Jim’s got a great summary of the larger idea behind UMW Domains (written by Ryan Brazell) up on his site. The core idea — personal cyberinfrastructure — is one I buy into, but at the same time the current mechanisms for it (cPanel, personal servers, and the like) seem clunky and not poised for greater adoption Continue reading

From the Chronicle, a surprisingly good article on Big Data: This month Mr. Lazer published a new Science article that seemed to dump a bucket of cold water on such data-mining excitement. The paper dissected the failures of Google Flu Trends, a flu-monitoring system that became a Big Data poster child. The technology, which mines people’s flu-related search queries to Continue reading

I radically simplified the approach to wiki article reuse. I think for the better. I’d like you to tell me what you think: http://screencast.com/t/UScpp3Zfc0eV Keep in mind this is only the start. The idea would be to build communities around the reuse. So, for example, when your page gets rewiki’d a central system logs that, Continue reading

Ages ago in MOOCtime there was this media think-nugget going around about the glories of Big Data in MOOCs. It reached its apex in the modestly titled BBC piece “We Can Build the Perfect Teacher“: One day, Sebastian Thrun ran a simple and surprising experiment on a class of students that changed his ideas about Continue reading

Short post, but a note at where I’m at on the wiki project. I’m a maddeningly circular developer, because I write code to help me think about problems. The Dokuwiki work is coming along well, given the amount of time I actually have to give to it, and given I took a detour to make Continue reading

Google is not supposed to be building profiles of students for advertising purposes. It’s looking like they did. The suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google’s terms of services, they can never have given, in Google’s terms, “implied consent” to scan their email. The Continue reading

Via @fnoschese, here’s the Google Trend on searching for “Lesson Plans” Wow. I can think of lots of little reasons why this might be happening, but none seems sufficient in itself. I know for instance that my wife Nicole used to search a lot more for art lesson plans but two things happened. First, she Continue reading

David Wiley started it, Bill and Darren continued the discussion. Stephen Downes jumped in. At issue: is there a need for a “Fifth R” in what we have come to know as classic 4Rs openness? Does openness require a “right to retain” the work? I have some ambivalence here — the fact we need to Continue reading

Missed this statement from ECAR 2013 last pass through it: What Is the Current Context for E-Text/E-Textbook Use in Higher Education? According to a recent ECAR/Intemet2 e-text evaluation project, the cost of textbooks was the most important value driver for e-textbooks, but cost-savings potential did not trump functionality when it came to student use of e-text for coursework.‘ “Students Continue reading