2016 eLearning Hype Curve Predictions
Andy Hicken, Web Courseworks, 2015/12/29

No real surprises here, but I appreciate the slightly different take offered by Andy Hicken. At the top opf the hype cycle are badges. MOOCs and xAPI are on the way down. MOC (Maintenance of Certification) have troughed and are on the way up again. Still on the hype cycle accelerator are subscription learning, gamification, and free online education. Hicken also observes, correctly, that "online learning lags behind other industries in adopting new technologies. This is not because people in online learning are not interested in new technologies; it’s because we’re not a high-revenue industry compared to giant industries like consumer goods."

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How to Run A Shiny App in the Cloud Using Tutum, Digital Ocean and Docker Containers
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2015/12/29

A few weeks ago I ran a link about running an application in a container in the cloud. The idea of this is that you create a complete operating system and server in a single package and run it on a cloud-based service. After I ran the post about the server ruunning Bluemix, Docker, and Watson, Tony Hirst published instructions describing how to run a Shiny app in the Cloud Using Tutum, Digital Ocean and Docker Containers. What's neat is that he stores the code in GitHub and sets it to update his cloud-based app when he updates his code. I don't know if I'll ever have the time to become expert in this, but I really like the way it's headed.

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MOOCs and crowdsourcing: Massive courses and massive resources
John Prpić, James Melton, Araz Taeihagh, Terry Anderson, First Monday, 2015/12/29

This paper draws an interesting parallel between two types of massive phenomena: MOOCs, and crowdsourcing. The former are online courses designed to enable access to learning to large numbers of people at once, while the latter takes advantage of the contributions of many people to support a single objective, such as the creation of an online encyclopedia. "Both phenomena implement open calls to the public at large for participation, are solely IT-mediated phenomena, and form and draw upon IT-mediated crowds for their existence and operation." The most interesting bit is the division of technology types into episodic (the members of a particular crowd never interact with one another directly through the IT (eg. Google’s reCAPTCHA)) and collaborative. 

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