How MOOCs Can Be Free and Profitable at the Same Time
John Swope, EdTech, December 26, 2013

MOOCs are necessary, argues the author, because of the competition between institutions. "Universities are highly competitive, and they invest significant money into faculty, facilities, research and now a new loss-leader: MOOCs. These courses offer universities a way to find and recruit high performers." So the question becomes how to make the pay off. But it's the same old set of argements from the days of learning objects. "First, MOOCs are reusable. Whereas the cost of a professor, a lecture hall and other variable expenses must be incurred for each brick-and-mortar class, the cost of a MOOC is incurred one time, up front (with smaller, ongoing maintenance costs), and that content is sold over a longer period of time. Second, MOOCs can utilize a freemium model to keep costs low for most students and upsell students and organizations that want premium features."

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The death and life of great Internet cities
Joe Kloc, The Daily Dot, December 26, 2013

There was once a movement afoot to brand internet users as 'Digital Citizens',  'Net Citizens' or 'Netizens'. It was a metaphor that never to me made much sense, and I objected in blog form to some of the presumptions propagated by entities like Wired. Interestingly the Net Citizen profile I was criticizing in 1997 is the same as the MOOC participant profile of today: affluent free marketers who are educated, vote and embrace change. The writers of Wired would have done well to read Rogers (and I'm sure we'd see the same profile charactizing users of Google Glass). Anyhow, though the Netizen idea was silly the metaphor of the internet as place was real, defining as it did the idea of the digital city, and that great abandoned wasteland of the early internet, Geocities. This post looks back on those glory days. (this and the next post via Tom Woodward).

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Where’s _why?
Annie Lowrey, Slate, December 26, 2013

Back when I was messing around with Ruby I was one of the fortunate ones to learn the programming language through _why’s (poignant) Guide. _why was an enigma, from his unusual name to his writing style, which ranged between comic book, fairy tale and technical manual. I can't say it really helped me learn Ruby, but I appreciated the effort, and things like Try Ruby have helped a lot of people over the years. This article is a wistful look at _why and about learning programming. And in the end, we learn, "Finally, late in my reporting, I got word back-channeled to me from another Salt Lake City programmer: Jonathan is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone." Which makes me happy.

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What Faculty Should Know About Adaptive Learning
Michael Felsdtein, e-Literate, December 26, 2013

Good overview article on adaptive learning by Michael Feldstein (I don't look at the author name until I've selected an article for inclusion in OLDaily, so the repeated citations from e-Literate are a testimate to the quality of the work, at least in my view). Feldstein cautions against extreme views on adaptive elarning, both for and against: "When the idea that machine-assessed competencies capture everything important that a student should learn in a class, there is danger.... The countervailing temptation for faculty, then, is to reject all adaptive learning itself as a fraud and a conspiracy to defund education. That temptation should [also] be resisted."

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