, portable, yet flexible and configurable mixed-reality, serious gaming, training simulator based on natural interactions." The point of the presentation is to descrbe the role of the participants themselves in the evaluation of the technology as it was developed. More...
Help us Edit the Learners Bill of Rights
Philipp Schmidt, P2PU, January 23, 2013
P2PU is launching a campaign to create and in some sense ratify a 'Learner Bill of Rights' for online learners. All very well, though I think the idea of a Bill of Rights is a bit of an Americanism - I contrast it with the 'Cyberspace Charter of Rights' I authored back in 1999 and which I think still reads well. Of course, I never had the means (nor inclination) to round up a biunch of famous people to sign it, so it never received a whole lot of traction. More...
Half a Million DVDs in Your DNA
Robert F. Service, ScienceNOW, January 23, 2013
I saw this in a couple places today (here and here): "Researchers in the United Kingdom report today that they've encoded these works and others in DNA and later sequenced the genetic material to reconstruct the written, audio, and visual information." Several other initiatives are underway to accomplish the same thing. More...
Boundless, the free alternative to textbooks, releases its content under Creative Commons
Jane Park, Creative Commons, January 23, 2013
The story is in the headline. Boundless "has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license." The company expects to make money selling premium features. More...
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