How to Create Your Own Illustrated Characters in PowerPoint
Tom, The Rapid eLearning Blog, Jul 04, 2014

I wonder what the 'completion rate' is for this bit of learning. Does it even matter? It help my attention right to the end, and I think I might try creating animated characters using PowerPoint some time in the future. The video is by Daniel Albarrán.

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Microsoft joins key industry groups to deliver on promise of the Internet of Things
Kevin Dallas, The Official Microsoft Blog, Jul 04, 2014

If you're not watching developments in this arena, you should be. How do we "get the benefit out of the more than 212 billion 'connected things' IDC predicted we’ll see by the end of 2020?" The time is now to think about (say) how things will help us learn and how we'll interact with them. Microsoft is joining the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the AllSeen Alliance to create this infrastructure. Maybe these will have education working groups, or maybe it makes sense to form an 'Education of Things' alliance. More.

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PersonalizED :: A Guide to Personalizing Learning in the Classroom
Mary Ellen Beaty O’Ferrall, Sara Henschell, Margaret Roth, Fieldmarks Blog, Jul 04, 2014

According to the authors, "Personalized learning is an instructional philosophy intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, and cultural backgrounds of individual students to create an environment and experience that best facilitates their learning." This post is a fairly good overview of personalized education. It's worth asking, though, as you read through, how this account is distinct from personal learning, where people create learning according to their own needs and interests, rather than having something created for them.

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Complexities of Measuring Effectiveness
John Marschhausen, Connected Principals, Jul 04, 2014

If we actually understood this, and believed it, we would never assess learning using things like tests: "education is complex, challenging to measure, and impossible to show with a single measure. Each child in our care, every single student in our classrooms, is a unique person with different strengths, needs, and passions. Socioeconomic challenges, such as poverty, can greatly impact education – we partner, support, and engage our families to maximize educational opportunities." Related: competency education will be the next great disruptor in the system.

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Online education is dead; long live Mentored Simulated Experiences
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, Jul 04, 2014

I'm not sure what is new about this proposal, except perhaps the name (which really just combines two things we already know quite well). Here's Roger Schank: "Universities have adopted online education wholesale. They are producing garbage. No, actually they are producing what they have always produced." So this, he says, is dead. Instead: "What is education? Its an experience, mentored by an expert, in which the student tries to accomplish something, fails, and then after some discussion with peers and mentors, tries again." It took less than a month for the term to be co-opted into something quite different, covertly reintroducing instructivism: " I think our ebook work is close to what he’s describing, since we focus on worked examples (as a kind of 'mentoring') and low cognitive-load practice (with lots of feedback)."

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Personal Learning Networks, CoPs Connectivism: Creatively Explained
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, Jul 04, 2014

OK, with some or another of these analogies I would probably have issues because the metaphor is not exact. But it doesn't really matter because what I really like is the way the author finds different ways to creatively express the essential nature of communities of practice. And a number of them capture a little-discussed but important aspect of MOOCs and communites of practice: self-organization.

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MOOC completion rates DO matter
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, Jul 04, 2014

Martin Weller offers an argument to suggest that MOOC completion rates do matter. He argues that while MOOCs may be like a newspaper, they're "like designing a newspaper where you had to read a certain section by a certain time." And, he asks: "Most MOOCs are about 6-7 weeks long, so 90% of your registered learners are never even looking at 50% of your content. That must raise the question of why are you including it in the first place?" The answer is very simple: Choice. On the internet today you have all the newspapers in the world. Most people only read a small fraction of them on a regular basis, but they feel free to dip into the content of others from time to time.

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