Goodbye One Laptop per Child
Wayan Vota, OLPC News, March 11, 2014

OLPC news plays the eulogy. "The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project." Not a noble end. Still - would we have had the tablet revolution without OLPC? Maybe - but not for a long time, probably. So it worked out well in the end.

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Photodentro LOR
Elina Megalou, March 11, 2014

This is a national learning object repository for schools in Greece, subject of another presentation at INTED 2014 in Valencia. It includes interactive text books, a national digital repository infrastructure, and a digital education platform.

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Open Discovery Space
Barry Phillips, SERO, March 11, 2014

Presentation at INTED 2014 today. "If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pull” rather than “push” approach." See also this presentation from 2012.

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Wincton City
Beverly Leeds, University of Central Lancashire, March 11, 2014

Fropm a presentation at INTED 2014 today in Valencia - "It is a web-based learning resource modelled on a real UK high street community provided for  academic staff and students or others to use. It aims to meet the needs of a range of subject areas in Business Education by simulating the complexities of modern organisations within local communities with many interdependent and inter-related functions and processes." The city is composed of OERs, and the information supports various student activities. You can find quite a few more of these resourcess just by searching for 'Wincton City' on Google - for example, this fiuctional Wincton Gazette.

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University education, like love, cannot simply be moved online
Sky Gilbert, Globe, Mail, March 11, 2014

The funny thing about this article is that the author does not seem to know just how much of the average love life has moved online, from dating and flirting, getting to know each other, and even day-to-day conversation. Yes, there is the in-person aspect, without which love just wouldn't be the same. But the difference between love in person and education in person is this: we would feel funny paying highly specialized individuals $150K a year to satisfy aspects of our live life. It feels funny, in this respect, to read a line like this: "Teaching and learning involves human beings, interaction, opinions, facial expressions, emotion, and yes even a touch of the hand or a warm, sweaty handshake." And that's where Sky Gilbert misses the point of online learning, done properly. It takes all the bits of an education that be put online, and puts them there, and then leaves us with the tools and the means of providing the interaction and back-and-forth discourse we need for ourselves. Just like love.

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