Tim Owens and I have been working off and on the past couple weeks on this Federated OER Wiki idea, and there have been times where I’ve looked at the design of what we are doing and thought maybe this was the Plan 9 from Outer Space of Edtech projects. Has an idea ever so… Continue reading

A recent article in The Economist expands on the fascinating presentation Larry Summers gave last summer which expanded on an idea that’s been floating around the economic blogosphere a while. In the old view of the future, productivity gains came through the automation of low paying jobs. Today one person digs ditches and another writes… Continue reading

Now sure, with a title like this I coud probably have this post fire randomly throughout the year and nine out of ten times it would be true. But the discussion Dan has been facilitating over the past several months about what “real world” education means (and why “fake” assignments can be better than “real… Continue reading

Short follow-up to yesterday’s post. As many people do, I referred to the cycle of elite online learning iniatives as “Groundhog Day“. And from our perspective that’s probably apt. But it occurs to me that from their perspective it’s Memento. MASSIVE spoiler alert here, but the premise of Memento is that the memory-damaged Leonard Shelby… Continue reading

From the Chronicle: Beginning in March, HarvardX for Alumni will offer versions of seven Harvard MOOCs exclusively to graduates of the university. The courses will not be full-length MOOCs but “segments” that include some new material developed specially for graduates, according to Michael Rutter, a spokesman. Some professors might even travel to talk about the… Continue reading

Hey, I’ve invented a new initialism: pd;dr. For “Pando Daily; Don’t Read”. It’s necessitated by me quoting a Pando story, but not wanting you to follow the link there and have your faith in humanity whittled down to a stump by the articles that will be in your peripheral vision.  In any case, there’s an… Continue reading

The theme for #FutureEd this week was expressed in a Toffler quote (which turns out to not quite be a Toffler quote): The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. I find this quote a bit frustrating. For one, I… Continue reading

This post is going to be a bit geeky, and a tad technical. So there’s your warning. I’ve been thinking a lot about the forkable Domain of One’s Own wiki, with its GitHub underpinning. And I’ve been watching a lot of Ward Cunningham’s videos on the concept of federated wikis. And the thing I’ve come… Continue reading

UPDATE: Cathy Davidson replies in the comments. It looks like moving the the timeline out of the Coursera platfrom has been planned but not yet implemented; they will be taking a similar approach to the Rap Genius approach they are taking with the Constitution. Thanks for the reply, Cathy! I still encourage you to read… Continue reading