Category: #edtech

Academic failures – got any previous?

We carry around our academic failures like previous convictions. If pressed, we might even blame something: but I’d never even been to France so it just didn’t make sense… Whether or not the excuse is fair, we accept what the piece of paper tells us. I’m not very good at that. Sadly, what we really believe is…
Beyond the Islands of Innovation

I managed to catch the first day of the ALT conference in Liverpool, and thoroughly enjoyed catching up with some of the open crew, and meeting some new faces. Some of my earliest thinkery dates back to altc conferences, like this and this. Good people…
The LMS…

…there’s not much enlightenment at the end of this tunnel. Inspired by This is not the online learning you (or we) are looking for by Alan Levine.
Open Badges from Dialogue

It’s one thing to decide how to badge a group of people on your own terms. It’s quite another to catch potential badges as they appear like apparitions out of dialogue with the people. What is that? … and what would it look like? This thinkery is from the We Are Open Co-op meetup.
Computing Badges

Desired Experience: Swift Or Objective C, JavaScript, Cordova, Angular… I’ve always thought that one of the most obvious areas ripe for micro-credentials is Computing skills. It’s a pretty fresh sector, so school credentials are miles behind. However, the speed at which it’s changing also lends itself to recognising small chunks of competency. Most skills in…
Learned Behaviour

The path to learning is paved with good behaviours. It can also be a pretty lucrative path, for some… From Speak & Spell: A History by Audrey Watters.
Algorithmic secret sauce

“the promise of NGDLE remains fuzzy and inchoate to most of us, a dream of algorithmic secret sauce that will rescue us in the near future if we trust in the industry to provide.” From Interventions by Brian Lamb.
Web 2.0 Country

Web2.0—the web of platforms, personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—is the only web most students know. That web exists by extracting individuals’ data through persistent surveillance, data mining, tracking, and browser fingerprinting and then seeking new and “innovative” ways to monetize that data. As platforms and advertisers seek to perfect these strategies, colleges and universities rush…
POSSEE

Doug Belshaw was the first to enlighten me on this self publishing principle, and encourage me to set up my own site, and publish out from there. Every drawing should have it’s own canonical link he’d say. Unambiguous words, and I’m glad I listened. This rang true again when working with Jim Groom and Reclaim Hosting on…
A personal API

So in the middle of reading Jim Groom’s post on The LMS is dead, and getting my head around next generational digital wonderment, I found myself jumping into Kin Lane’s post on the Personal API. As a programmer, I’m aware of what an API is and how it works, that it becomes a fundamental part…
NGDLE Perspectives

On the one side, it’s good to give a nebulous thing a name – even better if you’re first to give it a name. It allows momentum to gather, and dialogue to take place. It allows hashtags and domain names and conference streams to beckon interest. On the other hand it allows labels to be…
Building a Learning spaceship…

Lego is an interesting metaphor to choose for a next gen learning environment. Let’s build a spaceship! If only it were that easy. If only it was clear what construction was actually needed. In my experience of building platforms, it’s rarely clear. Competing voices, with competing features. But apologies, here I am talking platform once more. Jim Groom’s…