If You Are Too Busy To Reply to A Message, Then You are Sending a Message
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, July 3, 2013

Alan Levine writes, reasonably, "if you are such a freaking big shot that you cannot reply to someone’s message, especially if you have had prior ones, well you are saying, 'I am important… and you are not.'" Now I am the last person to say that I am important, but as of right now (I checked) I have 167 items, 3 unread, in my NRC email, and 775 items, 18 unread, in my downes.ca unread - and that's after getting rid of most of the automated emails. A lot of this email is from lists and alerts I use to keep myself informed. But the rest of it is personal communication, and believe me, I think it's all important. That's why it's still in my inbox. I reply (I think) to every personal message; if I haven't replied in a week or so it's OK to send me a follow-up (your message is probably stalled in the 400s). So I don't think Alan Levine is being totally fair here; sometimes your work binds you to email in a way that makes keeping up difficult.

[Link] [Comment]

Deakin’s MOOC launch a test-bed for learning redevelopment
Tim Dodd, Financial Review, July 3, 2013

Learning from offering open courses: "Deakin University will launch its first massive open online course (MOOC) on Monday and use it as a test-bed for redeveloping its full learning environment." They're looking specifically "to test how it could assess skills employers wanted, such as communication, ­digital literacy, problem-solving, self-management and teamwork." I think, in general, that it's really difficult to learn how to develop and deploy e-leanring without something like thisas a test-bed system. Certainly I think I've learned more developing gRSShopper and offering MOOCs than I ever did reading papers and journal articles. Via Sui Fai John Mak.

[Link] [Comment]

You followed my bot! Transforming robots into influential users in Twitter
Johnnatan Messias, Lucas Schmidt, Ricardo Oliveira, Fabrício Benevenuto, First Monday, July 3, 2013

I have suggested that we can analyse ability and expertise by examining performance in social media. This article shows how far we have yet to go in realizing that possibility. "We created simple robots capable of interacting by means of Twitter accounts, and we measured how influential they were. Our results show that it is possible to become influential through simple strategies. This suggests that the systems do not have ideal means to measure and classify influence."

[Link] [Comment]

Flosse Posse
Teemu Leinonen, July 3, 2013

Note that Teemu Leinonen's Flosse Posse blog is moving to new address, http://teemuleinonen.fi/. It was hosted by Dicole Ltd for the previous eight years. With Google Reader disappearing it's a bad time to be making a website and RSS feed switch, which is why I highlight it today.

[Link] [Comment]

MOOCs and Online Education; a real difference
Jim Farmer, e-Literate, July 3, 2013

How common an error is this: boards and administrators "learning about online education from what they were reading, not from information provided by the University... depending only on the national press and broadcast for judgments about the effectiveness of instructional methods." It sounds pretty familiar in my own environment, and probably in most OLDaily readers' environments. That's why discussion of MOOCs and onlinbe learning with administrators "has become error-prone and counter-productive." It's really important to distinguish MOOCs from previous types of open and online learning, and even to distinguish types of MOOCs from each other. And this needs to be done in the media, because administratrors don't follow, read or listen to their staff. See also: When data goes bad.

[Link] [Comment]

Japanese MOOC startup raises $1.5 million from investors
Takeshi Hirano, SD Japan, July 3, 2013

From the wires: "Schoo is a Tokyo-based MOOC (massive open online course) startup providing livestreamed lectures on the internet. The startup announced today that it has raised 152 million yen (approximately $1.52 million)... Schoo was launched back in January 2012 under the mission of “ridding the world of graduations”. It provides more than 130 different online courses, and to date it has more than 40,000 users, mostly office workers in their late 20s and early 30s."

[Link] [Comment]