Proliferation of researcher profiles
David Davies, David Davies' Weblog, January 4, 2014
As a researcher I am asked to contribute to these researcher profile networks from time to time. My response has been, to be honest, lukewarm. What good, I wonder, is being served by a proliferation of ensiled researcher profile lists? Yes, it would be good to have a single list of my research outputs. But there are conflicts in formats and presentation. More...
Create a Personal Publication Archive with Open Journal Systems (OJS)
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, January 4, 2014
Apropos of the post on research profiles (see below) this item on the use of Open Journal Systems to create a personal publications archive is intriguing. One of the advantages is a very standardized representation of personal publications, which can be shared. OJS also provides a lot of administration features, so you can store drafts, get people to review your work, and more. More...
Academic Jibberish
Stephen Krashen, SKrashen, January 6, 2014
One thing I strive for is clarity in my writing. It's because I'm lazy - I find it a lot easier to write something that is short and clear than to couch ideas in a cloak of academic jargon. But I still have to read it. And I agree, "A great deal of academic writing is incomprehensible even to others in the same area of scholarship." Now the situation isn't as bad as portrayed by McLeans, which focuses on a blog called LOL My Thesis, where students submit plain English versions of their thesis topics. More...
Getting Around International Content Restrictions
Alec Couros, Open Thinking, January 6, 2014
I spent a little time over the holidays trying to set up a personal VPN on my website, but it wasn't as straightforward as it looked. But I have uses for such a service - not just accessing Pandora and Hulu and Spotify but also securing my email and other online transactions. I might find it worth my while to do what Alec Couros does, and to pay around $70 for a hosted VPN (I've been hesitant to do this because I'm hesitant to trust unknown online vendors with credit card payments). More...
Media literacy tops traditional education in school smoking-prevention efforts
Unattributed, Medical News Today, January 17, 2014
This is an interesting result, I think. "While traditional anti-smoking education focuses on health effects of smoking and resisting peer and other social influences, media literacy empowers participants to analyze and evaluate portrayals of tobacco use in media." Hit students with anti-smoking messages, and it's just one more bit of propaganda. More...
Rethinking School Privatization in Sweden
snickerdoodle, Metafilter, January 2, 2014
Metafilter thread, introduced as follows: "20 years ago, Sweden passed a series of reforms that encouraged privatization of its schools. In addition to making it easier to create new schools, the new laws made it legal for private, profit-seeking companies to open schools. More...
Udacity 2013 Yearbook
Brenna Van Norman, Udacity Blog, January 2, 2014
After its late-year 'pivot' and Sebastian Thrun's "we make lousy software" remark, this is actually printed in the Udacity blog: "2013 was a great year with a lot of new milestones." So how is the pivot going. More...
The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities
Robert V. Kozinets, Journal of Marketing Research, January 3, 2014
So here's an interesting question I got in my email: is netnography a real thing? I have to confess that I don't know, as it's totally new to me. So what is netnography? Harrison Hayes writes, "In Netnography, online observations and interactions are valued as a cultural reflection that yields deep human understanding. Like in Ethnography, Netnography is naturalistic, immersive, descriptive, intuitive, adaptable, and focused on context." Robert Kozinets makes clear its relation to consumer research. and cites people like Sherry Turkle. More...
FaceBook As A Temporary Social Sandpit
Graham Wegner, openeducator, January 3, 2014
I've been reading Facebook more and more as many of my friends and family become connected. But I've become increasingly frustrated by the stream, which instead of sending me actual posts from them, has been increasingly sending useless posts from Huffington Post, Upworthy, Forbes, LifeHacker, and other publications I assume to be premium content partners. More...
The restaurant metaphor used by Dennis Callahan reminds me of the graphic I made last month to illustrate the difference between formal learning, xMOOCs and cMOOCs. More...
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