The Astonishing Power of YouNow
Amanda Hess, Slate, 2015/12/16

"That's how it used to be, you created drama and you got a lot of followers, that's what it was originally." This bit of wisdom comes from a 14-year-old on YouNow, a video chatting site that at the same time broadcasts the conversation (and video) live to any number of anonymous viewers. From what I can see, 14 seems to be the average age of broadcasters. Or maybe 18. How new is YouNow? It doesn't have it's own Wikipedia page yet (it redirects to BlogTV (but there's a German page)). What do people do? Pretty much anything, mostly ordinary stuff, like live-streaming themselves as they sleep (more). Sure, you can broadcast yourself, but most seem to broadcast themselves in conversation with guests. This Slate article is about social media producing stars. Irrelevant. As I watch it, I see it being about people making connections. The one weird thing is that people tip the presenters. There are other sites that do that, but I can't discuss them in a family newsletter.

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Personalized medicine is topic of new Vanderbilt massive open online course
Paul Govern, Vanderbilt University, 2015/12/16

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating: despite the push toward standardization and evidence-based medicine, care-givers must face the fact that "Different people may respond differently to the same drug... Doctors should treat the whole patient, steering clear of half measures. Today this means taking account not only of illnesses and medications, but also cultural preferences, health care literacy and, increasingly, genetic information." The same, of course, applies in learning. Different people respond differently to the same content. This is why instructivism fails, and why in the long term we have to embrace personal learning. What's interesting now is that a new course from Vanderbilt explores this. But it shouldn't be thought of as mass education; it should be thought of as a resource (like a drug) that each person uses, and reacts to, slightly differently.Here's the link to enroll in Case Studies in Personalized Medicine.

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Skipping Copper: The Consumerization Of Edtech
`Ben Wallerstein, Jacob Stieglitz, TechCrunch, 2015/12/16

As education becomes more affordable, we would expect it to become more of a consumer market than a public services market. But not at the rates we're currently seeing in Asia, where wealthy parents spend as much as 20 percent (South Korea), 7.5 percent (India), 9.5 percent, (China) or 40 percent (Vietnam) or their income supporting their children's education. I wouldn't call the 1% rate in the U.S. "anemic", I would call it a more appropriate level. Still. All of that said, there is a trend toward consumerization of education. "Broadband ubiquity and mobile computing are beginning to bend the curve on access and, in turn, consumption. And it’s happening quickly." But there are issues. "One-to-one computing initiatives and low-cost/high-speed home Internet will help address equity concerns, but we worry that disparate access to early learning tools, in particular, might exacerbate our large, and growing, school-readiness gap.

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