"Ideas spread because they are good at spreading, not because they are inherently valuable." - Me
Steve Hargadon, The Learning Revolution Has Begun, 2015/07/08

This is a healthy bit of pushback against the popular idea that the spread of ideas is inherently a good thing. "
Think of a virus. The characteristic most important to a virus spreading is that it spreads quickly. Does it ultimately maim or incapacitate or kill its victim? Those things are really secondary to its ability to spread fast before the long-term results kick in, whatever they may be." That is (in my opinion) why the structure of a network is important. A network needs to be able to resist harmful cascade phenomena.

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Professor Says Facebook Can Help Informal Learning
Meg Bernhard, Chronicle of Higher Education | Wired Campus, 2015/07/08

From the "welcome to the 21st century" department: "A new study suggests that if engaged in online debate, college students can use the popular social network to learn and develop a variety of skills."

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Stabilizing AWS Costs on UMW Blogs
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2015/07/08

Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't the only cloud hosting service out there, but it's one of the largest and most sophisticated. But as Jim Groom writes, people still get nervous about using cloud technology. " One of the reasons folks were scared of AWS is the fact that you pay monthly based on usage and resources rather than a fixed cost for a dedicated server." And it's not just web services - I get nervous about having my music on Google and my Photoshop on Adobe Cloud. Anyhow, you can keep costs under control, but you have to manage your configuration, otherwise "you could keep throwing EC2 instances at the problem," says Groom. An EC2 instance (I looked it up) is an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud."

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Real training, real-time, real environments
Amazon, 2015/07/08

If you haven't explored these, you may want to take a quick look through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) online courses. Here's their pitch: "Get hands-on practice working with cloud technologies and software. Train on-demand and learn at your own pace. Choose from a variety of Learning Quests to guide you." The 'quests' are courses, more or less, composed on a dozen or so small tasks priced at between $8 and $15 each. Learners (players?) get badges for completing the courses, and can prepare for an AWS certification exam. Amazon is also making the most of its cloud environment to help others offer courses: "Partners can create, manage and run labs anytime. Labs are delivered via the public cloud to classrooms, events or online; anywhere there is access to the Internet." See also: The Cloud Academy Blog.

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