Stephen Downes

If you use Google Reader or publish a blog or website RSS feed, then your worlkd have been turned upside down by Google's announcement it is closing Google Reader and by the weakening of RSS support on services like Blogger (and in browsere interfaces, and its outright elimination from services like Twitter and Google+). Sue Waters has a good guide for you, to help you cope. As a community, we'll have to grapple with this more deeply as time goes by. But for now, here's what you can do over the summer. I tried out one recommended resource, the Old Reader, today. "The Old Reader is designed to be a direct replacement of Google Reader." It was pretty good, though I find it interesting to note how any change of interface can feel so jarring.

I have always thought people should comment on their own site and link to or reference others. But the internet developed differently, with people (and companies) trying to draw users into theoir own sites (the better to show them advertising). Hence, the discussion list and/or comment list became a web staple. Sometimes - in places like the WELL - this worked out opretty well. Most of the time, though, unless you are activkly moderating comments, you get littered with the refuse of online activity. I recently closed comments on Half an Hour because, once I passed the million views mark, I crossed some sort of spam threshhold (which cut through Google's flimsy spam filters like a hot knife through butter). OLDaily is protected through obscurity, but even here, I have to watch what gets posted. And women tech writers face a whole range of issues I can't even bear to describe. So I am totally sympathetic with Audrey Watters shutting down comments. She can read my comments on her article here, on my site, where my comments belong, as she alway has.

Tony Hirst is feeling the same sort of discomfort with the modern Google that I am. Day after day, Google has been making announcements that make it less open and more like a content farm. It's a bunch of little thinghs, like reducing data access in spreadsheets, weakinging map export data, dropping support for CalDav (and incidentally, dropping calendar Sync), dropping support for XMPP instant messaging, and of course, its increasing distance from RSS. "It’s not just any one of these things, taken on its own merits," says Hirst, "it’s all of them taken together... 'Embrace, extend, extinguish' ... where have we heard that before?"

I totally agree with D'Arcy Norman's comments on timeline views of online course discussion metadata. And I liked the comments that came up in the dicussion after:

• the coding-data analysis may not be necessary to learn much of what can be inferred through more automatable metadata analysis...
• having better coding-data analysis tools may not be as awesome as it sounds, as there is the potential for having nasty feedback loops if the discussion analysis is available to participants during the discussion itself.

Slidesa and PDFs of Norman's presentation are available.

Ignatia reports: "Last week the University of Edinburgh released their first report on their experiences gained after having organized 6 MOOC courses via Coursera. In this 34 page report they provide insights on organizing a Coursera MOOC, the success rates, their lessons learned, and how they went about in setting up the courses." The report is practical, covering governance process, project structure, the designing and building of the MOOCs, participant demographics, activity data, and measurements of success. Interestingly, the report authors observe, "if the number of MOOCs available rises significantly, as new platform providers appear and bring with them even more MOOCs to add to those already in planning, then we would expect our overall enrolments to fall unless we are very active to compensate."

This is nice. "Whether you’re an A-level student, teacher or you’re just interested in the subject www.TheFaculties.org provides you with free, short films of university lecturers speaking on topics taken from the A-level curriculum." The materials are licensed under cReative Commons (By-NC-SA).

Actually, I think we should call it regrifting. Because like Jim Groom, when I saw Georgia Tech was charging $7000 for a new Masters in Computing Science MOOC I didn't think it was prticularly low-cost, despite the press (I guess you have to compare it with U.S.-style pricing, which would put the same program at an utterly unreasonable $40K). You also have to be admitted, of course, to be allowed to view the collection of videos and quizzes Georgia will be lining up for you. Groom points out, "You charge $7000 a year tuition with the idea you’ll have a 2-year cohort of 10,000 students. If you add that up, you get $140 million. That’s massive, especially when you’re only hiring eight new faculty to educate those 10,000 students." Related: Alastair Creelman writes, "many fear that MOOC consortia will soon reveal their true colours once they've captured the mass student base and are fearful of the way we are being won over by the lure of 'free'."

So recently the Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider terminated its cloud database service, giving customers a week to move their data. Being a paid customer did not help; it just gave you an extra week to prepare. So it's important as this article suggests to have a data migration plan. "What's your cloud back-up plan? Frequent data dumps?" But it also raises the question of depending on cloud hosting vendors in general. "If you had the chance to migrate your end-of-life SaaS application to an on-premises, open-source deployment, would you do it?"