This is about connecting people you at colleges or who you went to college with, rather than being a service for academics like academia.edu or others of that ilk, and it’s an incremental change from the existing ways LinkedIn already does pull people who claim the same institutional background together, but an interesting development none the less.
Address of the bookmark: http://pro.gigaom.com/blog/linkedin-launches-linkedin-for-education/
I’ve very rarely come across a software patent that is not really stupid, that does not harm everyone apart from patent trolls and lawyers, and that is not predated by earlier examples of prior art. This article explains how anyone can easily put a stop to them before they do any damage. Great stuff.
Address of the bookmark: http://boingboing.net/2013/07/24/killing-stupid-software-patent.html
Sad news of the death, at 88, of one of the greatest thinkers and inventors of the past century. Although the headlines all proclaim him as the inventor of the mouse, that was only one of his many achievements that were more profoundly influential. Among the many other things that he invented or played a significant role in inventing were the first working hypertext (and hence the Web), the word processor, the Internet (his lab was the second node on its forerunner, the ARPANET), email, video conferencing, windowing systems like the Mac and Windows, and much else besides. A modest and inspiring genius whose vision of augmenting, not replacing, human intellect reverberates loudly to this day.
Address of the bookmark: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/
An interesting article that makes a very strightforward and obvious point, with some evidence, that brainteasers in job interviews do little more than demonstrate the candidate’s ability to do brainteasers in job interviews. They do not predict success in the jobs they are filtering for. The parallel implications relating to typical exam processes and practices in educational systems are clear.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/why-brainteasers-dont-belong-in-job-interviews.html
I have made use of this or its influential ancestor article in a few courses that I have taught over the past decade or so and, after a long period of forgetting about it, have done so again recently. Rereading it again, I was as affected by it now as much as I was the first time I read it. Though it relates to events that occurred in the largely superseded technology of the MOO, Dibbell’s detailed descriptions and rich reflections are as relevant in an era of social networks, MMORPGs, Q&A sites, web forums and immersive worlds as they were when he first wrote them. Maybe more so.
It’s a long, harrowing, but rewarding read, not for the easily offended, unravelling the unpleasant story of Mr Bungle and his reincarnation as Dr Jest, the things he did to other characters in the MOO, and the responses of the other inhabitants of the MOO to ‘him’ (I may give away too much with those quotes). It challenges notions of identity, self, and the nature of human engagement as well as offering a fascinating meditation on ethics, consensus and social contracts in both meat-space and cyber-space. No unequivocal answers, but many challenging questions. The denouement that was not there in the original piece is worth waiting for, and makes the whole episode even more ugly and even more thought-provoking than it appears from the start.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/
If someone had made this up I might have thought they had gone a little too far down the satirical path to be entirely believable. And yet…
‘Outside, more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent their rage, smashing cars and chanting: “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.” The protesters claim cheating is endemic in China and that sitting the exams without help puts their children at a disadvantage.’
One parent assaulted an invigilator who had refused a bribe having confiscated a cellphone hidden in a student’s underwear. The invigilators were holed up in the examination halls and had to send calls for help over the Internet. Radio transmitters and receivers were confiscated (some hidden inventively in erasers), and at least two groups trying to communicate with examinees were found in a nearby hotel. I don’t know whether they found all of them. Probably not, if they were anything like those discussed at http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/172006.htm which reports on things like earpieces that had to be surgically removed when they got stuck or, most awe-inspiring of all, an ‘interphone’ that exploded inside a student’s abdomen.
A study at http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/article/view/183537/183482 suggests that 58% of Canadian students cheated in high school exams, though the numbers fall as level of study increases, with ‘only’ 9% of graduate students admitting to cheating in exams. The level of cheating in coursework is significantly higher across the board. These are sobering figures, given that the results are self-reported and may thus give an optimistic picture.
From ingenious uses of high tech cameras and transmitters, watches that display books’ worth of notes, and hidden earpieces, to bottles of water with crib sheets printed on the inside of the label or engraved notes on fingernails, cheating technologies are big business. There are some amazingly smart tools and methods available online such as those at http://24kupi.com, http://www.cheat-on-exam.com and http://www.wikihow.com/Cheat-On-a-Test (which, for any students thinking this might be a good idea, invigilators know about too 
). However, with embeddable technologies, tattooed circuits, and increasingly tiny smart devices the possibilities are growing fast.
This is an arms race that no one can win. Cheats get smarter at least as fast as institutions get wiser but some will always be caught and all will live in fear of being caught. However, the value of a qualification is directly proportional to its validity so, if that is called into question, everyone loses – cheats, institutions, non-cheats and society as a whole. It is more than a bit worrying that there are medical professionals, safety inspectors and architects who cheated in their exams, especially as the evidence suggests this attitude persists throughout cheats’ careers. Endemic cheating is a tragedy of the commons. If you cannot trust a qualification then there is no point in having one and all become valueless.
Can we do something about it? Yes, but it requires a concerted effort, and better detection technologies are only a small part of the answer. It is perfectly possible to design assignments that are engaging, personal, relevant and largely cheat-proof. I’ve yet to find a foolproof method that cannot be foiled by a determined cheat who employs someone else to impersonate them take a whole course on their behalf. However, we can stop or render harmless simpler contract cheating, plagiarism, collusion, bribes and other common methods of cheating through simple process design. Courses where no student ever does the same thing, where learning is linked to personal interests and aspirations, where each part is interconnected with every other and the output of one part is the input of the next are both more engaging and more cheat-proof. Amazingly, I have had students who attempt to cheat even then but, because of the built-in checks of the design, they fail anyway. Multiple examiners and public displays of work are a good idea too – non-cheating students can usually be relied upon to point out examples of cheating even if the examiners miss it. We can get rid of the traditional regurgitation format of exams, or make use of alternative and less spoofable variations like oral exams, especially those that require students to draw on unique coursework experience rather than uniform replication of process and content. We can help educate students how not to cheat and make a point of reminding them that it is a bad thing to do. And we can get to know our students better, both to reduce the likelihood of cheating and to discover it more easily should it occur. Most of these methods cost time, effort, and money when compared with the common industrial one-size-fits-all models they are up against. But they all lead to better learning, provide more reliable discrimination of competence, greater immunity to cheating, and are fairer to everyone. If we stack that up against the staggeringly high costs of endemic cheating, they begin to look like much more efficient alternatives.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Students+China+riot+after+teachers+stop+them+from/8554083/story.html
Excellent dismissal by Alfie Kohn of the massive systematic idiocy of grading and testing. Some great arguments made, but I think the main one is summarized most succinctly thus:
“Extrinsic inducements, of which G&T is the classic example in a school setting, are devices whereby those with more power induce those with less to do something. G&T isn’t needed for assessment, but it is very nearly indispensable for compelling students to do what they (understandably) may have very little interest in doing. “
We have to work out better ways of teaching than this. It is not right for an educational institution to continue do something so antagonistic to learning.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/gradesandtests.htm
Very interesting new development, not quite finished yet but showing great promise – a simple means to aggregate content from your learning journey, supporting open standards. This is not so much a personal learning environment as a bit of glue to hold it together. The team putting it together have some great credentials, including one of the co-founders of Elgg (used here on the Landing) and the creator of the Curatr social learning platform.
Currently it appears that its main open standard is SCORM’s new TinCan API, but there are bigger plans afoot. I think that this kind of small, powerful service that disaggregates learning journeys from monolithic systems (including those such as the Landing, Moodle, MOOCs and Blackboard-based systems) is going to be a vital disruptive component in enabling richer, more integrated learning in the 21st Century.
This is the description of the tool from the site itself:
“It’s never been easier to be a self-directed learner. Whether you’re in school or at work, you’re always learning. And it’s not just courses that teach. The websites you visit, the blogs you write, the job you do; it’s all activity that contributes to your personal growth.
Right now you’re letting the data all this activity creates slip through your fingers. You could be taking control of your learning; storing your experience, making sense of what you do and showing off what you know.
Learning Locker helps you to aggregate and use your learning data in an environment that you control. You can use this data to help quantify your abilities, to help you reach personal targets and to let others share in what you do.
It’s time to take your data out of the hands of archaic learning management systems that you can’t reach. We use new technologies, like the xAPI, to help you take control of your learning. It’s your data. Own it.”
Address of the bookmark: http://www.learninglocker.net/
A brave or, more accurately, foolhardy attempt to marry Bloom’s (unempirical and unsubtle) taxonomy and the (equally unempirical but worthy of reflection) SAMR model of technology that categorizes technologies in terms of relative transformative capacity, with examples of appropriate iPad tools to cover each segment of both wheels. Like most such models, it is way too neat. You simply cannot categorize things that relate to the complex world of learning in such coarse and simple ways – in both the case of Bloom and of SAMR, it ain’t what you do so much as the way that you do it that makes all the difference in the world, and the tools linked to are mostly much more interesting (and, conversely, much more boring) than the diagram suggests. However, like many such models, it is not a bad bit of scaffolding or at least a springboard for reflection that encourages one to think about things that, without it, might be missed, especially if you are not an expert in pedagogy or technology.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/05/a-new-wonderful-wheel-on-samr-and.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin
Infographic on relative cheating rates online and not (summary – no significant difference overall). A bit lacking in references to reliable sources though – I suspect a certain amount of cherry picking has gone on here.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.onlinecollege.org/2012/07/23/do-online-students-cheat-more-often/