MOOCs And Privacy, German Fears About Online Student Data
Hannes Grassegger, Johannes Boie, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2015/12/14

This is a retelling of the dispute between mathaematics professor Paul-Olivier Dehaye and Coursera. Dehaye, you may recall, is the instructor who pulled all his materials from Coursera mid-course. This telling of the story is a lot friendlier to Dehaye. It talks about the opacity of Coursera's contracts and the possibility they are using student data for non-course purposes. It describes his aim of the course was actually to stand as a model for the freedom of teaching." According to the article, Dehaye "ordered the entirety of the course data to be released to him at the beginning of his course in June to use it for research and teaching purposes, but the request was refused." Then, "In a spontaneous act, Dehaye ordered his students to leave Coursera and he himself deleted all course materials." Cousera, as we know, shut him out of the course and blocked all further communication with his students. The original German version of the article is here; this is the translation in Worldcrunch.

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EDUPUNK: It was pure in my heart!
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2015/12/14

I'm not sure how seriously you should take this mockumentary, but it's worth thinking back to a time not even a decade ago when Facebook was young, when Twitter was a startup, and when anything beyond staid learning objects and management systems was punk. It was created by Alan Levine - he writes about it here - "this silly idea in my head a few weeks ago that would not go away" - for a session in Guadalajara (which explains the mixture of Spanish and English). "Fact is," writes Groom, "it’s a bit hard for me to mock EDUPUNK because while I always found it playful, it was never ironic for me. The creative joy of critiquing and refusing a system should not be underestimated."See also: “The Internet is the most basic form of the punk rock revolution.”

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Resources from 25 Presentations at Miami Device 2015
Tony Vincent, Learning in Hand, 2015/12/14

The presentations are a bit hit-or-miss but I enjoyed reading or watching the uses of various new tools in learning. Basically, what we are seeing, I would say, is multimedia for the masses. Off the top, I like the infopics Tony Vincent makes. They're like LOLcats, but with people. And then there's fun with green screens with Janet Corder and Joan Gore - I really have to play with these some day. And maybe I'll make some infographics, like Laura Bates, Melanie Burford, and Angie McNally. There are many more things here - enough to keep you playing all day on a weekend afternoon.

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Marc My Words: The Three Laws of eLearning Failure
Marc Rosenberg, Learning Solutions Magazine, 2015/12/14

Here are the three laws (quoted):

• Great eLearning technology combined with bad content results in more efficiently delivered bad content.
• eLearning that is compensation for bad documentation, tools, processes, or management will ultimately prove to be a waste of time and money.
• When great eLearning comes up against a lousy learning culture, the culture wins every time.

Essentially they are restatements ofone of the oldest laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

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