Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making
Phil Hill, e-Literate, April 2, 2013

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Overall positive coverage of an effort by the State University of New York (SUNY) to adopt and evaluate various elements of open learning in order to increase access and reduce costs. But there's one odd remark in the middle of it: "SUNY, of course, is not the place to develop MOOCs, online courses, OER, open courseware or PLAs." And one wonders, why not? It seems an error to leave the innovation to others, because then you get innovations that don't suit your own needs or interests.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Open Educational Resources, Traditional and Online Courses]

A White Boy's Observations of Sexism and the Adria Richards Fiasco
Mark Chu-Carroll, Good Math, Bad Math, April 2, 2013

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There are some good observations in this column, including this: "I really, honestly believed that the teacher was treating her students (the teacher I did this with was a woman) equally. But when I counted? She was calling on boys twice as often as girls." The last team I hired was relatively balanced by gender and culture, not by preferential selection, but by consciously paying attention to bias. If I'm ever allowed to hire again, my next team will be balanced as well. Because that's the way it's done: by being aware, by speaking out, by practising equity. (p.s. here's some background on Adria Richards, who btw has my support).

[Link] [Comment][Tags: none]

Resisting the Marketisation of Learning
Rob Watson, Rob Watson Media, April 2, 2013

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It's interesting. One of the predicted side-effects of treating education as a business was that the business would focus more on the customer. Though this sounds good in practice, in fact what has happened is that the new business-like education would determine that students don't have enough money, and that henceforth the customer would be the ultimate 'consumers' of the educational 'product', business and industry. And, as Rob Watson ponders, "I wonder how long it will be before Higher Education is swamped by an external inspectorate, like Ofstead, who checks a national curriculum that [is] designed to meet the supposed economic needs of the customer?" Ironically, with corporate taxes at all-time lows, it is business and industry that pays the least for education. But don't tell that to the people who assign stadium naming rights to the corporation that paid $1 million (instead of to the taxpayers, who paid $100 million).

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Online Learning]

Windows 8 in education: Student Demos - Elizabeth
Tim Bush, Microsoft UK Schools News Blog, April 2, 2013

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My new Lenovo came with Windows 8 so I've had some experience with it. But I have to confess, far from it being easier to find things, I'm still at the stage where I can't find anything (it doesn't help that the tiles are constantly changing, so there's no visual recognition happening). I still use the Lenovo more like a computer and less like a tablet. But that may evolve over time. Anyhow, this link is to a (fake?) student demonstrating Windows 8 for education in a 2-minute video.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Microsoft, Video, Experience]

At the Crossroads for Feed2JS
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, April 2, 2013

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Alan levine is looking to shut down Feed2JS, not because of the cost and the hassle (though both are substantial) but because, after ten years, it's time to move on to something else. He comments, "The code is old. The MagpieRSS parser is old." I can't say I blame him. I've had things I set up as experiments - things like the Referrer System (which at its peak was generating 800K hits per day) and Edu_RSS (which wasn't) - that I let go. And I think he should relax - this isn't at all like Google letting Reader go. (Photo: Bert Werk)

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Flickr, Google, RSS, Edu_RSS]