iBerry

Michael Geist, May 2, 2013 From Michael Geist: "I am delighted to report that this week the University of Ottawa Press published The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, an effort by many of Canada's leading copyright scholars to begin the process of examining the long-term implications of the copyright pentalogy. The book is available for purchase and is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons licence. The book can be downloaded in its entirety or each of the 14 chapters can be downloaded individually." Good reading for the flight home. [Link] [Comment]

Cathy Davidson, HASTAC, May 1, 2013 Cathy Davidson reacts with some bemusement on finding herself at the top of the list of movers and shakers in the MOOc works, as seen by the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Am I a key player in the MOOCs being supported by venture capitalists at a handful of elite or Ivy or near-Ivy institutions? Hardly!"

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Contact North, May 1, 2013 Short report from Contact North consisting mostly of summaries of the relevant research reports. The conclusion is utterly unsurprising: "the consensus seems to be that no amount of research will ever result in a ‘ yes’ or ‘ no’ answer to the question of whether or not online learning saves money while maintaining quality." This is in large part, to my mind, due to a rampant vagueness about what constitutes 'quality'. [Link] [Comment]

May 1, 2013 From the website: "Since 1990, MindFuel has been dedicated to creating and delivering unique science programs for kids in classrooms and online. Science should be fun, intriguing and inspiring, so our programs are designed to be just that. We give students a chance to interact with different materials, experiment with a variety of solutions and explore unique online worlds." Mindfuel is formerly the Science Alberta Foundation, and is evolving to a model similar to the Australian Academy of Science's PrimaryConnections. Mindfuel programs include Wonderville (explore careeers in pipelines),  Ignition Pack (formerly the  the Science-in-a-Crate Program) and Edacity (science social network for rural students). [Link] [Comment]

SMART Technologies, May 1, 2013 From the website: "The SMART Ecosystem Network (SEN) is a community designed to nurture the growth of companies and individuals interested in working with SMART. The network provides technical resources, accreditation programs and marketing support to its members, ensuring they are given the resources they need to develop and market software and content that work well with... SMART products." [Link] [Comment]

Contendo, May 1, 2013 From the website: "we develop a competency training package that relates directly to your facility. We base our entire training program on the design specifications of your process and equipment. We provide a realistic representation of your facility, in a format that delivers it in a consistent manner to all staff." Contendo currently specializes in competence-based training for the oil and gas industry. Based in Belledune, New Brunswick, with an office in Calgary. [Link] [Comment]

May 1, 2013 From the website: "Equella is a digital repository that provides one system to house your teaching and learning, research, media and library content. Equella has been deployed for copyright resource collections, research materials, managing and exposing materials through web sites and portals, content authoring, workflow, institutional policy and document management." Equella is owned by Pearson. [Link] [Comment]

Learning Bird, May 1, 2013 From the website: "We match lessons to each child according to their individual state, grade level, and learning profile. Our recommendation engine gets better with time and use and we're constantly working to improve it, allowing us to craft the most efficient learning experience available." [Link] [Comment]

Andrew B. Watt, Andrew B. Watt's Blog, April 30, 2013 This is a great story - kids, trying to track down why their 3D printer is making errors, figuring out things like x-axis and number lines and the rest. "they can see the X-Axis, the Y-Axis, and the Z-axis.   How many of those plastic pixels wide is your coffee cup?   How many deep?   How thick are the walls? The handle? And  Can that handle be supported by its own weight as the printer builds it?" As always, immersing yourself in the thing makes for much better learning than simply being told the abstract principles of the thing. [Link] [Comment]

April 30, 2013 Translation: "The # education will soon have a Nobel prize ... " See the NY Times article. If they were really interested in innovative teaching, they would not limit eligible recipients of the prize to university professors. That is all. [Link] [Comment]

Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, April 30, 2013 Still in the context of the Evernote RSS fiasco, but this paragraph alone makes the story worth the read: "Kudos to CloudHQ for making it easy to move content from one service to another! You can also sync content back-n-forth between a variety of services, which makes it a pretty neat deal at $9.90 per month (if you need that level of redundancy). Since this is a one-way trip for me, I probably won't be using it much...but CloudHQ is tempting as an easy way to move from GoogleDrive to Dropbox or vice versa!" [Link] [Comment]

Eric Olsen, Higher Ed Live, April 30, 2013 It's always interesting to observe people thinking that "there must be some reason" for doing things online, because they cannot comprehend that the thing in itself is worth doing. I have binders full of original writings from the pre-internet days that prove that I would be doing this even if there weren't an audience to see it. For me, it's easier and more convenient to do it online. But I don't need some other reason (even if there is some other reason, the point here is that I don't need it). I'm sure some people do it for the money, to it for the fame, do it for the social approval, etc. But there are some people who, in the words of mark Pilgrim, "can't not write." I'm one of those - and I fear the people who say "there must be some reason" (economists, all of them) will never get me. [Link] [Comment]

Anuli Akanegbu, EdTech, April 30, 2013 There has been much criticiasm of the Chronicle's recent elevation of Khan Academy to 'MOOC status'. My own thinking is that either (a) they needed four companies to make a nice need diagram, and cMOOC is not a company, or (b) someone paid them. But I really don't know. In this post, Anuli Akanegbu asks when Khan passes the "duck test" - as in, "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." So, does it? "By all appearances, the Khan Academy passes the MOOC “ Duck Test.” But even though it may look like a MOOC and sound like a MOOC, founder Salman Khan maintains that the Khan Academy is not a MOOC." There is video. [Link] [Comment]

Jennifer Carey, Powerful Learning Practice, April 30, 2013 OK, I think it's good to give people advice on where to find free and open images online. But I bristle when these are characterized as 'legal' images. It is true that you can't just use copyright images willy-nilly. But there are ample provisions under fair use (or fair dealing) for the use of images - goodness, just go look at Google's image search and you will see that Google, at least, can use smaller copies of them in appropriate contexts and for non-infringing purposes. The definition of 'legal' is not the same as 'presventing anyone from sending cease and desist orders' because (putative) image owners extend their 'rights' far beyond what the law allows. A kid using a Google Images copy of salami on a class blog? That really sounds like fair use to me, and to my mind, large commercial corporations should just leave these kids alone. And online pundits should not cater to this - these corporations are wrong when they are harassing kids about copyright, and should not be treated as though they are right. [Link] [Comment]

eLearning Africa News Portal, April 29, 2013 This is really intersting; I wish there were more sources of inffermation about what's actually happening in East Africa (I have to depend on the blogs and reports writtern by the World Bank and other such agencies, exactly the opposite of what's being presented here). "experts have recently identified far more radical, hidden changes occurring across the Continent. New technologies, when adopted, are adapted to local needs: a sort of under-the-radar innovation which is now pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Mark Kaigwa, Kenyan ICT guru, digital strategist and keynote speaker at eLearning Africa, explains the situation in his own country: 'it’ s the organic stuff, initiated by the community and on the fringes… this is what’ s really going to transform our country and the rest of the East African region, if not the whole Continent.'" [Link] [Comment]

Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, April 29, 2013 People ask me sometimes what the difference is between the sort of system I advocate and cloud-based note-taking services such as Evernote. Here it is, in a nutshell: I advocate that people own their own software, so features they rely on don't disappear because the service provider decides they're too much trouble. "For educators, this is an essential service. Students and teachers posting to a single notebook can immediately re-share content with the world via RSS...
Unfortunately, all this is now impossible." Read more here.
[Link] [Comment]

Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, April 29, 2013 I think Blogger is probably on the way out. The evidence for this (beyond the demise of other Google products people actually like) is the development of Blogger's new comment system, which is essentially Google+ comment system (with all the weaknesses that entails). As Alex Chitu writes, "you can no longer manage comments from the Blogger dashboard and the new comments aren't included when you export your blog." To my observation, there is a remarkable similarity between Google+ comments and a garbage can. Except people actually want garbage cans. See also: add Google+ comments to web pages. [Link] [Comment]

Harold Jarche, April 29, 2013 Connectivism (at least my version of it) applied neatly to organizational learning: "Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. To know the culture of the workplace, one must be the culture. Marinate in it and understand it. This cannot be done while trying to control the culture. Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control." [Link] [Comment]

Nigel Hawtin, Xarissa Holdaway, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2013 There's some interesting on the Twitter about how the Chronicle has "jettisoned" any reference to the original MOOC authors (and somehow promoted Khan Academy to MOOC status. But as Lissie says, "I don't want to be famous / if I have to be shameless / if you don't know what my name is / so what so what." [Link] [Comment]

Arthur Levine, Inside Higher Ed, April 29, 2013 This is a bit of an odd article, describing as it does the history of post-secondary education in an America-centric and sonetimes inconsistent manner. The term "Democracy's College", for example, is a parochialism that misrepresents both college and democracy. The article, as one commenter notes, depicts several centuries of history where institutions adapted to change, but then argues (on the basis of nothing) that change will come from outside the institution. There's a weird social Darwinism vide through out. MOOCs will be forgotten in history, but when we look back, "like Western Governors University, Coursera, and Udacity leap to mind." And causation is often reversed: for example, the author writes "These institutions will operate globally, not locally, which will dictate a digital format," when in fact, it is the "digital format" that enables universities to operate globally. [Link] [Comment]