Adapt Learning
Adapt Learning, June 12, 2014

Interesting effort devoted to, as their website says, "create, as a community, the leading e-learning authoring tool for producing responsive content... to develop a freely available authoring tool for organisations that wish to develop their own responsive e-learning content... [and] to encourage a large, global community of end users and developers." Version 1.1 of their framework has just been released. Interestingly, the code available is all Javascript and Less (CSS). View the demo here. Adapt is an open source project established by City & Guilds Kineo, Learning Pool and Sponge UK. 

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Digital News Report 2014
Nic Newman, Reuters, June 12, 2014

The disruptions to news reporting caused by the internet and social media are just beginning, according to this report released by Reuters. Facebook is vital worldwide for news distribution, Twitter in the US, UK and Spain, and WhatsApp in many other parts of the world. Sharing is widespread in the US, Brazil and Spain (though much less so in the UK. So, in related news, we are seeing that the next five years will see a major revenue shift for news agencies. This is especially relevant given the reluctance of pewople to pay for news; "the report finds only a minority of people have paid for digital news in the last year (ranging from 7% in the UK to 11% in the US, 14% in Finland and 22% in Brazil)." As we found here in Moncton last week, a paywall during a crisis looks a lot like profiteering, not service to the community, which has always been the newspaper's core value.

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New Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, June 12, 2014

A recent post describes "8 Ideas That Will Permanently Break Education As We Know It," by Terry Heick in TeachThought. Sheila Stewart addresses one of these points, the idea that 'parents are the sleeping giants' in education. "Hopefully parents can also work with teachers, principals and policymakers," she writes, rather than "redirecting anger." I address the rest. It's a good overview of the ways education is changing, but it subtly misses the point item by item. This post is my response to those items, creating an overview of what might be called New Learning.

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Are All Experiential Learning Opportunities Created Equal?
Ailsa Bristow, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, June 12, 2014

Co-op learning and work placement are good means of ensuring authentic learning experiences, but to be effective they must reach those students who would benefit most from them. This is what is not happening, reports the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. In general, university participation rates are lower among aboriginals, students with disabilities, and the poor. This has a long-term impact on unemployment among these groups. And these differences are magnified for things like co-op placements or paid internships. "Students from marginalized groups are able to secure a WIL (Work-Integrated Learning) opportunity it is less likely to be in a high-quality paid experience, despite the additional financial barriers that students in these groups are more likely to face." Via Academica.

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