World's Largest Natural Sound Archive Now Online
Anita Li, Mashable, January 23, 2013
So I spent the better part of an hour listening to loons on Mason Lake and a chorus of birds in Queensland, Australia, thanks to this Mashable link to the free natural sounds archive, now available online from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. More...
Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'
BBC News, January 22, 2013
To understand why Valve would consider Windows 8 a catastrophe, it's helpful to understand that Valve has set up its own software store and service. So when you buy, say, Civilization V from them, you basically install Valve, which then downloads Civilization V from the internet and runs it on your system - and indeed, any computer you own, even your Macbook, since you are running it from the internet. More...
A Reference Model for Learning Analytics
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Knowledge, and , Learning, January 22, 2013
This is a good overview of learning analytics, beginning with the concept of the recommender system as it developed in the 2000s through to more contemporary work. More...
It was just a matter of time... Google plans to kill passwords
Katina Michael, Uberveillance, January 22, 2013
Nobody would be happier than I to see the end of passwords - as it stands right now I have more than a hundred different passwords for home, office, web and other applications (I have an algorithm I use to make sure they're all different, but can be remembered). More...
Time for an evolution
Catherine Lombardozzi, Learning Journal, January 22, 2013
If we think of online learning not as the provision of a process (as we would see in a classroom) but rather as an environment (such as we might see in an application like Word or even a game like Sim City) then instead of 'learning design' we get 'learning environment design'. More...
Introducing version control & git in 1.5 hours to undergraduates
Dan Scott, Coffee|Code, January 22, 2013
HTML slides (nicely done) and a git repository used in this presentation have been made available online. I dare say it would be useful not only to undergraduates but to git-impaired people like me. More...
Course o’ the Week – PRDV103 Available on iTunes U
Marissa Citro, The Saylor Journals, January 22, 2013
I think maybe we need a vocabulary reboot, because it seems to me that if you are downloading something from iTunes, whatever it is, it is not a "course" (it might be a "video lecture" or some such thing). More...
“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind”
Abject, January 21, 2013
One of the questions I ask myself on a regular basis is whetehr I should abandon low-level scripting in languages like Perl and managing my own server in favour as, as Boris Mann calls it, the new hack stack. The old hack stack is and was called LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl (or PHP). But these days servers are constructed in environments like Ruby on Rails or Django and services are often plug-in, hosted elsewhere and accessed via APIs, like MailChimp for mailing lists or Amazon Web Service for data hosting. More...
Nowhere to Turn
Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, January 21, 2013
A while back I wrote something along the lines of, "the financial crisis for higher education is slowly developing, through when it arrives it will seem like it happened overnight." Well, it's just about dawn, according to this article describing a Moody'sreport saying essentially that traditional revenue streams for the sector are drying up and will not return. More...
Post-Publication Peer-Review Already Exists, Already Has Incentives, and Is Already Robust
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, January 21, 2013
Kent Anderson responds to Wired's Dan Cohen, who argues "that OA can’t be effective if post-publication peer-review isn’t made as robust as possible." According to Cohen, we already have a mechanism that performs this function: awards. More...
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