Open EdX Now Available From Amazon Web Services Marketplace
Michael Hart, Campus Technology, 2015/06/26

The most interesting thing about the new MOOC learning management systems (like Coursera, Udacity and EdX) has always been their use of cloud technologies in the backend (which helps them scale). Now we can see this a bit more directly with the AWS (Amazon Web Services) version of EdX. Anyone using AWS can access the software for free and launch their own course (they'll have to pay Amazon cloud hosting fees, however).

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About Clipper
John Casey, ClipperTibe, 2015/06/26

The bad news is that I wasn't ever actually able to play a clip (and sharing isn't supported yet), but the good news is that this is a useful concept and conforms to my idea of the reuse of educational resources - leave the resources where they are (in this case, sitting on YouTube) and link specifically to the bits you you need to use in your course or project. YouTube does support links to specific time intervals in its videos, so this project is basically a framework making it easy to create those and then (eventually) share them. Here's the home page, here's a video, and here's the current version of the editor.

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Let’s Talk about Digital Learners in the Digital Era
Eliana Esther Gallardo-Echenique, Luis Marqués-Molías, Mark Bullen, , Jan-Willem Strijbos, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 2015/06/26

I thought that the title of this paper was an invitation to the reader to engage with the content, but by the end I understand that the title is the recommendation being issued by the authors, specifically, that we should use the term "digital learner" instead of the term "digital native" (or the 47 other generationally-inspired terms used by authors over the years). The reasoning is straightforward: "the key claims of this discourse are not based on empirical research... there are no meaningful differences between net generation and non-net generation students." But there is a subset of students with an affinity for digital technologies. "The focus is on persons, so the first word refers to them. The perspective is anthropological-pedagogical, so the chosen word is 'learning'. (And) not only young people learn through ICTs in the Knowledge Society."

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Learners’ Goal Profiles and their Learning Patterns over an Academic Year
Clarence Ng, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 2015/06/26

I have long argued that the solution to the problem of motivation lies in providing students with subjects they want to study and become proficient in. To my mind, this article to some degree validates that argument. The authors conclude, "Distance learners learn with different goal profiles that are associated with different learning patterns... distance learners who endorsed both mastery and performance-approach goals engaged in deep learning using adaptive strategies consistently throughout an academic year. (They) remained interested in learning and had confidence in their learning abilities across three different survey points over the year."

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Roles of Course Facilitators, Learners, and Technology in the Flow of Information of a CMOOC
Oleksandra Skrypnyk, Srećko Joksimović, Vitomir Kovanović, Dragan Gaševic, , Shane Dawson, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 2015/06/26

This, to me, signifies the success of a cMOOC: "Our study also shows that top ten nodes with the highest in-degree were primarily hashtags. This suggests that people were connecting around thematic markers of common interest, referring to them and making them popular. In fact, thematic analysis of the same dataset confirms that the learners were more focused on the topics of interest, rather than those suggested by course facilitators, and that those topics emerged quickly in the course, and were maintained by the groups of people that adopted them." Fascinating paper; if you're interested in cMOOCs don't miss it.

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GitHub’s hackable text editor, Atom, hits version 1.0
Owen Williams, The Next Web, 2015/06/26

I spent a good part of the morning exploring this. Others may not get excited by a text editor, but I do. I like the multi-pane design, code snippets and highlighting, and especially, the speed and fluidity of the interface. The stuff behind the scenes is pretty interesting too: "Atom is a desktop application built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node.js integration. There's a whole ecosystem behind Node.js, which is essentially a personal web server. It runs on Electron, a framework for building cross platform apps using web technologies." Unfortunately this cutting-edge technology comes with a price, as the package manager can't connect - it doesn't mesh properly with my Windows firewall. Here's the Atom 1.0 blog. Here's the installer.

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