MOOCs Won’t Replace Business Schools — They’ll Diversify Them
Gayle Christensen, Brandon Alcorn, Ezekiel Emanuel, Harvard Business Review Blogs, June 6, 2014

This idea here is that MOOCs are effective advertsing vehicles that will help these schools attract the demographics they want, especially since they have a global reach. Of course, this is true for every agency which launches a MOOC, so if everyone launches MOOCs, it's all a wash.

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What is Schema.org?
Phil Barker, Lorna M. Campbell, CETIS, June 6, 2014

Schema.org has been around for a while. But if you're not familiar with it, and need to know about web page indexing on a technical level, this is an important read. "Schema.org is a joint initiative of the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex aimed at making it easier to index web pages... This briefing describes schema.org for a technical audience. It is aimed at people who may want to implement schema.org markup in websites or other tools they build but who wish to know more about the technical approach behind schema.org and how to implement it."

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Scientists, Calculate Your Chances of Success in Academe
Andy Thomason, The Chronicle: The Ticker, June 6, 2014

I can only imagine this program would predict my complete and utter failure as a researcher: "The probability of becoming a principal investigator, according to the researchers behind the article, hinges mostly on three variables: the number of articles, the “impact factor” of the journals in which the articles were published, and the number of papers receiving more citations than the expected number for that journal." The report, of course, was published in a journal. And what it predicts, of course, is success as someone who publishes in journals. The actual field of research is much wider than that. More (via Academica): Science Daily | Inside Higher Ed | PIPredictor.com 

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Seeding is believing: McGill launches crowdfunding platform
Megan Elizabeth Martin, McGill Reporter, June 6, 2014

McGill University in Montreal has launched a crowdfunding platform to encourage donations. "McGill donors can now choose specific projects to support – projects that really speak to them – and watch as their support helps change our landscape of learning," said Ayesha Mayan, Director of McGill’s Annual Fund. So we're moving through a very typical evolution in this technology too - from a single dominant player (Kickstarter) to many individual and silo-style platforms. Next (we can only hope) come the aggregators, which will help us choose from providers.

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Learning Locker
Ben Betts, High Tech High Touch, June 6, 2014

As the website says, "Learning Locker is the open source Learning Record Store (LRS) for tracking learning data." They've announced the release of version 1.0 - "We're delighted to announce that Learning Locker, the open source LRS has reached Version 1.0 and that our turnkey offering, the Cloud LRS, has now been officially released. Visit the Learning Locker website for details and to sign up for instant access. If you want to inspect LL for yourself before downloading or signing up, you can visit our demo installation to have a play."

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