Why Udacity and EdX Want to Trademark the Degrees of the Future—and What’s at Stake for Students
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2016/11/04

So this is not good. "No one owns the term “master’s degree.” But upstart education providers dream of getting a lock on the words for the next generation of online graduate certifications... Udacity won a trademark for Nanodegree last year. And in April, the nonprofit edX... applied for a trademark on the word MicroMasters. And MicroDegree? Yep, that’s trademarked too, by yet another company." It's clear that these new players in the world of e-learning demonstrating the same corporate bad behaviour as their predecessors in the LMS industry.

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Future OER
Norman Bier, Brandon Muramatsu, 2016/11/04

From the website: "What is the future of Open Education? This panel and audience discussion will explore possible visions of open education in 2036, using a series of broadly solicited papers as a starting point. These essays are available at http://futuOER.org — please review, comment and consider in preparation for this discussion." One of my own essays is in there: Open Learning in the Future.

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Open Research
Rebecca Pitt, Beatriz de los Arcos, Rob Farrow, Martin Weller, PressBooks, 2016/11/04

You'll find that this 'textbook' based on the open course of the same name is a very quick read. But it does offer a glimpse at what the open textbook of the future may look like, containing not just text but hyperlinks, audio and video. "This new textbook edition builds on our earlier facilitated versions of the course by including group activities and incorporating participant contributions into new activity commentary sections. You can now work through the course material as an individual, group or if you’re a facilitator or educator, use the content and activities to aid discussion." Via Beck Pitt.

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21st Century Learning, 20th Century Classroom
Zoe Branigan-Pipe, CAE Canada Education, 2016/11/04

"It’s time to match classroom and school design with our changing philosophies and teaching practices," argues Zoe Branigan-Pipe. From the way children sit, the way they are isolated from each other, to the way they are lumped into age-based groups, the realities of the 21st century school reflect an earlier age. "What if students could attend learning sessions based on their individual interests or needs, similar to the EdCamp model or MOOCs (massive open online courses) that allow choice and interest-based learning?" she asks. We begin to see some of the answers in the work of the the Enrichment and Innovation Centre, she writes. "The best examples that we found were Kindergarten classrooms." More on this in the Pipedreams blog:

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Building a News Bot for Facebook Messenger
Julien Genestoux, 2016/11/04

Building a Facebook news bot is all very fine, but there's this: it's easy (relatively speaking) to import content into Facebook. My own gRSShopper did that, and gRSShopper is also a web aggregator (though I had too much respect for readers to simply dump aggregated content into Facebook). What's difficult is getting content out of Facebook. Oh sure, it can be done, after a fashion - gRSShopper could harvest Facebook page feeds, for example. But Facebook doesn't really want you sharing Facebook content outside their platform. It wants everyone to use Facebook, which is why you hear that giant slurping sound as it tries to suck everyone in. Related: Here's why young people are abandoning Facebook: "It’s clogged with brands, news and the odd meme. It’s lost any semblance of a personality." Via Ben Werdmuller.

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The State of Javascript 2016
Sacha Greif, 2016/11/04

This is a terrific website (it wouldn't be accurate to call it an article) covering the many flavours of Javascript libraries assembled in various web site and web service stacks. There's too much to summarize here, but there seems to be a general divide between Facebook's React framework and a range of other options. But don't think it's a neat divide; it's not. Anyway, these frameworks don't last long - JQuery (which powers this website) is already history. This work will take some effort to read and comprehend, especially if you haven't kept up, but it's well work the effort.

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