OER Beyond Voluntarism
Brian Jacobs, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/08/29

I don't think panOpen.com's Brian Jacobs gets the concept of OERs. here's what he writes in Inside Higher Ed: "A better way forward is to compensate the stakeholders -- faculty, copyright holders, and technologists, principally -- for their contributions to the OER ecosystem. This can be done by charging students nominally for the OER courses they take or as a modest institutional materials fee." The point of OERs is that you don't charge the students. Yes, the way forward is to compensate OER developers. But the way backward is to start charging end-users again (since they are typically the ones who can least afford it).

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Don't Email Me
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/08/29

I guess everyone has read the story about the professor implementing a no-email policy for his class. He wants to speak to students in person only. He argues that he is "teaching students to be more self-reliant by making them read assignments and the syllabus more closely, and freeing up time for conversations in the classroom and during office hours" but really he's just cutting back on the level of interaction between professor and student. That's not necessarily a bad thing - students like people everywhere will take the greatest advantage of a service possible. But it reflects a failure of imagination.

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Clinical Teaching of Interprofessional Child Development Assessment Skills in a Large Group Setting
Teresa Carter, Eileen Hanna, Marilyn Swinton, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2014/08/29

So what to make of this? As summarizzed, "The research found no discernible difference in student learning between the facilitated and non-facilitated workshops; however, students in the non-facilitated workshop indicated that they would have preferred a more guided discussion." Links: Report | Appendix.

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It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results
Eric Enge, SearchEngineLand, 2014/08/29

You may have read about the benefits of adding authorship information to your web pages using Google+ functionality, but Google's attempt to incorporate these into search results has been discontinued. "John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post that Google will stop showing authorship results in Google Search, and will no longer be tracking data from content using rel=author markup." So what went wrong? What always goes wrong with metadata? People weren't making up their pages. Even publishers were disinclined to use author metadata.

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