This puts all snippets into one place. Possibly worth scan-reading for items that catch your attention. (Updated 20151201)
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Ian Nash grades Michael Wilshaw's annual report ‘unsatisfactory’. - https://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" - https://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. - https://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? - https://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. - https://wiki.creativecommons.org/4...
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And finally..... The synthesis report by @helenbeetham from the 4 y JISC Curriculum Design Programme https://www.webcitation.org/6CUUTdC... [PDF]. Web-based version: https://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 - https://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 https://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] - https://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]. - https://www.instituteforgovernm...
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The Materiality of Algorithms [Nov 2012] via @cshirky reminds me of The Software Sorted Society [Jan 2007] https://goo.gl/OLuXi - https://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. - https://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 - https://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. - https://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". - https://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". - https://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" - https://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: - https://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. - https://www.guardian.co.uk/politic...
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Picture from @stephenheppell via @joecar "Summative peer assessment of undergraduate calculus using Adaptive Comparative Judgement" - https://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." - https://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 https://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. - https://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. - https://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 - https://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. - https://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. - https://openstaxcollege.org/
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CC licensed material "Great Writers: Inspirational literature from the University of Oxford", via Rhonda Riachi. - https://writersinspire.org/writers
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How should colleges handle the media? - interesting posting by @John__Field - https://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. - https://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 https://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 - https://educationoutrage.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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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] - https://www.ey.com/Publica...
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Evidence-based strategies for reducing health inequality. Worth browsing the gripping Executive Summary, whatever your field. - https://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". - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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I enjoyed this well-structured multi-authored flavour-capturing report from #altc2012 @a_l_t - https://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 - https://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: https://www.africafornorway.no/why - https://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 - https://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. - https://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 https://tinyurl.com/c7sfx96 - https://www.hyperorg.com/blogger...
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Another sensible response (by @guzdial) to Shirky's terrific “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy" https://tinyurl.com/avgn3ga - https://computinged.wordpress.com/2012...
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@donaldclark has written this particularly good piece: "Jay Cross: informal learning guru". - https://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 - https://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. - https://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 https://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. - https://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.] - https://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. - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-...
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How US voters used their online devices to get access to election information. - https://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 - https://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 - https://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 https://tinyurl.com/d3ftlvt - https://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. - https://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. - https://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. - https://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. - https://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 - https://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. - https://www.apa.org/monitor...
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Common Ground's Scholar "An Interactive Workspace for Writing Across the Curriculum". - https://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. - https://www.adrenna.com/open-so...
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For better online maths, start with an intuitive challenge. Sharp analysis from @ddmeyer via @danielstucke - https://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. - https://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 - https://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. - https://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. - https://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. - https://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". - https://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 - https://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. - https://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". - https://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. - https://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. - https://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) - https://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.) - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...
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Why Full Open Access Matters. Succinct outline by lawyer Michael Carroll in PLOS Biology. - https://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. - https://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? - https://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 - https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs...
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New MEI 16-18 maths course - drawing on this by Tim Gowers https://goo.gl/TxzMn - will focus on 'real' problems. - https://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 - https://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. - https://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." - https://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 - https://danielstucke.com/post...
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EdUmatics - 5 professional development modules to help teachers integrate ICT into mathematics classrooms. - https://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. - https://www.drdots.net/
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@ajcann experiences and comments (interestingly & quite favourably) on the @Coursera approach to Peer Assessment. - https://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". - https://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). - https://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2012...
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Useful. Wikipedia's comparison of reference management software. Via OKFN OA email list. - https://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 - https://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. - https://www.base-search.net/...
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The Parachute: Open access – gold versus green. Forcefully written post by @Villavelius [=Jan Velterop] - https://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". - https://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk/
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