Online education platform Coursera blocks students in Syria and Iran
Nina Curley, Wamda, January 28, 2014
I'm sorry to hear about this ban. I have always been of a mind that science and education transcent international differences (the phrase 'teachers without borders' should be redundant). More...
India MOOCs
Viplav Baxi, India MOOCs, January 28, 2014
Contributors to Viplax Baxi's India MOOCs website are discussing the sites mission and goals. some of the suggestions are ambitious. "No learning without learning outcome guarantees," says one. More...
Why Student Debt Burden is Falling Like a Stone
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, January 28, 2014
I don't know what Higher Ed Strategy's is up to with this article purporting to show that the student loan debt burder issue is "people trying to manufacture a good crisis" but this article doesn't show it. It purports to "care about the data" but is almost completely unsourced. More...
Ed Tech Thought Leader Interview: Innovative CIO Phil Komarny
Kelly Walsh, Emerging Education Technology, January 28, 2014
Two part interview (part one, part two) with Phil Komarny, VP and CIO for Seton Hall University (noted for its iPad and Macbook programs for students). As expected, it's grounded in the IT needs of the traditional campus-based university, but nonetheless contains good insights and advice. More...
Everything in Moderation
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, January 25, 2014
So, I've seen this before: "conversation, in his words, 'very quickly disintegrated into a snakepit of personal venom, religious bigotry and thinly disguised calls for violence.' But some students have accused him of abusive and tyrannical behaviour in his attempts to restore civility." Where? Well, in pretty much every unmoderated discussion list in the world. We also had this sort of issue threaten to arise in the Moodle discussion board we used in the very first MOOC. More...
An Exploratory Study of Emotional Affordance of a Massive Open Online Course
Jeremy C.Y. Cheng, EURODL, January 25, 2014
Well, it's different. And I like the perspective it takes, starting with J.J. Gibson's direct perception, and the idea that "here is nothing inherent in technology that automatically guarantees learning." According to the author, "Emotional affordance of MOOCs is defined as properties which facilitate or inhibit an emotion-related process or behaviour as perceived by its users." So how does this all play out. More...
Opening Science
Sönke Bartling, Sascha Friesike, Springer, January 25, 2014
I think we've known for quite some time that science is not a set of facts that can be amassed but rather a network of interconnected perspectives or points of view. As Michael Polanyi said in 1962, "This network is the seat of scientific opinion which is not held by any single human brain, but which is split into thousands of different fragments … each of whom endorses the other´s opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods." So what does that mean for science today. More...
Books: Rome
Various authors, Project Gutenberg, January 27, 2014
Richard Seltzer has been pushing educational eBooks recently, for example this collection on the history of Rome. Which would be nice, but he is charging money for works that are available for free. More...
To Each According to its Degree: The Meritocracy and Topocracy of Embedded Markets
J. Borondo, F. Borondo, C. Rodriguez-Sickert, C. A. Hidalgo, Nature.com, January 22, 2014
Interesting paper. "A system is said to be meritocratic if the compensation and power available to individuals is determined by their abilities and merits. A system is topocratic if the compensation and power available to an individual is determined primarily by her position in a network." Different structures create networks that are either meritocratic or topocratic. More...
Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics
John Cannarella, Joshua A. Spechler, arXiv, January 22, 2014
Well, this is putting your model to the predictive test. The authors write, "Extrapolating the best fit model into the future suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017." I for one would not be surprised to see that happen. More...
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