An open letter to Stephen Downes
Jonathon Rees, More or Less Bunk, August 16, 2013

Jonathon Rees responds to my recent posts defending MOOCs. "While I still don’t think crowd-sourcing higher education can do what most of us do in our face-to-face classrooms every day, but thank you for your consistent struggle against the commercialism of what you all pioneered. To be specific: that’s what needs to be dismembered and buried separately, not the MOOC as originally conceived."

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Seven Faces of Information Literacy in Higher Education
Christine Bruce, August 16, 2013

Christine Bruce writes "Wise use of information, involving the adoption of personal values in relation to information use, is the distinguishing feature of this conception. Wise use of information occurs in a range of contexts including exercising judgement, making decisions, and doing research." There is a core of an interesting idea there, but it comes out sounding like a Bloom's taxonomy for information. I wish I could ban the concept of 'levels' from education research, to redirect writers away from lazy taxonomies of progression, and toward understanding complex causal relationships. Link via Grainne Conole.

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Meet Darknet, the hidden, anonymous underbelly of the searchable Web
Brad Chacos, PC World, August 16, 2013

Interesting article describing the Darknets, the hidden maze of content and services inaccessible to the average browser. The sercices are basically organized as a peer-to-peer network; there is no hierarchy, no overall structure, that woild render it vulnerable to attack. "Each node knows only the identity of the nodes it directly connects to—not every connection between your PC and the Web server—and each “hop” between nodes gets its own set of encryption keys." Why is this important? Because it tells us what structures we will build, once we get past the 'Google (and government) must see all' phase of the intrtnet, and past the 'LMS must see all' phase of online learning.

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Chegg files for IPO; seeks $150m
Andrew Nusca, ZD Net, August 15, 2013

"Chegg, the eight-year-old California company that started as an educational textbook rental service but blossomed into an online learning hub, today filed for an initial public offering... Chegg is seeking $150 million for its educational platform, which offers (digital and printed) textbook rentals and sales, homework assistance, online courses and scholarship services." Another example of the histed platform model turning into a viable business.

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