Research through the Generations: Reflecting on the Past, Present and Future
Grainne Conole, SlideShare, 2017/04/12

Overview paper describing the history of learning technology as a series of transformative innovations. "The take home messages are that this is an exciting and important time for digital learning research, there are multiple theoretical research perspectives and methodologies, which have enormous potential but must be appropriately used." The link is to a SlideShare page, but don't try to read it on Slideshare. Just download the paper.

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The Current State of Educational Blogging 2016
Sue Waters, The Edublogger, 2017/04/12

Longish overview of the use of blogs in classes. Most survey respondents are edublogs.org users though some use Blogger and other services. Importantly, blogging isn't just about posting bogs, it's about reading and responding. "It’s all about commenting. The students who make an effort to find other student blogs that interest them and make thoughtful comments get the most traffic on their own blogs. Those who don’t, get few visits–no matter how catchy their title, flashy their theme or wonderful their writing."

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A Bot That Can Tell When It's Really Donald Trump Who's Tweeting
Andrew McGill, The Atlantic, 2017/04/12

This is a pretty good example of what can be done with analytics. As we know, there are the tweets Donald Trump writes himself, and then there are tweets written by his press office. The two have different styles, as was noted last year. The twitter bot takes advantage of this. "It’s a Twitter bot that uses machine learning and natural language processing to estimate the likelihood Trump wrote a tweet himself." This is of course a novelty but it's the same sort of logic that can be used to filter spam, and eventually, to identify individual students by their writing style and typing cadence.

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