OLDaily
by Stephen Downes
February 27, 2014
Learning to Code
Doug Peterson,
doug - off the record,
February 27, 2014
What is the best way for a teacher to learn how to code? If you're new at it, I think I would recommend CodeAcademy, because it allows you to write code and see the results right away. Otherwise, get a book on Python or some simular scipting language (yes, it can be an eBook or a set of web pages; that's how I learned Ruby) and go through it doing all the examples (do all the examples). If that doesn't work, take a class.
Quotes from from Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi (Part 3)
Doug Johnson,
Blue Skunk Blog,
February 27, 2014
You can probably deduce that there is a part 1 and part 2 as well. But this is the one that caught my eye. "
Everyone agrees that necessary as it is to listen to the unconscious, it is not sufficient. The real work begins when the emotion or idea that sprang from the uncharted regions of the psyche is held up to the light of reason, there to be named, classified, puzzled over, and related to other emotions and ideas. It is here that craft comes into play."
HarvardX’s and MITx’s MOOC Data Visualized and Mapped
Jimmy Daly,
Ed Tech,
February 27, 2014
People love these roll-ups and visualisation of all the people in all the courses offered by EdX (and HarvardX).
DS106 Assignment Bank Theme: Now With Syndication Options
Alan Levine,
CogDogBlog,
February 27, 2014
Everything is better with RSS syndication - even assignment banks. "The work yesterday was to redesign the options for setting up syndication to bring examples for an assignment into the site. My thinking was originally to closely tied to the way we have set it up on ds106. And that way was tied to the original approach for building it."
Pitbull’s school: Star promotes a radical idea for at-risk kids
Neely Tucker,
Washington Post,
February 27, 2014
Take the concept of MOOCs (with star professors) and charter schools (with private funding and mandate) and combine them and you get this inevitable result: pop-star charters. "Armando Christian Pérez, a.k.a. the pop mogul Pitbull, is in a sixth-floor classroom of Sports Leadership and Management. It’s a new charter school he is supporting just outside the rough Little Havana neighborhood where he was raised." Sigh. Now if we could only associate each "rough Little Havana neighborrhood" with a pop star, we're all set.
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