This puts all snippets into one place. Possibly worth scan-reading for items that catch your attention.
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Ian Nash grades Michael Wilshaw's annual report ‘unsatisfactory’. - http://policyconsortium.co.uk/2012...
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The Economist has bubble/Ponzi nuances in "American universities represent declining value for money to their students" - http://www.economist.com/news...
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Economist article about "dronefather" Abe Karem with
many insights on the superiority of tightly focused smallish scale
development. - http://www.economist.com/news...
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@DonaldHTaylor on how MOOCs might pay. But if the learner/course cost in a MOOC is only "the cost of T shirt", then what? - http://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/2012...
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#OA #OER Creative Commons - important consultation on changes to the warranties you give when attaching a CC license to content. - http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4...
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And finally..... The synthesis report by @helenbeetham from the 4 y JISC Curriculum Design Programme http://www.webcitation.org/6CUUTdC... [PDF]. Web-based version: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w...
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Impressive: @A_L_T 's certification scheme launches in Australasia as #CMALT Australasia, in partnership with #ascilite - http://www.alt.ac.uk/sites...
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The Richards Review of Apprenticeships (relates to how to improve the UK system, 143 p PDF) is archived at http://www.webcitation.org/6CU8bSI...
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PeerJ (Editorial Board of 700 & Advisory Board of 20 of whom 5 are Nobel winners) is up & running https://s3.amazonaws.com/static... [PDF]
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Interesting June 2012 International Telecommunications Union data of phone and broadband uptake worldwide [2 page PDF] - http://www.itu.int/ITU-D...
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"Choice and competition in FE." 9 pages of good sense & depressing retrospective from the Institute of Government [PDF]. - http://www.instituteforgovernm...
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The Materiality of Algorithms [Nov 2012] via @cshirky reminds me of The Software Sorted Society [Jan 2007] http://goo.gl/OLuXi - http://culturedigitally.org/2012...
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ex-MPCer @D_Blanchflower doesn't pull punches in ".. Cameron's economic gibberish" reviewing DC's CBI speech. - http://www.independent.co.uk/news...
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“Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates is not a skills gap." NYT Adam Davidson, via @NYTimeskrugman - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...
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@dylanwiliam 's 2000ish "The half-second delay: what follows?" shows the problems of criteria-based approaches to QA. - http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1129...
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Re-reading "16 bits per second - the bandwidth of
consciousness", from 2007, based on Tor Nørretranders "The user
illusion, cutting consciousness down to size". - http://fm.schmoller.net/2007...
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"Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility":
2007 NYT interview with Gerd Gigerenzer whose research sits behind
Gladwell's "Blink". - http://www.nytimes.com/2007...
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Interesting angry utterly unparochial piece by @downes "Suppose the Irvings Had Not Set Up Shop In Moncton" - http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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"Build longer arcs", says Seth Godin. Focus "on what
works (& what's important), not what's new & merely shiny".
Excerpt below: - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_b...
"The real opportunity, I think, is in trying to build longer arcs. Now
that the cycle of new is eating itself in a race to ever-faster, there's
a bigger chance to make long term change by consistently focusing on
what works (and what's important), not what's new and merely shiny.
What's important, what's always important, is useful change."
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Cameron's campaign manager Lynton Crosby "a cross between Alastair Campbell and Crocodile Dundee" reports Hugh Muir in the G. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politic...
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Picture from @stephenheppell via @joecar "Summative
peer assessment of undergraduate calculus using Adaptive Comparative
Judgement" - http://www.uea.ac.uk/c...
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Terrific post from @edent > "I want to see a
complete separation of church & state... Hardware should be separate
from software ....Software separate from services." - http://shkspr.mobi/blog...
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@martin_eve "Platinum OA may more accurately break
down, in the public academic consciousness, the assumptions about APCs
that now pervade the Gold model". For example http://www.researchinlearningt.... - https://www.martineve.com/2012...
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Just out today (22/11). Houghton & Swan explain that Green #OA "provides the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving to OA". Conclusion based below. - http://www.cfses.com/project...
"The evidence, both ours and that of others, clearly suggests that
disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than
subscription or toll access publishing. In an all-OA world, it seems
likely that the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA.
However, we are not in an all-OA world yet, nor are we likely to be in
such a world in the foreseeable future. The most affordable and
cost-effective means of moving towards OA in the meantime is through
Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder,
institutional, sectoral and national levels at little cost. Moreover,
Green OA may well be the most immediate and cost effective way to
support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy."
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If #OA
is not on your radar, "Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access
Initiative" is a good place to get to grips with the issues &
background. - http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openacc...
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Daniel Willingham (recently cited by M Gove) has
several terrific videos on his site, including a strong critique of
value added merit pay - http://www.danielwillingham.com/videos...
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Rachel Wolf, ex-advisor to Boris, Gove & then head
of New Schools Network is reported to be off to NY to work for News
Corp's education arm, Amplify, whilst remaining Chair of NSN. - http://www.educationinvestor.co.uk/ShowArt...
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The Rise and Fall of the TV Journalist - a ~2007 short film by Adam Curtis - will get you thinking. - https://www.youtube.com/watch...
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OpenStax College - CC licensed text books - free online - low cost in print. - http://openstaxcollege.org/
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CC licensed material "Great Writers: Inspirational literature from the University of Oxford", via Rhonda Riachi. - http://writersinspire.org/writers
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How should colleges handle the media? - interesting posting by @John__Field - http://thelearningprofessor.wo...
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"The FE Guild: a sea change or just another pendulum swing?" Thoughtful piece today by Ian Nash of the Policy Consortium. - http://policyconsortium.co.uk/categor...
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"Building an Innovation-Based Economy" by West, Friedman & Valdivia (Brookings) has strong recs about #OA, CC licenses on textbooks etc. See also http://creativecommons.org/weblog...
InnovationBased Economy.pdf 479 KB
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@rogerschank in praise of computing-supported learning
by doing as the right underlying model for university (& other)
education - http://educationoutrage.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
Interesting reading for HE staff nearly everywhere.
Ernst and Young's "University of the Future: A thousand year old
industry on the cusp of profound change" [big PDF] - http://www.ey.com/Publica...
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Evidence-based strategies for reducing health inequality. Worth browsing the gripping Executive Summary, whatever your field. - http://www.instituteofhealtheq...
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Touching BBC report that Jose Mujica, President of
Uruguay, gives 90% of his pay away, making him "The world's 'poorest'
president". - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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I enjoyed this well-structured multi-authored flavour-capturing report from #altc2012 @a_l_t - http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2012...
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Worthwhile video >> "IT provision at Stretford High and our plans for the future" by @danielstucke @ #altc2012 - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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If you watch the "Africa For Norway" Christmas video, make sure also to read the rationale for it: http://www.africafornorway.no/why - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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#altc2012 video: "Network analysis: why it matters, how to do it, & what we can learn from it". Natasa Milic-F of MS Research - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Via @jjn1 NYT - "10 Universities to Form Semester Online Consortium" - offering credit-bearing courses from Autumn 2013. - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...
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What are we to do with feral publishers? Focuses in
part on the tax-affairs of Routledge/T&F & monopoly profits by
major journal publishers more generally. Preprint by Harvie, Lightfoot,
Lilley and Weir. - https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstre...
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@dweinberger is on the money and on the same track as
Stephen @Downes in today's "MOOCs as networks". See also Siva
Vaidhyanathan's http://tinyurl.com/c7sfx96 - http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger...
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Another sensible response (by @guzdial) to Shirky's terrific “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy" http://tinyurl.com/avgn3ga - http://computinged.wordpress.com/2012...
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@donaldclark has written this particularly good piece: "Jay Cross: informal learning guru". - http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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Impact beyond the Impact Factor. Definitely worth
looking at these 54 slides by Heather Piwowar - @researchremix -
co-founder of @impactstory - http://www.slideshare.net/hpiwowa...
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Todd Farley has worked on the inside of the testing
industry. His "What's Really Up With Automated Essay Scoring", is
sufficiently damning to make me nervous, though solid enough on the face
of it. - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-fa...
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David Sherlock (ex head of ALI..) hints interestingly
at the possible future development of a single loan-funded
post-compulsory education sector http://www.webcitation.org/6CC2e3M...
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This looks smart >> SciGit (yet to launch) a collaboration system for researchers to work on the same paper. - http://www.scigit.com/
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The "tax-avoiding, morality-free monopsony that is
Amazon", which is "a good place to shop" but "a very oppressive
business" that "has got the whole (publishing) business frightened".
[Excerpt from a speech in the House of Lords by Conservative Peer Ralph
Lucas below.] - http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords...
"I want to be sure that the new arrangements have sharp enough teeth and
enough ability to act on their own decision to deal with that
tax-avoiding, morality-free monopsony that is Amazon. It is a very good
place to shop, but it is a very oppressive business. It has
extraordinary contracts with its suppliers. Its arrangements with its
Marketplace sellers must breach something, but I have, in the past six
months, been unable to find a single major UK publisher who was willing
to have tea in the Lords to tell me what they think of Amazon. It has
got the whole business frightened."
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Terrific >> "Nate Silver and the Ascendance of
Expertise" (a.k.a the death of the pundit), by @boraz (Bora Zivkovic),
Blog Editor at Scientific American. - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-...
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How US voters used their online devices to get access to election information. - http://www.statetechmagazine.com/sites...
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@petermurrayrust explains with clarity why closed publishing greatly reduces the value to society of research outputs. #openaccess #opendata - http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr...
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You can’t fight snobbery with snobbery. Mick Fletcher (Policy Consortium) criticises the dissing of FE for sponsoring UCTs - http://policyconsortium.co.uk/2012...
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Napster, Udacity, and the Academy. Sharp essay by Clay
Shirky that deserves to be widely read as does this response from Doug
Clow http://tinyurl.com/d3ftlvt - http://www.shirky.com/weblog...
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Andrew Cecil, Amazon's European Director of Public
Policy, flounders haplessly under questioning by the Public Account
Committee. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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"In praise of paper" by Maria Konnikova in a
Scientific American blog should give all you ebook reader types out
there some pause for thought. - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literal...
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Well written, well judged (but slightly dated) guides
to different aspects of scholarly publishing, with an OA focus, by Raym
Crow. - http://www.chainbridgegroup.com/publica...
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The reactions to the Observer's Carole Cadwalladr's long and worth reading piece on MOOCs are mixed. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/educati...
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.@amcunningham Gripping. The BMA’s Michael Marmot
explains with data (6m -> 36m) why equity should be central to all
policy - http://www.youtube.com/watch...!
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Open methods, open data, open access are the key tenets of the just launched APA journal Archives of Scientific Psychology. - http://www.apa.org/monitor...
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Common Ground's Scholar "An Interactive Workspace for Writing Across the Curriculum". - http://learning.cgscholar.com/about-s...
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Drupal-based LMS. Interesting, if you have experience with and like/rate Drupal. A US company has launched one. - http://www.adrenna.com/open-so...
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For better online maths, start with an intuitive challenge. Sharp analysis from @ddmeyer via @danielstucke - http://blog.mrmeyer.com/...
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@cliveshepherd stops regular blogging. For now, only, I
hope. I agree with Clive, that all 3 of the people cited make a big
contribution to the field. - http://clive-shepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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Via @Villavelius "What Competition in Nature Should
Teach Us about Markets" Outstanding piece in Scientific American by Jag
Bhalla - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-b...
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How Obama won - classy & fascinating analysis by
Peter Kellner of YouGov, with some UK comparisons that give striking
food for thought. - http://yougov.co.uk/news...
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Though I detest the title of this piece by Eric Van de
Velde about the forces at work in scholarly publishing, I like the
analysis. - http://scitechsociety.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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Royal Soc. of Chem. will charge students & others
for re-using “Gold Open Access” articles writes chemist
@petermurrayrust. - http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr...
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@Downes rightly highlights Laura Pappano's US-centric history-free reporting in the NYT's "The Year of the MOOC". - http://www.downes.ca/post...
"Almost 3K words in this NYT piece on MOOCs, but couldn’t spare a single
one to mention Siemens, Downes, Couros, Cormier… Did you recognize any
of those names? They’re the people who actually invented massive open
online courses (MOOCs)".
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"That was the open access week that was". A fluent, interesting and broad round-up by @Stephen_Curry - http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry...
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Worth reading > Kaya Genç: "Plebs and Chavs: On Textual Representation of Class" in the LA Review of Books. - http://lareviewofbooks.org/article...
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The Bertelsmann-Pearson deal "suggests that the
publishers have finally heard the tocsin". According to @jjn1 this "will
be seen as just the latest instalment of a long-running story: a tale
of formerly dominant industries trying to prevent their venerable
business models being dismantled by the internet". - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol...
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Data journalism from the FT's @xtophercook sheds a
clear light on the GCSE English debacle. One of Cook's key questions is
excerpted below. - http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata...
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"Did a child in 2012 do as well as a similarly taught child did in 2011? I
would like to see graphs showing the probability of children of
different ability ranges getting a C, say, in 2011 and 2012. That would
cut to the heart of it."
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Very disturbing infographic showing the differences in
how, after a fight, a 12 year old Israeli and Palestinian child might
be treated. - http://972mag.com/visuali...
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#yapoc
Good post by @pbsloep about 'setting up' a learning network, building
on Kirsty Newman's doubts about the utility of portals. (YAPOC = Yet
Another Portal Of Choice) - http://pbsloep.blogspot.com.au/2012...
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YAPOC. Spot on. Why your knowledge-sharing portal will
probably not save the world - by Kirsty Newman, on the LSE British
Politics and Policy Blog. (A colleague's acronym for this syndrome was
YAPOC - yet another portal of choice.) - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...
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Why Full Open Access Matters. Succinct outline by lawyer Michael Carroll in PLOS Biology. - http://www.plosbiology.org/article...
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Kiss Goodbye to ICT (or KISS hello to Computer Science?). Piece by Richard Noss & Rose Luckin in the IOE blog. - http://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2012...
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"Summative peer assessment of undergraduate calculus
using Adaptive Comparative Judgement". As relevant to @Coursera as
instinct tells me? - http://www.uea.ac.uk/c...
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.@mfeldstein67 Canvas Network: a MOOC platform to
allow colleges to run open online courses on the said-to-be-snazzy
Canvas platform - http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs...
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New MEI 16-18 maths course - drawing on this by Tim Gowers http://goo.gl/TxzMn - will focus on 'real' problems. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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How does the "Gold v Green" #OpenAccess discussion look outside the rich world? Thoughtful and challenging piece by @graysouth via @Stephen_Curry - http://infojustice.org/archive...
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The big problem in economics is that it really matters
in which journals you publish. Dan Scott hits the nail on the head in
Open Economics. Long excerpt below. - http://openeconomics.net/2012...
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"For now, the funding mechanisms are the same and
the requirement to publish in journals with a reputation is still
paramount. Until now, arguments against open access publishing have
tended to focus on quality issues. The argument goes that the premier
(subscription) journals take the best submissions and then there is a
cascade downwards through second tier journals (which may or may not be
subscription-based) until you get to a pile of leftover papers that can
only be published by the author paying a fee to some sort of piratical
publisher. This does not stand much scrutiny. Plenty of
subscription-based journals are average and have been churned out by
publishers looking to beef up their portfolios and justify charging
ever-larger sums. Good research gets unnecessarily dumped by leading
journals because they adhere to review policies dating from the print
age when limited pagination forced them to be highly selective. Other
academics, as we have seen at Social Sciences Directory,...
more...
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.@MooreAnswers LA Review of Books - Stephen Marche -
"Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data. ... Literature is
the opposite of data." - http://lareviewofbooks.org/article...
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In Norway the Centre for ICT in Education has been
quietly getting to grips with the issuing of laptops to every "6th
former". - https://iktsenteret.no/english
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#ICTcurric Innovating out of a tight spot, with #Badges. Manchester assistant head @danielstucke describes his school's new - http://danielstucke.com/post...
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EdUmatics - 5 professional development modules to help teachers integrate ICT into mathematics classrooms. - http://www.edumatics.mathemati...
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Dr Dots - hearing a stunning cognition-focused
presentation by Josef Karthauser about how people can (and could!) learn
maths. - http://www.drdots.net/
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@ajcann experiences and comments (interestingly & quite favourably) on the @Coursera approach to Peer Assessment. - http://scienceoftheinvisible.b...
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@drtonybates reports that $463 million has been
invested this year by VCs into ed tech start-ups in the USA, while "the
public system starves". - http://www.tonybates.ca/2012...
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Measured & interesting ALT Newsletter piece about
cloud-based LMSs like Canvas & Lore by LSE's @KrisEdTech (Kris
Roger). - http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2012...
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Useful. Wikipedia's comparison of reference management software. Via OKFN OA email list. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
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Skeuomorphism = "replicating the shape of old forms in
a new medium". Apple has just parted company with a proponent of it,
according to The Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012...
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Extremely impressive. Use BASE (Bielefeld Academic
Search Engine) to search quickly across nearly 40m documents in over
2000 Open Access repositories. - http://www.base-search.net/...
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The Parachute: Open access – gold versus green. Forcefully written post by @Villavelius [=Jan Velterop] - http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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"Friend of Open Access" is Frederick Friend's
admirable web site "to support open access to reports, publications,
data and other information resulting from taxpayer-funded research and
teaching". - http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk/
Comments