College Libraries Transition to High-Tech Learning Centers
J. Kyle Keener, Ed Tech Magazine, September 16, 2013

One thing that has been clear to me for a while is that the future of libraries as a place were you borrow static artifacts, suich as books, is on the wane. Whe I write about this I get email from libraries expressing exasperation at my failure to recognize that libraries have changed. But it's not that I don't recognize the change, it's that I'm less sanguine about the new model. This post is probably the best statement of the transition: "open spaces for collaborative learning, whiteboards for taking notes and sharing ideas, and plenty of technology." It's a cross between computing lab, resource centre and meeting space. These are useful services, and they should be provided, but they are not unique to libraries.

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Credit for MOOCs Is One Step in a Long Journey Toward Relevance
Jummy Daly, Ed Tech Magazine, September 16, 2013

As universities embrace open online learning, the cold hard edge of the point of no return becomes clear: "I don't want anybody to think we're giving away credit." I can think of a number of business models where academic credit is given for free, so we also see the point at which open onlione learning will become an existential threat to the university system. Will it happen tomorrow? No. Will it happen? Sure it will.

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DC Metadata is Alive and Well - A New Standard for Education
Liddy Nevile, September 15, 2013

Dubmin Core still exists and people - tons of people, actually - are still working on it, with applications that range across all domains, from traditional Chinese music to education. This paper traces the development of educational medtata standards, where "a development where DCMI specifications have been adopted into an ISO/IEC standard. The new standard is to be used to develop other standards. This development has led in turn, for example, to the adoption of the ISO/IEC version as a normative standard for European education." There's some good history in this paper and presentation, taking us back through the EdNA and LOM days to current metadata implementations. Many more papers and presentations are available from the recent DMCI Lisbon conference proceedings.

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altc2013 Twitter NodeXL SNA Map and Report
Marc Smith, NodeXL, September 15, 2013

Here we have an analysis of the Twitter interactions during Alt-C last week. Now of course this chart is going to be incomplete - there were interactions over many other channels, such as email, Facebook and even my own conference chat in gRSShopper. But that said, the analysis is able to take the posts, identify primary contributors, and break down the interactions into a smallish set of groups (including, in G4, my talk on internet culture). "The graph is directed. The graph's vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm. The graph was laid out using the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm." When  you're taking big data, graph analysis is where it's at.

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MOOCs and the Gartner Hype Cycle: A very slow tsunami
Jonathan Tapson, Panodaily, September 15, 2013

Some very good points in this article. First, the autghor dispenses with two bad arguments against MOOCs:

• "The first is that you can’t get a high quality student-teacher or student-peer interaction on the Web. That fact may be correct, but sadly, you can’t get one at 99 percent of modern universities either."
• "The second flawed argument is that MOOCs have terrible completion rates... if we added up all the students who had ever completed this common freshman course, at all those universities, over their entire histories, it would be unlikely to exceed 10,000 completions. Udacity managed this in three months."

The third point is this: we are at the beginning of a slow tsunami - slow, because university is a three or four (or more) year commitment, not undertaken likely, with results that take a while to show. "Opting to study online is not a $1 or $10, CD-or-download decision." So the full impact of MOOCs won't be felt for a while. "For the mid-range institutions, there is probably a happy 10-year window in which they are safe and can continue in blissful ignorance."

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Update on the MOOC Market: Things Moving Fast
Josh Bersin, Bersin by Deloitte, September 14, 2013

Some quick updates. "1.  Coursera announced that its new "Signature Track" has now generated a million dollars of revenue and is growing... 2.  Google announced plans to partner with edX and not only contribute to the edX open source but also contribute Google's Course Builder technology... 3.  EdX and Google just launched "mooc.org," a site which will help companies and individuals build their own courses and share them." I guess we should have bought mooc.org when we bought mooc.ca - oh well.

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