College Credentials by Condé Nast
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, June 4, 2014
Would you trust a college degree issued by Wired Magazine or Architectural Digest? Maybe not, but that's not stopping some colleges from teaming up with Condé Nast to offer degree programs, even Masters'. I can see it now - an MBA from the Vanity Fair déCollage. More...
Skills and Higher Education in Canada
Daniel Munro, Canada 2020, June 4, 2014
Interesting and very detailed report from an institute called Canada 2020 on education and skills development. It underlines the importance of education in social and economic development, and focuses on two challenges - excellence, which it defines as "producing the right skills" (their emphasis), and equity, which focuses on the distribution of skills. More...
Reclaiming Education
Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, EDUCAUSE Review, June 4, 2014
I guess everybody knows I'm a fully paid up subscriber to this vision, and I really appreciate Jim Groom and Brian Lamb's statement of it: "Starting now. A technology that allows for limitless reproduction of knowledge resources, instantaneous global sharing and cooperation, and all the powerful benefits of digital manipulation, recombination, and computation must be a 'bag of gold' for scholarship and for learning." Be sure to look at the very top of the article for the link to case studies - otherwise you'll miss half of what's there. More...
The Secret Formula to Becoming an E-Learning Pro
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid eLearning Blog, June 4, 2014
I don't do the same things as described in these examples, because my idea of e-learning is very different, but I do practice something like the (not-so-secret) formula to becoming an e-learning pro:
Are we faking cultural literacy?
Anna Maria Tremonti, CBC | The Current, June 3, 2014
I listened to this interesting segment on CBC Radio this morning while receiving dental treatment. It featured Alexandra Samuel from Vision Critical, Theresa Moritz of the University of Toronto's Woodsworth College, and the Mozilla Foundation's web literacy lead Doug Belshaw. The discussion centred around the idea that there is some common core of cultural materials that make a person culturally literate - that is, educated well enough to understand the references in newspapers and magazines, a social Rosetta Stone, as it were. More...
Learner Control in Personal Learning Environments: A Cross- Cultural Study
Ilona Buchem, Gemma Tur Ferrer, Tobias Hölterhof, Journal of Literacy, Technology, June 3, 2014
According to the authors, "research on learner control in context of PLE has moved beyond computer assisted programs, intelligent tutoring systems and learning management systems towards authentic learning contexts mediated by technology in which the learner may have a greater control of either tangible or intangible elements of a learning environment." This paper develops that research, looking at degrees of perceived personal ownership in cross-cultural settings. More...
Mastering the Internet of Everything
Harold Jarche, June 3, 2014
Harold Jarche writes, "Many people are just figuring out Web 1.0, mastering their web browsers, email and the like. Others are getting into Web 2.0, using social media to connect to people and join communities of practice. And now along comes the internet of everything (IoE). How will we be able to master this new network paradigm, or will it master us?" Jarche says it's about finding balance. More...
The basic understanding, or, fact-based theory
Dave Ferguson, Dave's Whiteboard, June 3, 2014
I like this post. Not because I agree with it, necessarily - I don't really think the answer to "do you understand?" is "let me demonstrate". But I think there's a sense to be made of the idea that knowing is about doing rather than some mental state. More...
Business School, Disrupted
Jerry Useem, New York Times, June 2, 2014
Good article in the New York Times on the struggles of Harvard Business School, which depends on being elite, is coping with the arrival of online learning, which depends on being egalitarian. The school's response is to create a new type of credential, the Credential of Readiness, or CORe, which students can take online. More...
Interview with Steve Pettifer, computer scientist and developer of Utopia Documents
Richard Poynder, Open, Shut?, June 2, 2014
As this article notes, "Critics of the PDF also dislike the fact that it permits only passive reading. This means that scientists are not fully able to exploit the dynamic and linked nature of the Web." It seems like a small thing - and in the world of HTML I guess it is - but the world of PDF readers is beginning to move into the real of interaction with live data (including tables and references) with Utopia Documents, developed in 2009 and being released as open source software this week. More...
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