The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed.
Clay Shirky, 2015/11/09

Clay Skirky's reasoning is positively weird: "The gap between the conversation about college and its reality exists because the people who drive that conversation — you and me and our friends — mostly talk about elite schools." Um, no. Still, he manages to stumble to something like the right story. "We already know what the college of the future will look like, because the non-traditional students are creating it now. It’s a hybrid of online and in-person classes, centered on the student and not the institution, with credits accruing from multiple schools, and adding up to a degree in alternating periods of attendance and absence." Like the elites, this article is late to the party, looking at it from a skewed perspective, but still willing to take credit for having discovered it first.

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Mozilla is Doing a Hack Job on Open Badges
Kerri Lemoie, Medium, 2015/11/09

Criticism of the Mozilla Open Badges project. Kerri Lemoie argues that Mozilla doesn't even have any staff assigned to the project and disbanded the team more than a years ago. "Not only was the backpack abandoned — technically put on 'maintenance mode'— any real initiatives and plans for what the backpack was supposed to be were essentially put on hold since the spring of 2013." She outlines a list of the things that are needed: "true ownership of the mission, road map and funding of Open Badges... a truly independent alliance so that the initiative can be objectively supported and funded... a new, modern infrastructure for Open Badges." Image: Mozilla.

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IMS Caliper published – we now have a clearer picture how activity streams should be described
Tore Hoel, Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE), 2015/11/09

Discussion of the recently published IMS Caliper specification. Caliper describes the method to encode and transfer clickstream data - that is, a recording of each action taken by a user (click of a mouse, press of a keyboard). This data iss especially useful for user interface design. Note that this is not the same as the IMS Caliper RAM (Real-time Analytics Messaging) specification “to implement real-time, actionable messaging alerts”. which has changed its name to IMS HED Analytics group. The article also raises questions about the interoperability between IMS Caliper and ADL's xAPI (Experience API). "One of the first tweets  with the #imscaliper hash tag after the publications read 'consider current disparity between #xapi & #imscaliper, interoperability standards that don’t interoperate'."

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