Recent Research Review -- Reviewed (and Lamented)
Will Thalheimer, Will at Work Learning, 2014/08/22

I will admit that this article is an excellent read and that if you are in the field and haven't read it, you should correct this oversight immediately. If you really really don't have time this overview from Will Thalheimer will do nicely. I think that if you are supportive of mainstream research in training and development you'll have no issue with most of the contents and will appreciate the liberal selection of references to bolster the assertions made. Personally, I think that learning is less about transfer than it is about growth and development, so some of the foundational work doesn't appeal to me (I remember, for example, studying Holyoak in detail on schemas and induction when his work first came out, and disagreeing profoundly with it). But not agreeing with the work is no excuse for not knowing it.

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Top 10 reasons to trust Microsoft in the cloud
Tim Bush, Microsoft UK Schools News Blog, 2014/08/22

OK, I'll be pretty blunt about this: don't trust Microsoft in the cloud. I speak from personal experience: I paid Microsoft for online products (specifically, videos) and thanks to some back-end account problem, I cannot play those videos. My efforts over the last few weeks to fix this have been fruitless. Their online assistance helps for a bit, but then loses interest and stops responding. This isn't small change; we're talking a few hundred dollars worth of videos that have suddenly become unplayable. Videos that I actually downloaded and are on my computer and should be playable offline - unplayable. If this happened with my email or my Office applications, I'd be sunk. So ignore the promotional articles like the one linked here. If you can lose hundreds of dollars worth of property and have no recourse then you are dealing with an immature technology. Period.

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Why Students Should Own Their Educational Data
Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog, 2014/08/22

This is one of the core ideas of our LPSS project, and it's nice that a Harvard professor agrees with it: "What we need to know about you is your contextualized profile of your performance and what kind of support you’ll need to be able to model your learner profile across contexts. If I had to push for one thing that I think is super important, that is that the user should own their data."

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