Coursera grows fast, and looks – rightly so – overseas. For the moment, almost all courses seem to be in English. Will that language become even more dominant in higher education, because of the rapid expansion of American platforms? Or is it just the initial phase? via Diigo http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-number-of-university-partners-increases-focus-overseas/
“Need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee? Hit print.” I’m reading about this in the book Abundance (Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler), more about that book later on. via Diigo http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578002101200151098.html?mod=e2tw
Interesting. George Siemens, together with Bonnie Stewart and Dave Cormier have agreed (and been contracted) to write for Johns Hopkins University Press. George Siemens launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008 (with Stephen Downes). His book, about the scope and nature of higher education (HE) change, will… Continue reading
I’ve just finished reading The Rapture of the Nerds, written by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. It’s an often almost dream-like book about life in the era of the technological singularity. Wikipedia explains: The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.Since the capabilities of… Continue reading
Quartz seems to be an interesting and innovative news experiment: Jeff Sonderman at Poynter talks about 5 things journalists should know about it, but then again I’m getting wary about categories such as ‘journalists’ – the five points he mentions are important for bloggers, media entrepreneurs etc. A point which… Continue reading
Okay, gamification – using elements and design principles from games in non-game contexts – is already pretty hot. But now the real money could get involved. Ryan Kim at GigaOm sees gamification startups as the next big enterprise target: Gamification is thought of as a hyped buzzword by skeptics, but… Continue reading
I wrote a column for my newspaper about media streams and how also education should happen in streams (it’s in Dutch, and no, it seems that translating is not something which can be automated easily). Examples I used are the videostream at The Wall Street Journal, Worldstream, and Howard Rheingold’s… Continue reading
There is this idea that Facebook is just for entertainment, friends and family contacts. Robert Scoble already demonstrated that in fact Facebook can be used to create great lists, even more so than Twitter. Of course you can find interesting groups about any subject on Facebook, or follow media. I… Continue reading
I’m looking at Course Builder – as it is explained on https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/ it packages the software and technology used to build the Power Searching with Google online course. The guys at Google say: We hope you will use it to create your own online courses, whether they’re for 10 students… Continue reading
I’m pretty excited to learn that Howard Rheingold is offering a new course. I participated in his earlier courses about Introduction to Mind Amplifiers and Toward a Literacy of Cooperation, and of course there is the ongoing Peeragogy Handbook project. The new course runs for six weeks using asynchronous forums, blogs,… Continue reading