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Twitter, May 22, 2013 Koos, who must have seen my presentation Against Digital Research Methodologies, referred me to this stream: #overlyhonestmethods. There's also an article in the Guardian, here from last January. "scientists from all four corners of the twitterverse have not just dismantled that pure-of-thought image but demolished it with repeated 140-character salvos all bearing the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods... It all started with a neuropharmacologist researcher and blogger called Leigh when she tweeted "incubation lasted three days because this is how long the undergrad forgot the experiment in the fridge." There's 'scientific method', which is pure and abstract and unreal, and then there is science which, like me, muddles along. More: coverage from I, Science, also, the browser of a scientist, also, Tumblr images. [Link] [Comment]

Kate taylor, Globe, and , Mail, May 22, 2013 I think educational institutions can learn a great deal from the strategy adopted by Canada's National Film Board in 2007 to digitize its collection and move into the field of new media. "At home and abroad, the organization is fusing Canada’ s traditional strengths in documentary and communications technology with its newer reputation as a new-media leader to build a uniquely accessible cultural institution dedicated to storytelling and democratic dialogue." It's hard to overstate what is happening in Canadian public media. Take a measure of Chris Hadfield, add some sniffing bears from the NFB, and add a good dose of Radio 3 attitude, and you have a uniquely forward-looking landscape. Canadian educational institutions should be in the middle of this (and so should we at NRC), not standing on the sidelines. [Link] [Comment]

Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, May 22, 2013 According to this report, "a new peering arrangement being signed today  between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’ s research and education network." Essentially the agreement is to provide cloud access to Microsoft products; "any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’ s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365." In the comments, we read also that janet "are already working on deals with Google and Dropbox – see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services." In general, this seems like a good plan, especially if UK universities are able to save millions of pounds. But there is also good reason to be cautios when you see reports like this stating that "government is currently over-reliant on a small 'oligopoly' of large suppliers (and) benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates." [Link] [Comment]

Rosanna Tamburri, University Affairs, May 22, 2013 According to this University Affairs article, "the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses... it has committed $1 million to fund the venture. BCcampus, the provincial agency overseeing the project, is rolling it out in phases. It recently released a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first- and second-year subject areas  for which it is sourcing textbooks. It also identified 10 existing open textbooks, mainly first-year introductory texts. The agency issued a call for proposals to faculty members and teaching assistants to peer review the books and is making available an evaluation rubric to use for the reviews." The proposal received a good response from Tony Bates, who calls the idea "shrwed," especially as it implicates faculty in review and selection. It is estimated to save students $1000 per year. No response from publishers in the article. [Link] [Comment]

Christian Glahn, LO-F.AT, May 22, 2013

This is a really useful post. It begins by deflating some misconceptions about TinCan replacing SCORM, and proceeds to offer a much wider description of ADL's overall plan. In a nutshell, writes Christian Glahn, e-learning today has become distributed, collaborative, networked, continuous (etc etc), and so, "this creates tensions with the centralised, single interfaced, individual learning, and course-centred concepts of SCORM." So by 2011 ADL decided to rewrite the specification. TinCan, or the Experience API, constitutes only the first part of this. The  Training and Learning Architecture (or TLA) has, he writes, "four essential parts that are intended to  extend  the present capabilities of SCORM for maintaining interoperability in modern learning environments:" the Experience API and learning record stores (LRS), the content broker, learner profiles, and competence networks. See also  tincanapi.co.uk and see also this response from Michael Roberts. [Link] [Comment]

Lumen Learning, May 22, 2013 In my email just now, this announcement: "Today Lumen Learning and Instructure announced the availability, via the Canvas platform, of six open course frameworks that make it easier for instructors to teach effectively using open educational resources (OER). You can view the press release or browse  the courses from the Lumen Learning website. The brainchild of open education pioneer David Wiley, open course frameworks are curated collections of OER that look and feel like online courses, with content and course segments mapped to learning objectives. These courses serve effectively as blueprints instructors can use to teach a course as-is, adapt or refine the course content to make it work better for their students." So... they're course packages, right? The materials are mostly licensed under CC-by, and there's an option to purchase print materials on Lulu. [Link] [Comment]

Dean Groom, Playable ~ The Weblog of Dean Groom, May 22, 2013 Looking at the new xBox release (I saw an ad for it on the morning news) Dean Groom writes, "while games are scapegoated as causing all manner of social ills, they are the media-platform which is most able and likely to significantly change who own’ s the content gateway. It will be game-networks which decide which social-network, which movie, which news-channel and music will be presented to the family." The new xBox is Microsoft's play to become the network that leverages access to that attention, and hence, can derive revenue from the advertising and promotion thereby enabled. "What is important is that as a game-media-network they want a direct line to consumers in the attention economy – and that is what it will deliver. It will leverage its games capital to achieve it." [Link] [Comment]

Chad Sansing, Cooperative Catalyst, May 22, 2013 This is brilliantly done, painting a dystopian picture of the teaching profession in the not-too-distant future. A lot of detail, a lot of understatement, this article strikes a perfect balance of realism and chilling.

“ Taxes?”

“ Who pays those things any more?” [Link] [Comment]

Joshua Kim , Inside Higher Ed, May 21, 2013 It's all over the news today of course but this headline best captures my own thoughts about the matter (though I confess that another story - expressing surprise that Yahoo had a billion dollars - was a close second). Kim writes, "the fact that Yahoo's leadership is so smart, experienced, and hard working that makes bone headed acquisitions such as Yahoo buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion so instructive for those of us involved in trying to change higher ed." The lessons? We shouldn't be fooled by our own rhetoric, we should get outside opinions, and we should avoid being tempted by shortcuts. Meanwhile, I guess the exodus is on over at Tumblr (how many heartbreaks before people lean to create communities online that can't be bought?). [Link] [Comment]

Cole Campese, May 21, 2013 Cole Campese asks, "why do those who used to push forward now push back? ... the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? ... Because it isn’ t really open?" Well... yeah. That would be it, Cole. David Wiley is more generous than me with his response. "Yes, MOOCs have overrun the popular imagination. Yes, they are founded upon a severely impoverished definition of ‘ open.’ So what are you going to do about it? Complain? Really? How about spending your time figuring out how to leverage MOOCs to move the ‘ open’ agenda forward, rather than spending your time whining about how MOOCs have derailed it?" Of course, one can do  both - it's not an either-or. Many's a time I've made a hill work for me by doggedly cycling up it for the betterment of my health and constitution all the while cursing the very existence of hills, gravity and opposing winds. And sometimes what the world needs is a little more salt, bitter and sour, and a little less sweetness. I'm happy to provide that. [Link] [Comment]

Justin Reich, Education Week, May 21, 2013 I have in the past listed the courses offered by ALISON (I hate ugly all-acronym company names) on www.mooc.ca and just received a request to do so again (actually, they're asking for the listing on "your MOOCs list on the Gilfus Education Group website," which of course is not mine at all, except in the sense that Gilfus copied my list and put it there). Now I'm reconsidering my original decision, not in the least because ALISON (IHUAACN) is now positioning itslef as 'the first MOOC provider' (see this item, for example). What ALISON (IHUAACN) actually provides are free self-paced online course packages. And, of course, people have been doing that since the Middle Ages. And it brings to mind the sense in which a course is an event in which a course package is not. [Link] [Comment]

Bill Fitzgerald, Funny Monkey, May 21, 2013 From Bill Fitzgerald: "I've long held the notion that open source communities have been engaging in effective peer-supported learning, even while many for-profit companies and academic communities have been struggling to distill the process of peer-supported learning into something resembling a replicable product." And, he says, "In the platform-style MOOCs, the open web is missing. From a learner perspective, the portfolio is MIA. For a learner, throwing the evidence of your learning into a space that someone else controls isn't a viable long term strategy." I couldn't agree more. [Link] [Comment]

Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, May 21, 2013 Jim Groom writes, "I’ d take the opportunity to try and frame out the broader vision behind Domain of One’ s Own that goes well beyond the education sphere. In fact, it’ s remarkable how much of the vision is encapsulated in Jon Udell‘ s 2007 talk 'The Disruptive Nature of Technology.'" I think that's an interesting idea and a good way to reuse work that has been done before. "There remains an enduring issue and one which remains just as problematic six years on: a sense of coherence to the work we do online." [Link] [Comment]

Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, May 21, 2013 On the one hand, I agree with all of Donald Clark's criticisms of the recent crop of educational videos, especially those in MOOCs. He's quite right when he says there's too much talking head, too much cognitive dissonance, a dull presentation style and poor editing. He has this research and that to show that elements of video design impact retention. And yet... on the other hand, I have to ask whether improving video quality would produce enough of an improvement to justify the time and expense. Yeah, sure, if I'm consuming video like it was TV, then maybe. But if I'm in the middle of a project and I just need a clip to show me, say, how to fogment my doodad, then all that matters is that I can see what's happening. It's the act of fogmenting the doodad, not watching the video, that leads to retention. [Link] [Comment]

Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2013 This should be subtitiled 'The Chronicle Surveys the Outliers'. As one commenter says, "It is like asking college professors what they liked about college." And the people answering questions in this article are more typical of the professor demographic than the student: Jonathan Haber, for example, "a 51-year-old who has taken a year off from his job in publishing to try to get an entire four years' worth of college from MOOCs." [Link] [Comment]

Gretchen Gavett, Harvard Business Review Blogs, May 21, 2013 The Harvard Business Review advice to graduates is all about "success", "winning" and "persevering" in the face of challenges and competition. The well-meaning advice sounds good, but from where I sit, it seems so shallow. My advice I would have given to myself of 1986? "Find good work to do - a wrong to right, an injustice to correct, a problem to solve. This will bring meaning and value to your life. Cultivate interesting experiences and meaningful relationships. These will bring you happiness and contentment. Never mind the rest; it is irrelevant." [Link] [Comment]

Sue Waters, The Edublogger, May 17, 2013 If you use Google Reader or publish a blog or website RSS feed, then your worlkd have been turned upside down by Google's announcement it is closing Google Reader and by the weakening of RSS support on services like Blogger (and in browsere interfaces, and its outright elimination from services like Twitter and Google+). Sue Waters has a good guide for you, to help you cope. As a community, we'll have to grapple with this more deeply as time goes by. But for now, here's what you can do over the summer. I tried out one recommended resource, the Old Reader, today. "The Old Reader  is designed to be a direct replacement of Google Reader." It was pretty good, though I find it interesting to note how any change of interface can feel so jarring. [Link] [Comment]

Audrey Watters, Hack Education, May 17, 2013 I have always thought people should comment on their own site and link to or reference others. But the internet developed differently, with people (and companies) trying to draw users into theoir own sites (the better to show them advertising). Hence, the discussion list and/or comment list became a web staple. Sometimes - in places like the WELL - this worked out opretty well. Most of the time, though, unless you are activkly moderating comments, you get littered with the refuse of online activity. I recently closed comments on Half an Hour because, once I passed the million views mark, I crossed some sort of spam threshhold (which cut through Google's flimsy spam filters like a hot knife through butter). OLDaily is protected through obscurity, but even here, I have to watch what gets posted. And women tech writers face a whole range of issues I can't even bear to describe. So I am totally sympathetic with Audrey Watters shutting down comments. She can read my comments on her article here, on my site, where my comments belong, as she alway has. [Link] [Comment]

Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, May 17, 2013 Tony Hirst is feeling the same sort of discomfort with the modern Google that I am. Day after day, Google has been making announcements that make it less open and more like a content farm. It's a bunch of little thinghs, like reducing data access in spreadsheets, weakinging map export data, dropping support for CalDav (and incidentally, dropping calendar Sync), dropping support for XMPP instant messaging, and of course, its increasing distance from RSS. "It’ s not just any one of these things, taken on its own merits," says Hirst, "it’ s all of them taken together... 'Embrace, extend, extinguish' ... where have we heard that before?" [Link] [Comment]

D'Arcy Norman, D’Arcy Norman dot net, May 17, 2013 I totally agree with D'Arcy Norman's comments on timeline views of online course discussion metadata. And I liked the comments that came up in the dicussion after:

• the coding-data analysis may not be necessary to learn much of what can be inferred through more automatable metadata analysis...
• having better coding-data analysis tools may not be as awesome as it sounds, as there is the potential for having nasty feedback loops if the discussion analysis is available to participants during the discussion itself.

Slidesa and PDFs of Norman's presentation are available. [Link] [Comment]