Online learning for beginners
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/08/23

The supposedly retired Tony Bates has authored another e-book, this one an introductoon to online learning for beginners. Here are the contents:

1. What is online learning?
2. Isn’t online learning worse than face-to-face teaching?
3. Aren’t MOOCs online learning?
4. What kinds of online learning are there?
5. When should I use online learning?
6. How do I start?
7. Why not just record my lectures?
8. Won’t online learning be more work?
9. How can I do online learning well?
10. Ready to Go

As usual the result is required reading.

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When it’s Your Googopoly Game, You Can Flip the Board in the Air Anytime
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/08/23

Alan Levine, being more thorough than I, discovered that if you click on 'Events' on your Live Streaming Dashboard, (right under 'Stream Now') you can run your Hangout on Air (aka Live Event) - look for the subtle 'New Event' button in the upper right of the page. Google usability engineers hate you. So you don't need the streaming media encoder. But I'll be honest - after having used the encoder, I really prefer it (though of course none of this works particularly well on my laptop). In the future somewhere is a world where we can use a media encoder of our choice and a cloud service of our choice to host live video events without Google or any of the rest of them. But we're not there yet. OK, now to see if I can hack using Martin Hawksey’s genius script for an auto updated twitter archive to use something other than Twitter.

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How Musical.ly Became A Pop Culture Phenomenon
Jared Newman, Fast Company, 2016/08/23

What's interesting about Musical.ly is that it grew out of a failed ed tech startup. Musical.ly allows users to lipsync to popular videos and share the results with friends. It draws from a catalogue of several million songs. The original ed tech application was a device that enabled users to create five-minute videos explaining a concept or practice. But it failed for a lack of experts. "The challenge is that there are not too many people who are able to explain knowledge in such a short period of time." This is interesting, but I guess not surprising. The authors took what they learned from the failed startup to create the new app. "If you're going to build a product that relies on user-generated content, it needs to be lightweight and capable of uploading content in minutes rather than hours."

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