September 6, 2012
ACCC Legal Counsel: Access Copyright Licence Provides "Little Value"
Michael Geist,
Weblog, September 6, 2012.
According to the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC) lawyer, Access Copyright's major accomplishment seems to be to get educational institutions (and their students) across the country to pay good money for nothing. "The majority of dealing authorized by the ACCC Model Licence no longer requires permission or payment of copyright royalties. There is therefore little value in signing the ACCC Model Licence. For those ACCC members currently operating under the Interim Tariff, the majority of dealing authorized by that tariff no longer requires permission or royalty payments. There is therefore little value in remaining in a tariff relationship with Access Copyright beyond August 31, 2012."
Harvard and MIT online courses get 'real world' exams
Sean Coughlan,
BBC News, September 6, 2012.
This should surprise nobody. From the BBC: "Students taking online courses from prestigious US universities will be able to take final exams in a global network of invigilated test centres." The online tests will be invigilated and the centres wll authenticate the identities of test-takers. This - rather than any story about selling content or data - is the the monetization strategy end-game for MOOCs (though no doubt with the rise of test centres will come the rise of private tutoring). For the record, I predicted this development in my 1998 paper The Future of Online Learning, here.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Networks, Assessment, Tests and Testing]
Charest's defeat is a victory for students
Ethan Cox,
Rabble, September 6, 2012.
"In politics, the victories are never as bright as you would like. We must make do. But for the moment, we should not be embarrassed to say that we won: the [tuition] increase will be set aside, Bill 12 also... and Jean Charest has resigned." - Former CLASSE co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. And from Metafilter: "Biggest schadenfreude moment for the student protesters: Student leader turned politician, Leo Burebleau-Blouin, 20 years old, defeated the Finance Minister who had sat across the table from him and the other student leaders during months of negotiations over tuition and the student demonstrations. He is the youngest MNA ever elected in Quebec."
Aggregation Without Attribution
Hack Education,
Audrey Watters, September 6, 2012.
"Huzzah!" wrote Brian Lamb, "My anti-corporate ravings re-published without attribution bit.ly/R8FECf by the 'founder of Blackboard' bit.ly/R8FYAR" - the 'founder' in question is Stephen Gilfus, who has launched Gilfus Education group, "the world's leading independent strategy, research, and advisory firm for education and training organizations (Higher Ed, K12, Corporate), education and training businesses, and industry investors). What happened was the site set up an aggregator that harvested RSS feeds, including mine, retrieved the articles, and posted them without attribution on the site. Audrey Watters has a nice use of Storify on her site documenting the outrage that followed. The Gilfus service has since been shut down.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Books, Blackboard Inc., Research, RSS]
Overview: Version 1.1 of the Twitter API
Various Authors,
Twitter, September 6, 2012.
Interesting. Twitter APIs are dropping support for XML (specifically, RSS and Atom) and focusing its efforts on JSON support only. There are good reasons for this - JSON is a lot easier to work with and can be imported without parsing into remote applications. I've commented in the past that XML will in the long term be replaced by JSON. This is confirmation of that trend. But now we need to turn our attention to JSON discovery and consumption - there isn't a JSON feed network the way there is for RSS.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Content Syndication, Twitter, XML, RSS, Metadata]
MOOCs' Little Brother
Steve Kolowich,
Inside Higher Ed, September 6, 2012.
I'm not sure how you can reconcile the concept of 'open' and 'capped at five people' but that's what the University of Maine at Presque Isle is doing with it's LOOC - 'Little Open Online Course'. "Students are not paying, but they are getting the full experience," says university provost Michael Sonntag. "If they want to write every paper and take every test, our faculty members have agreed to give them feedback.”
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