Plan to move from #quantified self to Qualified self
Inge de Waard, Ignatia, March 5, 2014

OK, this is ambitious. "My ultimate scientific breakthrough dream would be the Qualified Self in the analogy of the Quantified Self." Given a provisional nod, what would such a qualified self look like? "All the gathered data would gather data on: emotions, creativity, understanding, progress, personal character." Well, I did a test like that recently (the Hermann Brain Dominance instrumnent) and while it was nice to test off the scale for creatity, the point here is that there was a scale. Is there a way to qualify self without it descending into qualtification? We are so permeated with metrics, we cannot fathom - well, what would we even call them - matrics? (p.s. what made me look at this item was the image - I was intrigued by the way some people are following the program (which looks like, "act like you're walking") while others aren't really making an effort. Such things interest me - what motivates a person to participate fully in something like that, and why would others be reticent?)

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Can You Solve This?
Veritasium, YouTube, March 5, 2014

I like this video a lot. It gets at an important element of the scientific method (not the only element - the scientific menthod is much more complicated than one simple rule) and it also gets at why so many people reason poorly. In a nutshell: when we look for evidence, we very often look for evidence that confirms out theories, and that's often pretty easy to find. But the confirmation is an illusion. It's only when we try to find evidence that disproves our theories that we can know whether we're getting closer to the truth. Via ScienceDump.

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Why I care about edtech
D'Arcy Norman, D’Arcy Norman dot net, March 5, 2014

It's interestging to see how in recent years the concept of 'innovation' is being rewoeked such that, if it doesn't involve some commercial component, it isn't innovation. But this post from D'Arcy Norman offers an alternative perspective. "Many in the edtech field see innovation as something like 'working out creative licensing deals with vendors and/or publishers,'" he writes. "No. It isn’t. Edtech is important because it can be transformative." He continues, "It can literally change the nature of the learning experience. It can shift people from consume mode, into collaborate and publish mode. It can knock down walls. Evaporate silos. Connect people across campus, across campuses, and across the globe." The whole commercialization thing puts the cart before the horse. It's not things that have commercial potential that are importnat. It's things that are important that have commercial potential. Commercialization is (or may be) the result of innovation, not the driver.

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Learning Design for Online Ed: An Interview With Gilly Salmon About Her Carpe Diem MOOC
Robert McGuire, MOOC News & Reviews, March 5, 2014

Video interview with Gilly Salmon. Now, the first MOOC that she is leading is about to launch. "Carpe Diem—Learning Design starts on March 10, and we took the opportunity to discuss some of the differences between course design for traditional online learning and for MOOCs. We also dig a little bit into the resources that were required to build this MOOC."

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