EduOpen: a new MOOC Provider Funded by the Italian Government
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2016/11/24

In the year after MOOCs were declared by experts to be a failure, the number of new MOOC providers continues to increase. "EduOpen is a network of Italian Universities, but it is also open to EU universities. At the moment it involves seventeen universities, which include a mixture of larger and smaller institutions from both northern and southern Italy. The full list of members can be found on en.eduopen.org." It's worth noting that the development partner is LMS of India. And Blackboard.

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'Post-Truth' Is Just A Rip-Off Of 'Truthiness'
Stephen Colbert, YouTube, 2016/11/24

It has to be said. And who better to say it than Stephen Colbert.

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Smart Reply: Automated response suggestion for email
Kannan, Kaufman, Karach, et al., The Morning Paper, 2016/11/24

You need to think of this paper as the first tentative explorations of a complex topic. Could your email answer itself for you? In a sense, a spam filter is the first attempt at such, where the response is 'no response, delete and block'. But what about actually sending a response, for example, a response to a meeting invitation? In theory, it sounds simple - identify the time of the meeting, check your availability for tomorrow, then respond appropriately and book. But how to respond? You want to match the tone of the invitation. Otherwise it looks like a machine responded. And if the request was to attend a meeting "tomorrow", w hat day is that exactly?

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The Forms and Functions of Teaching and Learning Innovations on Blackboard: Substantial or Superficial?
Vuyisile Nkonki, Siyanda Ntlabathi, Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 2016/11/24

So here's a challenge: "In view of the institution’s objective of developing a context-driven, transformative, and innovative teaching and learning practices involving the integration of technology, the study sought to classify and evaluate the form and function of teaching and learning innovations on Blackboard." Blackboard may claim to support these things but my first thought has to be something like "no way". But intuition needs to be supported by fact. The study's conclusions? "Blackboard innovations tended to be more superficial at the levels of substitution and augmentation." This isn't all the fault of the software, however. "The findings suggest convenience, management, and efficiency as the drivers of lecturers’ motivations to use Blackboard."

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10 Things That Happen When Students Engage in Design Thinking
John Spencer, 2016/11/24

Scroll down past the full-page advertisement, skim though the 'ten things' and linger on the image before you get to the meat of the article. "Design thinking prepares students for a creative life — whether that is in business, in the social or civic spaces, in the arts, or in engineering. But it does this by allowing them create things that matter to them right now. It’s not some far off 'grown up' thing." I agree. Via George Couros.

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