Online Conference Presentation Resources
Karl Kapp, Kapp Notes, 2015/03/06

Oh I want to do something like this one day - I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of old time radio fiction over the last few years, I could probably do the genre - and it could be a great format for a presentation. Maybe I can round up some people like Jim Groom and do a proper radio broadcast. Karl Kapp offers his own version in this slide deck (which I actually read through end to end before realizing I was doing it) talking about games and gamification (and game elements...). Good stuff. Now, how does that go again? "Suddenly, a shot rang out...."

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Identifying and Cultivating Student Leaders
Kylie Larson, Higher Ed Marketing Live, 2015/03/06

I spent pretty much the my entire university career as a 'student leader' first as a newspaper writer and editor during my undergraduate years, and next as a student association representative and president during my graduate years. I did not experience any "recruiting" efforts in my direction - quite the contrary, actually. I think this points to a difference between the relation between student associations and administrations in Canada and the US (outside North America I simply cannot say, but I imagine one or the other is common). Both student associations and student newspapers appear to be run as part of the university south of the border, while in Canad our associations and newspapers are fiercely independent of administration - so much so that I think it would be a scandal were it to be discovered that student leaders were being "recruited" by the administration. So I personally find this story a bit surprising and off-putting. Students don't need to have admnistrations recruit their leadership - they know who they are.

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New Hi-Tech Police Surveillance: The StingRay Cell Phone Spying Device
Clarence Walker, GlobalResearch, 2015/03/06

I'm not sure whether they cover this on U.S. networks but it's interesting to listed to a report on Al Jazeera about the 'Sting Ray' surveillance system originally designed for use against terrorists but not in increasingly wide day-to-day use by forces across the country. The system consists of radio towers that emulate cell phone towers an trick mobile devices into sending access information, data and other information. The judicial logic allowing use is that it is not actually surveillance. "The government did not install the tracking device — and the cell user chose to carry the phone that permitted transmission of its information to a carrier," Gorenstein held in that opinion. "Therefore no warrant is needed." The ACLU lists police departments using the system. Here's an EFF report from a couple weeks ago.

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Cathy N. Davidson Keynote Address at UNESCO X International Seminar
Cathy Davidson, 2015/03/06

Video from Cathy Davidson's talk "'Changing Higher Education from the Classroom Up' at the X International Seminar on 'Revisiting the Fundamentals of Traditional Curricula, R/Evolution: what “R” Would Mean for Education.' The conference was sponsored by the UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change and was held at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya." I haven't reviewed the video but I've seen it referenced in a couple of places. I see Davidson as fairly conservative generally in her thinking but I'll be sure to review this one in the future to test my presumptions.

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xAPI, LRS – The Interview
Craig Weiss, E-Learning 24/7 Blog, 2015/03/06

I was fortunate enough to meet with and converse at length with Craig Weiss while I was in Riyadh, so I thought I'd post a link to give people a sense of what he's about. He is, in short, a fountain of knowledge of learning management systems and related technologies. In this post he interviews Aaron Silvers (no slough himself) on the activity-recording specification called xAPI (aka Tin Can, aka the Experience API). Here is what it is supposed to do: "We want a system to be able to interpret, appropriately, consistently and reliably, the activity you performed and the context in which it was performed, no matter where it was recorded."

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