Presentation
New Learning, New Society
Stephen Downes, Feb 23, 2015, Change School Talks 2015, Toronto

Talk given to the Chang School at Ryerson University outline the weakness of traditional models of online learning and arguing instead for a student-centered and self-organized system.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

'Overnight, everything I loved was gone': the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone
Jon Ronson, The Guardian, 2015/02/23

Another in what I guess is becoming an internet trend: finding people who have been publicly shamed (and often fired) for their transgressions on the internet. Again I point out that if you don't want to be maligned for, say, mocking and flipping off the national cemetery, then don't mock and flip off the national cemetery. But there's also a subtext, and it's this: what happened to employee rights such that complains from strangers over the internet could get them summarily fired? Where I grew up, unions would prevent that sort of thing. Today those rights to reasonable protection have all but disappeared. Maybe the problem isn't the internet or Facebook's privacy settings at all. Maybe the problem more social.

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“Is L&D out of touch with reality?”
Jane Hart, Learning in the Modern Workplace, 2015/02/23

There are some problems with this article but it does raise the interesting question of where the learning and development (L&D) industry gets its priorities. My own experience suggests that the industry is driven by customer demand; it follows what customers are willing to pay for. And most of the money is in more traditional L&D. And you have to be able to show that alternative approaches work equally well, which I think hasn't yet been the case. Now the problems: first, the survey is self-selected from Hart's own readers, which builds in a huge bias. Second, the last link is just a plug for one of her workshops which to me looks very much like the traditional L&D she is criticizing ($100 a pop - I've always wondered whether I could make a living offering workshops online like that).

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OpenEdX and LTI: Pedagogical scripts and SSO
Stian Håklev, Random Stuff that Matters, 2015/02/23

Although Learning Technologies Interoperability (LTI) was originally designed for learning management systems, it can also be adapted to MOOCs (especially MOOCs you have to sign in to access)(which aren't really MOOCs, but I digress). In this post Stian Håklev describes integrating EdX with LTI to obtain single sign-on. "Now comes the hard work," he writes, "designing meaningful scripts and interaction patterns for students with very different reasons to participate, and levels of engagement, but at least we know that we can probably implement what we want to."

[Link] [Comment]

Google A-Z
Peter Beens, Google Docs, 2015/02/23

This is what a multi-billion dollar company looks like. Everything Google, from A to Zed. Big list of links to Google products. Via Doug Peterson.

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