Stephen Downes

(The retired?) Tony Bates attended the Open Textbook summit and came away with five lessons, including this most important one: "Adoption by faculty and instructors remains a major challenge. Diane Salter from Kwantlen Polytechnic University stated that there needs to be an institutional strategy for open textbooks and open educational resources, to raise awareness and get buy-in from faculty." I've had commentators (eg. Jonathon Rees (who has otherwise been very nice to me)) wonder aloud in the past why I sometimes appear so hostile to professors. Well, this sort of thing gets my goat - the overwhelming evidence that the professors don't care, not about student costs, not about institutional costs, not about anything, apparently, except their role as the leaders of academia.

Very lightweight interview with Richard Levin by Charlie Rose, with transcript provided by Phil Hill. Maybe Levin is just being cagey, but it's not clear to me he actually knows what the product, the differentiators and the issues are. Like this: "EdX is open source software, which some of the computer science types like that – it means they can play with it, they can add to the features on their own. But we’re developing interfaces that will allow faculty to add features as well." Does he mean modules, apps, APIs (like Coursera just offered)? Does he even know?

Worth a look: "EMMA will provide a system for the delivery of free, open, online courses in multiple languages from different European universities to help preserve Europe’s rich cultural, educational and linguistic heritage and to promote real cross-cultural and multi-lingual learning."

"Perhaps it is a result of the often discussed 'Snowden Effect,'" writes Gerry Grealish, "but no one can deny that countries and regions are putting some strict guidelines in place to ensure privacy of sensitive data that is moving outside of their borders." This article looks at three such guidelines. Canada has additional guidelines. Businesses and educational services working internationally must take note. You can't just shove all your data into AWS and be compliant.

People forget about CodeAcademy when they talk about MOOCs, but it was earlier than most and, with 24 million users, larger than most. It has distanced itself (quite rightly) from the xMOOCs offered at Stanford and elsewhere. "The problem with MOOCs, according to Codecademy founder Zach Sims, is that they simply try to replicate the offline learning experience. The web presents the opportunity to learn in an entirely new way, he says." Quite so. This year it will begin monetizing, not by selling certificates to students, but by matching students with jobs (circumventing the whole certification process entirely). When you stop thinking that you're a university, a world of opportunity opens up to you.

If you're wondering, Facebook knows pretty much everything about you. Which takes us back once again to the discussion of public spaces and private places. I remember writing about this in 2000, but it wasn't ereally much of an issue back then. But today, with surveillance, clampdowns on public demonstration, and all the rest of it, it is becoming much more so. Doug Belshaw writes: "Public spaces should be public and commonly-owned. Perhaps it’s time for governments to stop fawning over billionaires with technical skills and start providing services for all of us. Maybe instead of dismantling the state to allow for private profit, we can use technology to create a more egalitarian and just society." (p.s. don't bother with David Eggers; novelizations are not evidence, and shouldn't be cited as a way "to dig a little deeper"). 

Insightful post about the role and use of hashtags. It's relevant because of the widespread use of hashtags in learning. Hashtags were (and are) produced not by individuals or corporations, but by communities. Though commonly associated with Twitter, they existed before Twitter monetized them, and would continue to exist even after the company discontinues their use (as some carefully placed 'rumours' have suggested). But in the spirit of 'there is utterly nothing that commerce does not foul' the discussion over hashtags has turned to their exploitation (by news and other content agencies) and they ownership (by the people who really created them but who are missing out on the exploitation). It's actually a pretty common phenomenon; hashtags are just the latest victim. #Jazz #Rap #MOOC

A Gates-funded startup is shutting down over privacy and security concerns. "The nonprofit's goal was to give educators a data-based tool to personalize instruction. InBloom, based in Atlanta, offered to store and synthesize student data, such as grades, disciplinary actions and disability records in cloud-based servers."