Octeto

Fortunately, devices like tablets and e-readers make taking summer reading with you an easy task. And many app-makers out there have made apps that students (and in some cases, teachers too!) with summer reading. Keep reading to see a few such apps that we've checked out recently.

The post 4 Tools To Help Avoid Summer Learning Loss appeared first on Edudemic.

There's a trend slowly spreading across school systems called looping teachers. Basically, students stick with the same teacher for more than a year. Here's the pros and cons to know about!

The post The Benefits And Downsides Of Looping Teachers appeared first on Edudemic.

From pop culture icons to your local newspaper, there are powerful learning tools right at your fingertips. These real-world tools are being used in ESL right now!

The post The 8 Real-World Tools Being Used By ESL Teachers appeared first on Edudemic.

See it on Scoop.it, via Educación flexible y abierta

By: Kathryn Landers It's the middle of the night. You sit alone, confused with only the cold, harsh light from your email lighting the room. Are you ever going to hear from your online college? If ...

See it on Scoop.it, via Educación flexible y abierta

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The Myth of Disruptive Innovation

Folklorists often balk at the common usage of the word “myth” to mean “lie.” A myth, by their disciplinary definition, is quite the opposite. A myth is a culture’s sacred story. It involves supernatural or supreme beings — gods. It explains origins and destinies. A myth is the Truth.

So when I say then, that “disruptive innovation” is one of the great myths of the contemporary business world, particularly of the tech industry, I don’t mean by “myth” that Clayton Christensen’s explanation of changes to markets and business models and technologies is a falsehood. (I have an MA in Folklore, not an MBA — so that’s part of it, for sure.)

Rather, my assigning “myth” to “disruptive innovation” is meant to highlight the ways in which this narrative has been widely accepted as unassailably true. No doubt (as a Harvard professor) Christensen has faced very little skepticism or criticism about his theory about the transformation of industries— why, it’s as if The Innovator’s Dilemma were some sort of sacred text.

Helping to enhance its mythic status, the storytelling around “disruptive innovation” has taken on another, broader and looser dimension as well, as the term is now frequently invoked in many quarters to mean things quite different from Christensen’s original arguments in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

In this vein, almost every new app, every new startup, every new tech — if you believe the myth-making-as-marketing at least — becomes a disruptive innovation: limo-summoning iPhone apps (e.g. Uber), photo-sharing iPhone apps (e.g. Path), email on your iPhone (e.g. Mailbox), online payments (e.g. Paypal), electric vehicles (e.g. Tesla), cloud computing (e.g. Amazon Web Services), 3D printers (e.g. Makerbot), video-based lectures (e.g. Khan Academy), social search (e.g. Facebook Graph Search), the entire Internet, etc ad nauseum.

The Millennialism of Disruptive Innovation

The companies above might very well be innovative. — in their technologies and their business models. That’s beside the point if you’re looking for disruption. Per Christensen’s framework, these could also be “sustaining innovations” — that is, products and services that strengthen the position (and the profits) of incumbent organizations.

But that’s not the mythology embraced by the tech industry, which despite its increasing economic and political power, continues to see itself as an upstart not an incumbent.

And as a self-appointed and self-described disruptor, the tech industry seems to have latched on to the most millennial elements of Christensen’s theories — that is, the predictions about the destruction of the old and the ascension of the new. At the hands of technology: The death of the music industry. The death of newspapers. The death of print. The death of Hollywood. The death of books. The death of the Web. The death of RSS. The death of Microsoft. All predicted to be killed — suddenly or gradually or in the library with a candlestick — by some sort of “disruptive innovation.”

The structure to this sort of narrative is certainly a well-known and oft-told one in folklore — in tales of both a religious and secular sort. Doom. Suffering. Change. Then paradise.

People seemingly love to believe in the “end of the world as we know it” stories — for reasons that have to do with both the horrors of the now and the heaven of the future. Many cultures (and Silicon Valley is, despite its embrace of science and technology, no different here) tell a story that predicts some sort of cataclysmic event(s) that will bring about a radical cultural (economic, political) transformation and, eventually, some sort of paradise.

The Book of Revelations. “The Hollow Men.” The Mayan Calendar. The Shakers. The Ghost Dance. Nuclear holocaust. Skynet. The Singularity.

I’ll be the first to admit that the data in folklore professor Dan Wojcik’s book The End of the World As We Know It is dated (um, he was my Master’s Thesis advisor, circa 2000); he wrote the book in 1997 — oh! the same year that The Innovator’s Dilemma was originally published! Wojcik’s analysis of a sweeping societal belief in “the end of the world” — was well-timed with the technological anxieties surrounding Y2K, making it is an interesting and contrasting companion to Christensen’s contention that we’ll witness “the end” of certain organizations thanks to technological “innovation.”

For his part Wojcik noted that, according to Nielsen, some 40% of Americans believed that there was nothing we could do to prevent nuclear holocaust. 60% believe in Judgment Day. 44% in the Battle of Armageddon. 44% in the Rapture. He didn’t say how many believed in Y2K. He didn’t say how many believed in “disruptive innovation.” He did not ask how many believed in “the singularity” and such.

I'd argue that despite its staid Harvard Business School origins, Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” story taps into these same powerful narratives about the end-times -- told, as always by the chosen ones (be they Americans, Christians, Shakers, Heaven’s Gate followers, survivalists, Java programmers, or "my generation"). Folks do seem drawn to these millennial stories, particularly when they help frame and justify our religious, moral, economic, political, cultural, social, technological worldview.

Adjustments to the Disruptive Innovation Eschatology

Here are a couple of (education-related) end-times predictions from Clayton Christensen:

• In 15 years, half of US universities may be bankrupt.

• By the year 2019 half of all classes for grades K–12 will be taught online.

Disruptive innovation will be, as Techcrunch (among other acolytes) is happy to profess, the end of school as we know it.

Such is its inevitability, so the story goes, that new players can enter the education market and, even though their product is of lower quality and appeals to those who are not currently “customers,” oust the incumbent organizations. (Incumbents, in this case, are publicly funded, brick-and-mortar schools.) As Christensen and his co-authors argued in Disrupting Class in 2008, “disruption is a necessary and overdue chapter in our public schools.”

But like many millennialist prophets are wont to do when their end-times predictions don’t quite unfold the way they originally envisioned, Clayton Christensen and his disciples at the Clayton Christensen Institute (which was recently renamed from the Innosight Institute) have just tweaked their forecast about (public) education’s future. 5 years post-Disrupting Class, "disrupting class" will look a bit different, they now say.

This week, the organization released a new white paper, detailing a new path for transformation that winds a new future between the disruptive and sustaining innovations: they call it “hybrid innovations.”

"A hybrid is a combination of the new, disruptive technology with the old technology and represents a sustaining innovation relative to the old technology."

It’s an interesting revision (a refinement, really) of the organization’s predictions in Disrupting Class, the book which first applied “disruptive innovation” to education technology and that argued online learning would be a way to “modularize the system and thereby customize learning.” (In other buzzwords, to “unbundle” and “personalize” education.)

Not so fast, the organization now says. Hybrid innovation. "Blended learning." A little bit online and a little bit offline. And while middle- and high schools (and colleges, although that isn’t the subject of this latest white paper) might offer opportunities for “rampant non-consumption,” -- that is, classically, an opportunity for "disruption" -- “the future of elementary schools at this point is likely to be largely, but not exclusively, a sustaining innovation story for the classroom.” Computer hardware and software and Internet-access in the classroom, as those of us who've been thinking about education technology for decades now keep saying, won't necessarily change "everything." (Go figure.)

Of course, even in Disrupting Class, the predictions of the ed-tech end-times were already oriented towards changing the business practices, not (necessarily) the pedagogy or the learning. And the promise of a thriving education technology eschatology were already muted in Christensen's earliest formulations, by the “restrictions” placed upon the education sector — restrictions by virtue of education being a public and not a private institution, of education not being beholden to market forces quite the same way that the other examples that the mythology of “disruptive innovation” has utilized to explain itself.

“People did not create new disruptive business models in public education, however. Why not? Almost all disruptions take root among non-consumers. In education, there was little opportunity to do that. Public education is set up as a public utility, and state laws mandate attendance for virtually everyone. There was no large, untapped pool of non-consumers that new school models could target.”

Agitating for the End Times

This latest Christensen Institute white paper clarifies then that the future of education isn't necessarily (or utterly or easily) "disrupted." There are limits to the predictions, to the predictive models, to the business school approach to education change and such. There are, for example, lots of non-consumers of learning (a necessary piece of the "disruptive innovation" framework) if you're willing to frame education as something that happens outside the officially-sanctioned, brick-and-mortar institutions. But it's not so easy to woo "non-consumers" if you're really just focused on the market and policy and practices of an otherwise compulsory schooling setting. (And the distintion between "consumers," "non-consumers," "students," and "learners" is important too, although all get lumped into a consumption framework by Christensen.)

Like so many millennialist entities faced with the harsh realities of faltering predictions, the Innosight Institute (now under its new name) offers a new prediction.

But, let's be clear, the organization doesn't just predict the future of education. The Clayton Christensen Institute does not just offer models -- business models -- for the future. It does not simply observe an always changing (education) technology market. It has not simply diagnosed the changes due to technological advancements. It has not simply prophesied or predicted what future outcomes might be.

It's written a best-selling book (or two) about disruptive innovation. It has actively lobbied governments for certain aspects of its agenda (its mythology?), becoming a vocal proponent for its particular vision of a disrupted and innovative future. The Clayton Christensen Institute is a member of ALEC, for example, a corporate lobbying organization whose education initiatives include writing and pushing for legislation that enables the outsourcing of education to for-profit, online education providers and that eases the restrictions of entry to the market of the very virtual schools. 

"Over time," the new white-paper reads, "as the disruptive models of blended learning improve, the new value propositions will be powerful enough to prevail over those of the traditional classroom." And so, according to the Christensen mythology, despite any sort of hesitatation about the hybridity of disruption now, disruption will prevail.

And so, indeed, it is written. And so, it is told.

Image credits: Pedro Szekely, dynamosquito and Luc Viatour

On Wednesday, OPB ran one of the better stories I have heard within mainstream media on the Common Core standards; the piece was reported by Rob Manning. The piece focused on adoption within Oregon, and contains gems like this quotation from a district superintendent:

“In eastern Oregon, we have a saying that cattle get bigger because you feed them, not because you weigh them.”

However, the story also fails to nail down some key details.

Adopting the "Smarter Balanced" Assessment

The Manning piece describes how the Oregon Board of Education recently voted to adopt the currently incomplete Smarter Balanced assessments.

The tests are a work in progress and are still two years off. But hundreds of Oregon students and teachers have already tried the new “Smarter Balanced” assessment.

While the tests are two years off, there has been concern about whether or not the tests are on schedule to meet that timetable. Recent large scale failures of online tests (see previous link) do not allay these concerns. A lack of internet connectivity required to administer the tests is also a recognized problem.

Additionally, even Arne Duncan admits that the new tests will lead to “a couple of choppy years” for schools.

So, while the tests are technically a work in progress, not acknowledging that there is uncertainty about whether the tests will be ready when they are needed is an omission that glosses over the scope of the challenges involved in rolling out the tests accompanying the new standards.

Moreover, there are some concerns about the quality of both PARCC and Smarter Balanced questions.

A more accurate description here would read:

The full content of these tests is not yet finished, and there have been concerns that the tests won't be fully ready in time. However, hundreds of Oregon students and teachers have already field-tested a draft version of the new “Smarter Balanced” assessment.

The Origins of Common Core

The original piece at OPB contains scant and incomplete information about the origin of the Common Core standards, and the conditions that led to their widespread adoption.

Unlike "No Child Left Behind," this didn’t come through Congress. State-level officials put it together -- though the Obama Administration is on board.

State level officials did not put this together. The original group that put this together consisted of a small group of people working for testing organizations, with support from the major textbook companies and Edison Learning, a charter school operator and "school turnaround" specialist with a spotty record of success. The fact that the Common Core standards are called "state" standards is good marketing, but it ignores the reality that these standards were designed at the national level, by people and organizations doing work both nationally and internationally.

Also, saying that the Obama administration is "on board" misrepresents the level of support from the Obama administation for the Common Core standards. As noted in an earlier post, the Obama administration set the adoption of Common Core standards - and of tying teacher evaluations to standardized test results - as weighted criteria in Race to the Top, and as a requirement for NCLB waivers. When federal funding is tied to adopting both a set of standards, and assessments tied to those standards, that goes far beyond being "on board."

A more accurate description here would read:

The Common Core standards were developed by representatives from textbook companies, educational organizations, testing organizations, and other individuals, with lead authorship generally attributed to David Coleman, Sue Pimentel, Bill McCallum and Jason Zimba. While the Obama administration has been careful not to advocate for the standards by name, federal education policy has provided funding incentives for states that adopted the standards, and assessments aligned to the standards.

Field Tests

Students in Oregon were subjects in field testing, but the method of choosing schools for these field tests remains unclear.

David Beasley, superintendent of the Gaston District in western Washington County, says “Well, I’d like to say we volunteered, but we didn’t.”

Unfortunately, there is no follow up here to learn why or how this district was chosen. It's clear that students were made to take the tests, and we can only assume that this was done at the expense of instructional time. In New York, Pearson was paid millions of dollars to administer field tests, sparking parent outrage and a larger Opt Out movement.

Why was this district chosen? Did they have a choice? How much instructional time was devoted to these tests in this district? How many other schools in Oregon took these tests?

The superintendent clearly is not completely pleased here. It would have been interesting to hear more - even just one or two sentences - about the backstory.

With All That Said...

The rest of the story is pretty solid. They get student observations on the tests, which is an interesting perspective that most education writers overlook or ignore entirely. But the details matter.

The Common Core standards, much curriculum aligned to those standards, the tests measuring progress relative to the standards - these different pieces were all developed by the same people. Some companies or organizations had representation in all of these elements, and Federal education policy - and more importantly, Federal education funding - supported the adoption of the Common Core standards. Adopting the standards, of course, creates an immediate need for the new tests and the new curriculum.

With this much business at stake, it's no surprise that the people working on Common Core also spend a good chunk of money lobbying:

• Pearson, Inc and Pearson Education;
• Scholastic;
• Houghton Mifflin;
• EdisonLearning;
• McGraw-Hill;
• Wireless Generation

However, the adoption of Common Core standards, the rollout of the tests related to these standards, and the need for new curriculum that supports these standards, are often treated as separate entities. On the one hand, that's technically true - the standards are just standards. But, the federal policies, especially incentives in the various strands of Race to the Top and the NCLB Waiver process, helped ensure that Common Core standard adoption and new standardized assessments occurred together.

The origins of the standards, and the web of policies tying together the standards, the assessments, and the new curriculum, is very opaque. The complexity is made worse when one starts to look at the financial interests of the organizations that played a role in developing these new standards, as many of the companies and organizations involved in developing the standards could make enormous sums of money from services ranging from textbooks, testing, teacher training, and school turnaround support.

This complexity, however, is all the more reason why stories about the Common Core need to get the background right. If you miss the background, you miss the story, and everyone remains underinformed.

Image Credit: "Lazy Cow" taken by sarah white, published under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

We often talk about iPads in K-12 classrooms, the availability of information on the web for college students to access, and a host of other similar topics in too many categories to mention.

The post Why And How Teachers Are (And Aren’t) Using Technology appeared first on Edudemic.

Identity: “sameness of essential or generic character in different instances”. Merriam Webster Dictionary In a recent post I reviewed Routledge’s book “Learning Identities in a Digital Age”. The book is rich with thought-provoking insights into education, technology and its impact … Continue reading →

Tressie McMillan Cottom., tressiemc, May 24, 2013 Some really good writing in this longish post about university admissions that ends with this: "Rather than a market response to unmet consumer demand, my data tell a story of class insecurity that is transformed into a credentialing process through marketing that sorts, and admissions processes that signal to students that a for-profit credential can provide the security they intuit they need. The success of colleges like Profit U not only responds to the individual pain points of students grappling with increasing competition for fewer good jobs, but organizationally they have responded to weaknesses — pain points — in the social structure." This is really important. It's not just about jobs and it never has been. It's also about being able to 'join the club' - only to realize, that once you've finally gotten in, there are many more inner circles you'll never get to see. (Browse the rest of the site, too, for interesting stuff, including this astonishing dispute with the Chronicle from last year). Via Matt Reed. [Link] [Comment]

Phil Hill, e-Literate, May 24, 2013 According to the letter signed by 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, "It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission." They then ask that a committee of tenure and tenure track faculty draft "a set of ethical and educational principles" that will govern their involvement. The Harvard faculty letter, writes Phil Hill, takes the approach of "viewing MOOCs as experiments in 'teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community'." And, pointedly, not adjuncts and support staff, students, providers, funders, or anyone else. [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, May 24, 2013 David Wiley clarifies, and his points are worth lingering on.

• "Some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to 'Be Awesome Instead' of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open – truly open – is absolutely critical..." Quite so.
• And I am really really of the same mind as Wiley when he writes this: "For a number of years I have felt that the overwhelming majority of educational researchers are focused on the 'high quality' problem, to the virtual exclusion of the 'universal' and 'free' problem from the discourse." From my perspective, talk of 'quality' has become a useful red herring for those really wanting resources to be not open and not free. That's not to say I oppose quality (and neither does Wiley). But if it must be perfect before it is free, then it will never be free.
• "The only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others." Once again, I'm completely agreed. This is what I was trying to urge at OECD (not that they listened).

My only quibble is with his insistence on "free 4Rs permissions" - which includes allowing commercialization of free resources. Given what he has just said about opoen access, and about there being "no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen" I just can't see requiring allowing commercial use. Somewhere someone is going to have to say, "if you throw up a paywall, it's not open access, and you've broken the agreement."

Do you doubt me? If I blocked access to this website and started charging a subscription fee for OLDaily, would you consider it consisten with my long-time committment to free and open access? No? Then why would it be consistent with free and open access if someone else did it to my stuff? [Link] [Comment]

Doug Belshaw, literaci.es, May 24, 2013 Doug Belshaw has started a new blog on a new blog service / magazine called Svbtle. Here's his announcement post. "Svbtle is a new kind of writing and publishing network that takes the best things from traditional publishing and combines them with the best parts of the web." There's an application for membership, but it's not clear yet why someone would apply. Meanwhile, it has been interesting watching Doug Belshaw's transition from staid academic to hipster dude since his employment at Mozilla. (I say that just in jest, but it's still interesting to watch.) [Link] [Comment]

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May 24, 2013 So I spent way too much time playing this game this afternoon, which automatically makes it worth passing along. "'Data Dealer' is an online/serious/educational game about collecting and selling personal data - full of irony and humour. It's an interactive exploration of the personal data ecosystem in the digital age and targeted at both young people and adults." Have fun! [Link] [Comment]

This weekend is Memorial Day. It’s a time for family and picnics--a solid day off on Monday. We should never forget the reason for this day of observance. Soldiers have served proudly, and often died, so I can enjoy the freedoms to which I’ve become accustomed.

The post 10 Resources To Learn About Memorial Day appeared first on Edudemic.

Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. This distinction is important, given Harvard’s founding role in creating the edX organization and $30m pledge of support.

The letter is short, so I’ll quote it in full (the signatures are much longer than the letter itself).

As the university marks the first anniversary of edX and HarvardX, some faculty are tremendously excited about the potential of HarvardX; others are deeply concerned about the program’s costs and consequences. We appreciate the meetings, town halls, and other arenas in which faculty have been able to discuss HarvardX. But we believe that many critical questions about the relationship of the FAS to HarvardX, and to edX, have not yet been addressed. These questions (which fall outside the remit of the two existing HarvardX faculty committees, most of whose members are not from FAS) range from faculty oversight of HarvardX to the impact online courses will have on the higher education system as a whole.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is directly responsible for the teaching of Harvard undergraduates and Ph.D. students. It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission. Given the rapid pace of development of HarvardX, we believe it is essential to have a formal, sustained, and structured faculty discussion on these issues as soon as possible. We write to request that you appoint a committee of FAS ladder faculty to draft a set of ethical and educational principles that will govern FAS involvement in HarvardX, to be brought before the FAS for a vote in the coming academic year.

Note that they request FAS ladder faculty, which means tenure and tenure track faculty and specifically not adjuncts and lecturers. It is possible, however, that the requested committee of ladder faculty could choose to involve adjuncts in the process.

In Michael’s recent post on the San Jose State University open letter regarding edX, he called out the missed opportunity for faculty involvement in the future of MOOCs.

By ignoring the scholarship of teaching, the department missed an opportunity to engage the MOOC question in a different way. Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community. Researchers collaborate across university boundaries all the time. The same can be true in the scholarship of teaching. The faculty could have demanded access to the edX data and the freedom to adjust the course design. The letter authors seem deeply invested in positioning the edX course as something that is locked down from a third-party commercial vendor. But in reality, the edX course is developed by a faculty member and provided by a university-based non-profit entity. Perhaps the department felt that there wasn’t sufficient opportunity in this particular course design to make a request to have a collaboration worthwhile. But their rhetoric gives no indication that there is any room for such exploration under any circumstances, or indeed that the department has anything to learn about use of educational technology that could lead to either improved outcomes or lower costs.

The Harvard letter, in my opinion, takes this more reasoned approach of viewing MOOCs as experiments in “teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community”. Let’s hope that media coverage of the Harvard letter keeps this balanced view in mind rather than seeing another example to pit faculty members against the big three MOOC providers.

Update (5/24): In an afternoon article Steve Kolowich at the Chronicle describes more of the motivation for faculty writing the letter as well as the prospects for the requested committee.

That letter was on the minds of Harvard’s FAS professors when they convened to discuss MOOCs at a meeting this month, said Peter J. Burgard, a professor of German at Harvard. In their letter to Dean Smith, the Harvard professors allude to “many critical questions,” as yet unanswered, about “the impact online courses will have on the higher-education system as a whole.”

But, perhaps more immediately, the professors were irked that Harvard had become so deeply involved in MOOCs before consulting with them, said Mr. Burgard. [snip]

But the 58 signatories of the letter, out of the hundreds of professors in the FAS, might not get their way. In a written statement to The Chronicle, a spokesman for the dean suggested that a new committee, consisting solely of FAS professors, was not in the cards.

The post Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX) appeared first on e-Literate.

The stars are finally aligning for a dramatic shift in terms of education technology. Dr. Jeff Borden weighs in on why right now matters.

The post Why Right Now Is Just The Beginning For Education Technology appeared first on Edudemic.

Summary: 

Pierre Dillenbourg, Professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is co-author of the article MOOCs are More Social than You Believe, included in issue number 33 of  eLearning Papers.

Interest Area:  Higher Education Training & Work Learning & Society

Summary: 

Pierre Dillenbourg, Professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is co-author of the article MOOCs are More Social than You Believe, included in issue number 33 of  eLearning Papers.

Interest Area:  Higher Education Training & Work Learning & Society

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JISC, May 24, 2013 This is a set of eight presentations (slides only) from yesterday's conference on open access policies Goodenough College, London. Presentations inlcude talks from funders such as Wellcome Trust and RCUK, as well as discussion of the green and gold routes to open access archiving. Interestingly, open access includes not the ability to read a document online, but also search for and re-use (including download) the content and unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools (according to thisRCUK presentation). Some good statistics, also, from Alma Swan of SPARC Europe. See also controversy regarding RCUK's policies. [Link] [Comment]