Tell us who the most influential HE professionals on social media are
Jisc, 2015/08/10

I'm not sure this is exactly the way to do it, but JISC has issued a call to identify the most influential higher education (HE) professionals on social media. "You can nominate yourself or someone you know – although please do check with them first. These will then go to an experienced judging panel of social media experts from Jisc and the wider community to decide who are the most influential."

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The Future of Morality, at Every Internet User's Fingertips
Tim Hwang, The Atlantic, 2015/08/10

Ethics have always been at the core of education. But now as learning escapes the classroom walls, so do the associated ethical issues. Consider, for example, decisions about whether to link or whether to click. Does a reference to Reddit imply an endorsement of the offensive groups hosted there? It certainly does help pay for them - a fraction of a cent here, a fraction of a cent there. Do recommendations impact how we are governed? Maybe Google or Facebook ranking can influence elections. What about ad blocking? Is it unethical to stop Google from listening to your audio or watching you through your camera? What about blocking facial recognition with special sunglasses? What about using personal email to keep private information private?

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#aha_project discovering the Grit Scale #plog
Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, 2015/08/10

There are three things in this post.  The first is a link to Jay Cross's new book: "The book offers insight into learning, and more specifically increasing learning efficiency to a point of a long-lasting AHA-moment, hence the title: "AHA! 75 ways to work smarter". The second is the concept of 'plog' - "writing daily. Short passages (15 min is enough), reflecting on your day, but on a daily basis (something my mom has been doing for over 20 years or more, talking about a role model!). A proven action to increase your mental health, while also adding to your focus, patience, planning and personal growth (research by Teresa Amabile , nice name). Jay calls it: writing a Plog." I've been doing it for years, but I can't guarantee the claims about mental health. And finally, the grit score. I still question the concept of grit. But my grit score, for the record, was 4.63, which makes me pretty gritty - some would say abrasive. 

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The Web Feels Fine to Me
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2015/08/10

Alan Levine says the web feels fine to him. He cits a pretty impressive list of doom and gloom predictions: " It’s lost. It’s dead. No the same folks say it’s not dead. We have to save it. It’s boring. It’s lost that loving feeling. It needs to be made fun again." And he writes, "I think they are looking at the wrong end of the web donkey. Does anyone not remember the Long Tail? All of the lamenting, hand wringing, crying to the moon is focused completely on the head of the curve. The bag of gold is in the tail." Good point.

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LIMITS '15: First workshop on computing within limits
Various authors, First Monday, 2015/08/10

An interesting issue of First Monday just published, its theme devoted to the study of limits - mostly, but not exclusively, software limits. It's relevant at a time where we're contemplating the end of Moore's Law. Papers include an exploration of "how various forms of civilizational collapse would affect the software development process," the psychological limits of computing, and Cacophony, software that addresses "the difficulties inherent in collecting, fusing, and reasoning with data from a heterogeneous set of distributed sensors."       

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Did these researchers just create an autistic computer program?
Graham Templeton, ExtremeTech, 2015/08/10

I don't understand autism thoroughly, but this seems right: "one theory of autism claims that many of the disorder’s most characteristic symptoms could be the result of just a single, chemically induced modification: autistic brains may simply be too noisy." If this is true, then the thesis advanced in this article is plausible: "the results suggested that many of autism’s varied symptoms could all be an emergent property of a single low-level computational irregularity in the brain."

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