Visible Learning
Maggie Hos-McGrane, Tech Transformation, August 29, 2013

Maggie Hos-McGrane writes about 'visible learning', which is "about helping students to become their own teachers and calls on teachers to become evaluators of the impact of their own teaching." While tests are traditionally used to evaluate students, she writes, "what is needed is for teachers to be able to evaluate their impact on students so that if things aren't improving it is a call to them that they need to change."

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Editors’ Choice: Lessons Learned – Janet Murray
August 29, 2013

According to Janet Murray, "There has to be someplace where you say, “How do we reconfigure knowledge?” Because that is what happens when you have a new medium of representation, as with the printing press. And we’re not making fast enough progress there, because nobody’s getting rewarded for it, nobody’s being paid to do it." Which is ridiculous, first, because people (like me) are working on it, and are even being paid for it, and second, because progress happens even if people aren't being paid to do things (we need to do away with this pernicious notion that people only do things they're paid to do). Despite this, this presentation from Janet Murray on culture and representation is nonetheless worth a listen.

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Thomson Reuters Delivers Significant Enhancements to eLearning Solutions
Press Release, Thomson Reuters, August 29, 2013

Whether the enhancements are "sgnificant' is a matter of perspective, but this press release signals the intent of Thomson Reuters to continue making inroads into the e-learning space. The company is announcing "the delivery of a new Learning Management System (LMS), Accelus Learning Manager and integration of WeComply, a... provider of compliance e-learning, into its offerings," promising "increased scalability, performance, capacity and language support to Thomson Reuters online educational courses."

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Definition of MOOC in English
Oxford Dictionary, August 28, 2013

Oxford Dictionaries inserts 'MOOC' into its lexicon, and gets both the usage and the etymology wrong. It cites as an example, "anyone who decides to take a MOOC simply logs on to the website and signs up," which mistakes how one accesses a website (one does not 'log on' to a website, one 'navigates' to it, or more simply, 'goes' to it) and how one accesses a MOOC (only in some cases must one 'sign up'; in our MOOCs, for example, you just start reading; in others, you just start aching a video. A requirement that you sign up is a symptom of a closed website, not an open one. As for the origins of the word, which are actually pretty precisely known Oxford writes, " early 21st century: from massive open online course, probably influenced by MMOG and MMORPG," which may be what Cormier and Alexander had in mind in 2008, but was not what they were naming. Next time you need to know about a word, Oxford, ask the people who use it.

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The underlying inequality of MOOCs
August 28, 2013

OK, this is true: “People need to learn how to learn – they need some basic level of education and the ability to study. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack this (or they wouldn’t be disadvantaged).” And yes, it impacts MOOCs. The question is, do MOOCs make this more of a prroblem or less of a problem. I won't pretend to know the answer to this. But I think I can say that this suggests that the 'disadvantaged background' argument isn't automatically an argument against MOOCS.

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