Education and Venture Capital Funding
Clarence Fisher, Remote Access, July 23, 2013

Clarence Fisher looks at the numbers...

• Coursera – Acquires $43M in additional funding (July 10)
• Brightbytes – $2.5M in new funding (July 15)
• Desire2Learn – Opening a US Base in Boston after acquiring $80M in funding (July 15)
• Engrade - Lands $5M in funding (July 3)
• Top Hat Monocle – Closed an $8M round of funding (Sept. 2012)
• Lumos Labs – Pulls in $31.5M in funding (Jan. 2013)

... and then comments: "What worries me is that the grand majority of new products and investment money in education is not going to companies looking at the 'big picture' of education... none of the companies in my small list are concerned with connecting students in new or better ways. None of them are helping students to become more engaged with the important problems that our society faces. None of them are helping students to become more passionate learners. None of them are focused on creativity. Instead, millions of dollars is being invested in companies who are offering products to help students learn old skills more efficiently." Yes. It's a bit overstated, but there's an irony there.

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Innovation, quality and digital resources: the LINQ 2013 conference
Tony Bates, online learning, distance education resources, July 23, 2013

As the title suggests, Tony Bates summarizes the 2013 LINQ conference. Speakers featured Bates, Rory McGreal, Fred Mulder and Jay Cross, among others. What comes out of the conference is that Europe has a serious labour crisis and is attempting (as we are here) to match skills development to employer needs. Toward this end, open resources, and especially high quality resources, are advanced as part of the solution.

To a certain degree I agree with this, and this is the sort of thing educators provide, so that's where we should be aiming. But the employment crisis will not be solved though education alone. At a certain point we have to look at the distribution of wealth in society - jobs are drying up because the money is no longer in the hands of people who spend it, but rather in the hands of bankers and investors, who hoard it (or do things like spend it on this week's ridiculous $12 billion acquisition of Shopper's Drug Mart). At a certain point, education may have to become more about thriving and surviving outside the traditional employment market, rather than trying to cram more and more people into the few jobs that remain within it.

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Scam open access journals
Rory McGreal, Athabasca L, ing, July 23, 2013

Rory McGreal warns of "a growing number of scam open access journals that for the most part use "gold open access" in which the author pays." Peter Suber raises the same concern in an interview with Richard Poynder: "I’m disappointed by the cancerous growth of scam or predatory OA journals, by the assumption in some quarters that all or most OA journals are predatory." McGreal identifies some scam lists, including http://scholarlyoa.com/. McGreal offers good advice to academics: "I think that it is best to assume that if you have to pay, it is scam. Even legitimate commercial journals now offer 'gold open access' in which the scholar pays to have the article in an open database. This too, in my opinion, is a scam."

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The Value of Hybrid/Blended Learning
Nancy White, Nancy White's Full Circle Blog, July 23, 2013

I said recently "outside formal education institutions, the hybrid model is virtually nonexistent" and received some pushback, for example, from Nancy White. She says, "in my world, which is definitely outside post-secondary education and not in Canada, blended models are front and center." She lists as examples FAO’s most successful learning programs, and the Management Sciences for Health, Virtual Leadership Development program, as well as the The Blended Learning Implementation Guide recently released by Digital Learning Now (DLN). All good examples, but all cases where learning is offered by instutions. Sure, they're not colleges or universities, but they're certainly not instances of self-managed informal learning either. I think the closest you copuld come to hybrid learning in the non-institutional learning community might be things like barcamps and hackathons.

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MOOCagogy: Assessment, Networked Learning, and the Meta-MOOC
Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, Hybrid Pedagogy, July 23, 2013

Interesting perspective on MOOCs, drawing on the idea (with which I agree) that real learning can't (and shouldn't be) constrained: "We haven’t learned anything new about online learning from MOOCs (especially Courserian and Udacian MOOCs) because we keep the lion in the cage. The kind of learning we need to have happen in MOOCs can’t be contained -- not in neat and tidy discussion fora, video lectures, and standardized assessments. We must start by observing learning in its natural habitat with a hunter’s blind, good binoculars, and plenty of rations. MOOCs are anthropological opportunities, not instructional ones." The autrhors also note, "This article marks the relaunch of www.moocmooc.com, where we’ve now archived all the articles written for the three iterations of MOOC MOOC."

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Going through the motions improves dance performance
Anna Mikulak, Association for Psychological Science, July 23, 2013

In connectivism, the underlying idea that learning is the development of connections between neurons (and learnin theories tell us how such connections are formed). The hard science behind connectivism proceeds apace. In recent developments, researchers:

• have made neural network chips that emulate perceptual cognition
• identified neural pathways that control compulsive drinking in rats
• in 'top-down plasticity' repatterned 'body image' neural connections
• learned that word acquisition depends on bundles of neural connections
• explained the role of 'marking' in learning dance

The point here isn't that the approach to learning is based on one or another of these studies, but rather, that is it is consistent with, and reinforced by, these studies taken as a whole.

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Great Teachers Don’t Wait for PD Days
Kelly Christopherson, Educational Discourse, July 22, 2013

In the past I have given talks on personal professional development - this is my preferred approach when someone asks me what teachers can do to adopt the internet in their classroom. The idea is that if they use the internet in their own learning, they won't need to ask how to use it for their classroom. This post addresses the same topic, making the point that "PD needs to be eliminated from our discussion about teachers’ learning. Although it is professional development, it has become associated to something that is 'done' to teachers instead of a self-motivated improvement where you get some type of certificate at the end instead of the internal motivation to be better at what you do. Because we learn all the time, we need to tap into the natural learning process of adults instead of the imposed learning from experts." The best point in the post: Twitter is not a PD event - it is nothing more than the beginning of the conversation.

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