Jon Dron's bookmarks
Stories that matter and stories that don't: some thoughts on appropriate teaching roles for...
By Jon Dron 4 January 2024 @ 12:55pmwww.wired.com - Well, this was definitely going to happen. The system discussed in this Wired article is a bot (not available to the general public) that takes characters from the absurdly popular Bluey cartoon series and creates personalized bedtime stories...Published in Digital - The Human Nature of Generative AIs and the Technological Nature of Humanity:...
By Jon Dron 26 November 2023 @ 2:37pmwww.mdpi.com - A month or two ago I shared a "warts-and-all" preprint of this paper on the risks of educational uses of generative AIs. The revised, open-access published version, The Human Nature of Generative AIs and the Technological Nature of Humanity:...▶ How Education Works, the audio book: now with beats
By Jon Dron 8 November 2023 @ 3:46pmwww.spreaker.com - My book has been set to music! Many thanks to Terry Greene for converting How Education Works into the second in his inspired series of podcasts, EZ Learning - Audio Books with Beats. There's a total of 15 episodes that can be listened to online,...Preprint - The human nature of generative AIs and the technological nature of humanity:...
By Jon Dron 9 October 2023 @ 12:09pmwww.preprints.org - Here is a preprint of a paper I just submitted to MDPI's Digital journal that applies the co-participation model that underpins How Education Works (and a number of my papers over the last few years) to generative AIs (GAIs). I don't know whether it...10 minute chats on Generative AI - a great series, now including an interview with me
By Jon Dron 11 September 2023 @ 5:12pmwww.monash.edu - This is a great series of brief interviews between Tim Fawns and an assortment of educators and researchers from across the world on the subject of generative AI and its impact on learning and teaching. The latest (tenth in the series) is with...Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field | Open...
By Jon Dron 20 August 2023 @ 11:16amwww.openbookpublishers.com - Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field is a great new book about how researchers in the field of open, online, and distance education go about writing and/or their advice to newcomers in the...The artificial curriculum
By Jon Dron 15 July 2023 @ 1:23pmwww.researchgate.net - “Shaping the Future of Education: Exploring the Potential and Consequences of AI and ChatGPT in Educational Settings” by Simone Grassini is a well-researched, concise but comprehensive overview of the state of play for generative...View of Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective...
By Jon Dron 13 March 2023 @ 12:49pmwww.asianjde.com - This is a remarkable paper, pubished in the Asian Journal of Distance Education, written by 35 remarkable people from all over the world and me. It was led by the remarkable Aras Boskurt, who pulled all 36 of us together and wrote much of it in the...My latest paper: Technology, Teaching, and the Many Distances of Distance Learning | Journal of...
By Jon Dron 16 February 2023 @ 7:18pmwww.jofdl.nz - I am pleased to announce my latest paper, published openly in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, which has long been one of my favourite distance and ed tech journals. The paper starts with an abbreviated argument about the...Petition · Athabasca University - Oppose direct political interference in universities · Change.org
By Jon Dron 6 February 2023 @ 10:26amwww.change.org - I, like many staff and students, have been deeply shaken and outraged by recent events at Athabasca University. This is a petition by me and Simon Buckingham Shum, of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia to protest the blatant interference...Proceedings of The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference,...
By Jon Dron 13 January 2023 @ 11:06amconference.otessa.org - These are the proceedings of OTESSA '22. There's a good mix of research/theory and practice papers, including one from me, Rory McGreal, Vive Kumar, and Jennifer Davies arising from our work on trying to use digital landmarks to make e-texts more...Hot off the press: Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education (open access)
By Jon Dron 4 January 2023 @ 9:55pmlink.springer.com - This might be the most important book in the field of open, distance, and digital education to be published this decade. Congratulations to Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung, the editors, as well as to all the section editors, for assembling a...My latest paper: On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning
By Jon Dron 3 January 2023 @ 12:49pmjournal.otessa.org - This is a link to my latest paper, published in the closing days of 2022. The paper started as a couple of blog posts that I turned into a paper that nearly made an appearance in the Distance Education in China journal before a last-minute regime...Loab is showing us the unimaginable future of artificial intelligence - ABC News
By Jon Dron 30 November 2022 @ 12:01pmwww.abc.net.au - This is an awesome article, and I don't care whether the story of Loab is real, or invented as an artwork by the artist (Steph Swanson), or whatever. It is a super-creepy, spine-tingling, thought-provoking horror story that works on so many...Brunel University's Integrated Programme Assessment - a neat way to decouple learning and...
By Jon Dron 24 November 2022 @ 11:22amwww.brunel.ac.uk - I have frequently written about the need to decouple learning and credentials, so I love this approach to doing so from Brunel University. It fully decouples learning and credentials by offering ungraded study blocks (in North America the equivalent...The Socio-economic Contribution of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis
By Jon Dron 30 October 2022 @ 10:54amwww.religjournal.com - Jesus wept. This is a study from 2016 on the socio-economic contribution of religion to US society, published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. Its baseline estimate, based on revenue of faith-based institutions alone, is...In a nutshell, this is everything that is wrong with the cloud
By Jon Dron 29 October 2022 @ 11:22amboingboing.net - If you use an Adobe product (I don't know why you should - they are over-priced rubbish) you will find that some old Pantone spot colours in your own images (no matter how old) will be replaced with black when you load files using them, unless you...So, this is a thing...
By Jon Dron 26 September 2022 @ 3:24pmtwitter.com - Students are now using AIs to write essays and assignments for credit, and they are (probably) getting away with it. This particular instance may be fake, but the tools are widely available and it would be bizarre were no one to be using them for...My latest paper, "Learning, Technology, and Technique", now online in the Canadian...
By Jon Dron 10 August 2022 @ 7:50pmcjlt.ca - This is my latest paper, Learning, Technology, and Technique, in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (Vol. 48 No. 1, 2022). Essentially, because this was what I was invited to do, the paper shrinks down over...We need help: Athabasca University is facing an existential threat from the government of Alberta
By Jon Dron 5 August 2022 @ 4:26pm Comments (1)www.youtube.com - This video from Peter Scott, president of Athabasca University, is a clear, eloquent, and passionate plea to save our university and the education of its students from imminent destruction at the hands of a brutal, self-serving, short-sighted...Can GPT-3 write an academic paper on itself, with minimal human input?
By Jon Dron 2 July 2022 @ 12:51pmhal.archives-ouvertes.fr - Brilliant. The short answer is, of course, yes, and it doesn't do a bad job of it. This is conceptual art of the highest order. This is the preprint of a paper written by GPT-3 (as first author) about itself, submitted to "a well-known...Can GPT-3 write an academic paper on itself, with minimal human input?
By Jon Dron 2 July 2022 @ 12:48pmhal.archives-ouvertes.fr - Brilliant. The short answer is, of course, yes, and it doesn't do a bad job of it. This is conceptual art of the highest order. This is the preprint of a paper written by GPT-3 (as first author) about itself, submitted to "a well-known...Ernst & Young fined $100 million after employees cheated in exams
By Jon Dron 28 June 2022 @ 11:23pmwww.npr.org - Not just any exams: ethics exams. These are the very accountants who are supposed to catch cheats. I guess at least they'll understand their clientele pretty well. But how did this happen? There are clues in the article: "Many of the employees...Interesting product: Bionic Reading
By Jon Dron 19 May 2022 @ 10:44ambionic-reading.com - Having spent a while researching the literature on ways that visual landmarks and other text enhancements (and deliberate obfuscations) affect comprehension and recall, I am a little sceptical about the underlying theory for this patented product...So mouse jigglers are a thing now
By Jon Dron 9 December 2021 @ 9:30pmwww.amazon.ca - A mouse jiggler is a mechanical device that literally jiggles your mouse, or a dongle that electronically mimics mouse movement. There are even a few real mouses with jiggling functions built in. Why? Though there are a few people who might use it...Journal of Universal Rejection
By Jon Dron 1 December 2021 @ 11:22am Comments (3)www.universalrejection.org - Perfect. Just perfect. If anyone would like to collaborate with me to submit a paper to the Journal of Universal Rejection, feel free to contact me. I probably won't answer.Gather is a remarkable retro but modern collaboration, cooperation, and socialization system: I...
By Jon Dron 9 November 2021 @ 7:15pmcelinelatulipe.medium.com - The other day a small group of students and I had a really interesting experimental classroom session in Gather. The article linked here describes a much bigger-scale and intentional approach. If you're not familiar with Gather, its a web-based...The Uncensored Library – Reporters without borders
By Jon Dron 8 November 2021 @ 9:37amwww.uncensoredlibrary.com - This is very cool - a library of articles and journals that have been censored in various regions, built inside Minecraft, that thereby evades censorship (for now). It lends a whole different meaning to 'serious games'.Some thoughts for Ada Lovelace Day
By Jon Dron 12 October 2021 @ 10:56pmwww.scientificamerican.com - This Scientific American article tells the tale of one of the genesis stories of complexity science, this one from 1952, describing what, until relatively recently, was known as the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem (or 'paradox', though it is not in...At last, a serious use for AI: Brickit
By Jon Dron 2 July 2021 @ 10:10amhttps://brickit.app/ - Brickit is what AI was made for. You take a picture of your pile of LEGO with your phone or tablet, then the app figures out what pieces you have, and suggests models you could build with it, including assembly plans. The coolest detail, perhaps, is...Words will never be a substitute for grunts
By Jon Dron 14 April 2021 @ 12:55pmwww.aare.edu.au - Andrew Norton claims that online learning will never be a substitute for face-to-face learning. Indeed. Here are some other equally useful and true claims: electric vehicles will never be a substitute for gasoline-fueled vehicles; cellphones...What really impacts the use of active learning in undergraduate STEM education? Results from a...
By Jon Dron 8 April 2021 @ 9:38pmjournals.plos.org - This is a report on an interesting study by Naneh Apkarian et al, that asked a large-ish number (3796) of in-person American STEM profs (college and university levels) about the effects of various known factors on their use of active learning...My latest paper - Educational technology: what it is and how it works
By Jon Dron 4 April 2021 @ 11:42amhttps://rdcu.be/ch1tl - This is a link to my latest paper in the journal AI & Society. You can read it in a web browser from there, but it is not directly downloadable. A preprint of the submitted version (some small differences and uncorrected errors here and there,...Incarceration in Real Numbers
By Jon Dron 16 March 2021 @ 2:12pmmkorostoff.github.io - This is stunning, both in terms of content and in terms of its presentation. The content is depressingly familiar - the fact that the US incarcerates (in real numbers and as a percentage of population) vastly more people than any other country in...Affordable Internet for Canada - Virtual Day of Action today (March 16)
By Jon Dron 16 March 2021 @ 10:32am Comments (2)affordable-internet.ca - This is a timely event, running today via Zoom, as Rogers unexpectedly announce an attempted takeover of Shaw, thereby not only acquiring Shaw's extensive cable Internet and TV business, but also one of the last remaining serious competitors to the...EdTech Books
By Jon Dron 24 November 2020 @ 12:57pm Comments (8)https://edtechbooks.org/ - This is a great, well presented and nicely curated selection of open books on education and educational technology, ranging from classics (and compilations of chapters by classic authors) to modern guides, textbooks, and blog compilations, covering...Course Content - London Interdisciplinary School
By Jon Dron 6 November 2020 @ 12:23pm Comments (2)www.londoninterdisciplinaryschool.org - For those in other parts of the world, some translation may be needed here in order to understand what is novel about the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS): a course in the UK is equivalent to a program in North America, and a module is...Echoes and polarization in Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter: it's not just about the algorithms
By Jon Dron 30 October 2020 @ 3:48pmwww.washingtonpost.com - The authors of a recent paywalled article in MIS Quarterly here summarize their findings in another restrictive and normally paywalled site, the Washington Post. At least the latter gives some access - I was able to read it without forking out $15,...Strange affair of man with the machine
By Jon Dron 16 October 2020 @ 12:01pmlink.springer.com - This stunningly brilliant and passionate essay by my friend, mentor and inspiration, Karamjit Singh Gill (far too formal - he is Ranjit to me) is, sadly, occasioned by the death of his old friend, one of the most insightful, compassionate, humane...Why Social Media Make Us More Polarized, and How to Fix It - Scientific American
By Jon Dron 15 October 2020 @ 1:16pmwww.scientificamerican.com - This is an extremely fascinating article reporting on a couple of research studies by the author (The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds and Networked collective intelligence improves dissemination of scientific information regarding smoking risks)...Facebook Conducts 'Mass Censorship' of Climate Activists
By Jon Dron 26 September 2020 @ 11:36am Comments (2)earther.gizmodo.com - Immediately following its newly announced (and typically self-serving and cynical) initiative to uplift climate science on its site, Facebook showed its dedication to the cause by removing hundreds of climate change activist, indigenous, and social...Skills lost due to COVID-19 school closures will hit economic output for generations (hmmm)
By Jon Dron 11 September 2020 @ 10:12pmwww.cbc.ca - This CBC report is one of many dozens of articles in the world's press highlighting one rather small but startling assertion in a recent OECD report on the effects of Covid-19 on education - that the 'lost' third of a year of schooling in many...How Assessment is Changing in The Digital Age - Five Guiding Principles | teachonline.ca
By Jon Dron 1 September 2020 @ 11:59pmteachonline.ca - This article from teachonline.ca draws from a report by JISC (the UK academic network organization) to provide 5 'principles' for assessment. I put the scare quotes around 'principles' because they are mostly descriptive labels for trends and they...How social media platforms could flatten the curve of dangerous misinformation.
By Jon Dron 1 September 2020 @ 8:03pmslate.com - A simple article on a simple idea, which is to introduce brakes and/or circuit breakers to popular social media platforms in order to slow down viral posts to a speed that sysadmins can handle. Such posts can have deadly consequences and are often...Facebook is a 'parallel universe' of lies and minisformation crafted to deliver the...
By Jon Dron 31 August 2020 @ 5:18pmboingboing.net - This is a commentary by Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing on a New York Times article describing how the far-right is exploiting Facebook with ruthless efficiency. At least, that's one way to look at it. Another, as Beschizza notes, is: "...that...Kafkaesque and Orwellian technology design
By Jon Dron 19 August 2020 @ 3:08pmwww.theguardian.com - I am much indebted to the Romanian legal system for the examples it repeatedly provides of hard (rigid, inflexible, invariant) technologies enacted by human beings without the inconvenience, lack of accountability, or cost of actual machinery. I...I am disgusted, outraged, furious, sickened, and irritated by this perverse research (actually, no...
By Jon Dron 19 August 2020 @ 12:13amwww.pnas.org - I am really not at all offended in any way by this well-conducted, clearly reported, very interesting research into what the authors describe as 'moral contagion'. The actual article title is 'Emotion shapes the diffusion of...Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.
By Jon Dron 22 July 2020 @ 6:42pmstandardebooks.org - This is a great site. It doesn't have anything like the number of books to be found on sites like Project Gutenberg or Archive.org, but each one has been lovingly edited and restored to how it should be, and made available in most popular e-book...This New ‘Ion Drive’ Airplane Flew Straight out of Science Fiction
By Jon Dron 19 July 2020 @ 11:20ammedium.com - Well, this is cool and, indeed, right out of the pages of science fiction. It uses an array of highly charged electrodes on the wings, positively and negatively charged. The first in line ionizes nitrogen, which is therefore attracted to the second...Social physics (collection from Scientific Reports at nature.com)
By Jon Dron 7 July 2020 @ 3:11pmwww.nature.com - This is an incredibly large (more than 50) and broad collection of recent articles from nature.com - all or almost all of which appear to be open access - that in some way apply methods from physics to social contexts. There's a predictably large...Opinion: Let’s admit it – online education is a pale shadow of the real thing
By Jon Dron 20 May 2020 @ 12:39pmwww.theglobeandmail.com - Sigh. This is an opinion piece from a UoT philosophy professor, Mark Kingwell, published in the Globe and Mail. Its arguments (such as they are) are an extremely poor advertisement for his discipline or for the effectiveness of learning philosophy....Opinion: Let’s admit it – online education is a pale shadow of the real thing
By Jon Dron 20 May 2020 @ 12:37pmwww.theglobeandmail.com - Sigh. This is an opinion from a UoT philosophy professor, Mark Kingwell, published in the Globe and Mail.Its arguments (such as they are) are an extremely poor advertisement for his discipline or for the effectiveness of learning philosophy. This...Distributed Teaching
By Jon Dron 16 May 2020 @ 10:14am Comments (3)link.springer.com - I forgot to share this when it first came out at the end of last year. This is my contribution to Springer's Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, a brief (3000 word) article that gives a broad overview of the main ways in which the role of a teacher...The most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date source of information on COVID19 research
By Jon Dron 25 April 2020 @ 10:43am Comments (1)https://covid-trials.org/ - This site tracks and sorts registered COVID-19 trials, harvested from multiple reliable global databases as well as other promising research not included in such sources, mined and pre-filtered using AI techniques. The studies are all manually...Why Pioneer Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield Said the Mind Is More Than the Brain
By Jon Dron 9 March 2020 @ 1:15pmmindmatters.ai - I had not come across exactly this argument for mind-brain dualism before, though it resembles some going back to antiquity in its basic assumptions. It's an interesting idea, proposed by Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon working in the first half of...The makers of the game complaining about the people playing it
By Jon Dron 5 March 2020 @ 12:20pmwww.cbc.ca - ""I think as long as we have education, we're going to have people who are going to try and game the system and we just have to keep up with them," said Deb Eerkes, the university's director of student conduct and accountability. " (40 University...What is it to be Bayesian? The (pretty simple) math modelling behind a Big Data buzzword | Aeon...
By Jon Dron 24 January 2020 @ 11:52am Comments (4)aeon.co - This is a great little (16 minute) video that intuitively explains Bayesian probability from a variety of perspectives, but especially in visual (geometric) terms. Very useful for pretty much anyone - this is a critical thinking skill that applies...Is China really the educational powerhouse that the PISA rankings suggest? (tl;dr: not even close)
By Jon Dron 5 January 2020 @ 8:01pmen.jmdedu.com - Administered by the OECD, PISA is basically a set of tests, adapted to each country, that attempt to measure educational performance across a range of skills in order to rank educational systems around the world. The rankings really matter to many...Excellent news: Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms.
By Jon Dron 11 December 2019 @ 12:05pmwww.techdirt.com - Well this is good news! Of course, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and there is much that could go wrong in between plan and execution, but it seems that Twitter is recommitting itself to openness, standards, and the use of protocols...Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation - Scientific American
By Jon Dron 25 October 2019 @ 6:32pmwww.scientificamerican.com - Well this is not a surprise. It turns out that social media and cellphone use have little to no effect on the mental well-being of teenagers. And, having just hung out with more than 10,000 young people in Vancouver, I'd say that they seem to be...Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology...
By Jon Dron 3 October 2019 @ 10:16am Comments (1)www.nature.com - I've been struggling a bit with writing a chapter on how we should research technologies, especially soft technologies, in the light of their innate complexity, the difficulties of identifying relevant boundaries, their situated nature, the...The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
By Jon Dron 18 May 2019 @ 12:47pmgetpocket.com - A straightforward journalistic article from the Atlantic that does a decent job of explaining how and why learning styles theories simply don't work, with a particular focus on VARK. The takeaways are that, yes, people do often prefer to learn in...E-Learn 2019, Call for Proposals: Due July 8
By Jon Dron 24 April 2019 @ 1:13pmwww.aace.org - Call for Proposals: Due July 8 E-learn has been running since 1996 (originally under the name of WebNet) and is a great conference for researchers into online learning working in higher education and related fields. At its peak, it used to attract...George Siemens says he was wrong about networks. Well, not exactly wrong...
By Jon Dron 30 March 2019 @ 8:35pmwww.linkedin.com - A characteristically smart and articulate post from George Siemens explaining why a view of the universe as nothing but networks all the way down - that he has supported in the past - is not sufficient to explain everything that matters. As George...Premature optimism
By Jon Dron 28 February 2019 @ 3:35pmtechcrunch.com - Despite careful future-proofing and a structure that was deliberately built to evolve over time so that it would remain current, my elderly Social Computing course has pretty much reached the end of its useful life, so I have started to revise and...A Universal Moral Code?
By Jon Dron 14 February 2019 @ 11:40amwww.journals.uchicago.edu - It appears that there may be a universal moral code, at least across 60 very different cultures, at least according to this large metastudy of anthropological literature. The authors focus explicitly and exclusively on manifestations of cooperative...Google kills off Hangouts and Allo in a cull to its messaging apps
By Jon Dron 8 December 2018 @ 6:12pmwww.alphr.com - Well, this is rotten. As the article suggests, the loss of Hangouts and Allo was pretty inevitable, given the large overlap in functionality between them and various Google apps (notably their Messages app), and that Google has a long history of...Microsoft under GDPR microscope for Office 365 and OneDrive | Alphr
By Jon Dron 15 November 2018 @ 12:04pm Comments (4)www.alphr.com - No big surprises here to anyone that has ever so much as glanced at Microsoft's business model and historical abuse of its customers, but definitely a matter of concern for organizations (like Athabasca University) that rent their services from...Smart learning environments, and not so smart learning environments: a systems view | Smart...
By Jon Dron 23 October 2018 @ 11:15amslejournal.springeropen.com - This is a new article from me about smartness in learning environments. The originally submitted title was 'stupid learning environments' but the reviewers rightly felt that this didn't accurately reflect the main points of the article. It's worth...Laziness Does Not Exist
By Jon Dron 19 October 2018 @ 10:43am Comments (5)medium.com - This is a refreshing article from E Price, a social psychologist, who makes an obvious and self-evident point that is far too often forgotten: that there are always underlying reasons for what we perceive as laziness. This quote sums it up: "People...Open Education Resources, Massive Open Online Courses, and Online Platforms for Distance and...
By Jon Dron 8 September 2018 @ 11:59am Comments (1)link.springer.com - Ironically published in a closed and massively over-priced Handbook of IT in Primary and Secondary Education, here's a chapter from me and Gerald Ardito on open and distance learning in the context of teaching children (paywall). I don’t know...Unintelligent machines
By Jon Dron 15 August 2018 @ 1:26pmwww.codeinstitute.net - In 2012 there were roughly 100 million lines of code in an average car, a number that has been rapidly increasing for decades, and is no doubt significantly higher now. If you printed out 100 million lines of code, it would consume approximately 1.8...You Can Learn Everything Online Except for the Things You Can't
By Jon Dron 9 August 2018 @ 1:36pm Comments (3)www.wired.com - A Wired magazine article from Rhett Allain that is big on metaphor (courses are the chocolate chips, the cookie is the on-campus experience) but very small on critical thinking. What it does highlight, though, is the failure of imagination lurking...Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it
By Jon Dron 3 July 2018 @ 6:13pm Comments (1)aeon.co - An article for Aeon by Jon Tennant on the heinous state of affairs that gives unscrupulous publishers profit margins that put Apple to shame while hiding publicly funded research from the public that pays for it. It is a shamefully broken system...Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance
By Jon Dron 22 June 2018 @ 10:54am Comments (1)www.sciencedirect.com - Sadly published behind a paywall (but, happily, also available at SciHub) this is a fascinating sequence of studies from Hafenbrack & Voh that, firstly, appears to demonstrate that mindfulness (meditative practice) actively reduces...The ultimate insomnia cure: new GDPR legislation soothingly read by Peter Jefferson
By Jon Dron 29 May 2018 @ 5:22pm Comments (3)blog.calm.com - The BBC's Shipping Forecast is one of the great binding traditions of British culture that has been many a Brit's lullaby since time immemorial (ie. long before I was born). Though I never once paid attention to its content in all the decades I...Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web
By Jon Dron 13 March 2018 @ 3:57pm Comments (2)www.theguardian.com - TBL is rightfully indignant and concerned about the fact that “what was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.” The Web, according to Berners-Lee, is at...Facebook has a Big Tobacco Problem
By Jon Dron 18 February 2018 @ 12:08pmmondaynote.com - A perceptive article listing some of Facebook's evils and suggesting an analogy between the tactics used by Big Tobacco and those used by the company. I think there are a few significant differences. Big Tobacco is not one company bent on profit no...Facebook’s days may be numbered as UK youth abandon the platform
By Jon Dron 14 February 2018 @ 9:10pm Comments (1)www.alphr.com - The end of Facebook couldn't come soon enough, but we've been reading headlines not unlike this for around a decade, yet still its malignant tumour in the lungs of the Web grows, sucking the air out of all good things. Despite losses in the youth...Turns out the STEM ‘gender gap’ isn’t a gap at all
By Jon Dron 3 January 2018 @ 11:46pm Comments (1)windsorstar.com - At least in Ontario, it seems that there are about as many women as men taking STEM programs at undergraduate level. This represents a smaller percentage of women taking STEM subjects overall because there are way more women entering university in...terra0 - a forest that will one day buy itself
By Jon Dron 19 December 2017 @ 10:58ampaulkolling.de - I love this art project - a forest that owns itself and that makes money on its own behalf, eventually with no human control or ownership. From the blurb... "The Project emerged from research in the fields of crypto governance, smart contracts,...DADA - social networking through drawing
By Jon Dron 2 December 2017 @ 1:52pm Comments (1)https://dada.nyc/ - DADA is a social network where communication occurs through drawings. Conversations turn into collaborative artworks. It's wonderful.Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits
By Jon Dron 2 December 2017 @ 12:54pmaeon.co - Martin Rees (UK Astronomer Royal) takes on complexity and emergence. This is essentially a primer on why complex systems - as he says, accounting for 99% of what's interesting about the world - are not susceptible to reductionist science despite...A Universe Explodes: A Blockchain Book, from Editions At Play
By Jon Dron 1 December 2017 @ 7:42pm Comments (2)medium.com - A really nice project from the Editions at Play team at Google, in which blockchain is used both to limit supply to a digital book (only 100 copies made) and, as the book is passed on, to make it 'age,' in the sense that each reader must remove two...Evidence mounts that laptops are terrible for students at lectures. So what?
By Jon Dron 29 November 2017 @ 5:35pm Comments (3)www.theverge.com - The Verge reports on a variety of studies that show taking notes with laptops during lectures results in decreased learning when compared with notes taken using pen and paper. This tells me three things, none of which is what the article is aiming...Small talk, big implications
By Jon Dron 21 November 2017 @ 7:42pm Comments (3)qz.com - An article from Quartz with some good links to studies showing the very many benefits of interacting with others, even at a very superficial level. I particularly like the report of a study showing the (quite strong) cognitive benefits of...Addicted to learning or addicted to grades?
By Jon Dron 3 November 2017 @ 11:25pmwww.cbc.ca - Figure 1: Skinner's teaching machine It is not much of a surprise that many apps are designed to be addictive, nor that there is a whole discipline behind making them so, but I was particularly interested in the delightfully named Dopamine Labs'...Signal : now with proper desktop apps
By Jon Dron 2 November 2017 @ 12:07pm Comments (1)signal.org - Signal is arguably the most open, and certainly the most secure, privacy-preserving instant messaging/video or voice-calling system available today. It is open source, ad-free, standards-based, simple, and very well designed. Though not filled with...The Downfall of Doppler Labs: Inside the Last Days of a Hardware Startup | WIRED
By Jon Dron 1 November 2017 @ 6:24pmwww.wired.com - Oh drat. So Doppler Labs is no more. This is very sad. I love my Here One bluetooth earbuds, have recommended them to many people, and would do so again. For simple noise cancelling they run countless rings around every other headphones and earbuds...Ominous clouds
By Jon Dron 31 October 2017 @ 6:01pmwww.engadget.com - Though Microsoft has been unusually prone to the kind of chicanery described in this article for most of its existence, the problem of price hiking combined with shifting, decaying, or dying cloud services is inherent in the cloud model they are...Study links student cheating to whether a course is popular or disliked
By Jon Dron 8 October 2017 @ 1:16pm Comments (3)www.insidehighered.com - We already know that extrinsically motivated students (mainly those driven by grades and testing) are far more likely to cheat than those who are more intrinsically motivated. I bookmarked yet another example of this effect just the other day but...This was actually accepted for an IEEE conference and then published
By Jon Dron 6 October 2017 @ 11:06pm Comments (2)ieeexplore.ieee.org - I invite you to draw your own conclusions about this paywalled paper and the amount of quality control and editorial input that goes into IEEE publications nowadays. Here's the abstract, which is one of the more coherent passages in the...The NGDLE: We Are the Architects | EDUCAUSE
By Jon Dron 3 October 2017 @ 11:43pmer.educause.edu - A nice overview of where the NGDLE concept was earlier this year. We really need to be thinking about this at AU because the LMS alone will not take us where we need to be. One of the nice things about this article is that it talks quite clearly...The return of the weblog – Ethical Tech
By Jon Dron 28 September 2017 @ 11:58amwords.werd.io - Blogs have evolved a bit over the past 20 years or so, and diversified. The always terrific Ben Werdmuller here makes the distinction between thinkpieces (what I tend to think of as vaguely equivalent to keynote presentations at a conference, less...Instagram uses 'I will rape you' post as Facebook ad in latest algorithm mishap
By Jon Dron 26 September 2017 @ 4:44pmwww.theguardian.com - Another in a long line of algorithm fails from the Facebook stable, this time from Instagram... This is a postcard from our future when AI and robots rule the planet. Intelligence without wisdom is a very dangerous thing. See my recent post on...Infants make more attempts to achieve a goal when they see adults persist
By Jon Dron 24 September 2017 @ 8:02pmscience.sciencemag.org - A straightforward and briefly reported study that supports the rather obvious hypothesis that quite young (15-month-old) children can and do learn from observing adults, at least in the short term. The twist here is that adults in the study were...No, you aren't a 'visual' learner
By Jon Dron 21 September 2017 @ 7:16pmtheweek.com - It's a damning indictment of our collective resistance to truth that the point of this article still has to be restated, yet again. Amazingly, 93% of the general public and 76% of educators still erroneously believe that we should be taught in ways...Amazon helps and teaches bomb makers
By Jon Dron 19 September 2017 @ 5:30pm Comments (3)www.alphr.com - Amazon's recommender algorithm works pretty well: if people start to gather together ingredients needed for making a thermite bomb, Amazon helpfully suggests other items that may be needed to make it, including hardware like ball bearings, switches,...Analytic thinking undermines religious belief while intelligence undermines social conservatism,...
By Jon Dron 18 September 2017 @ 1:37pmwww.psypost.org - 'Suggests' is the operative word in the title here. The title is a sensationalist interpretation of an inconclusive and careful study, and I don't think this is what the authors of the study mean to say at all. Indeed, they express caution in...Highly praised children are more inclined to cheat
By Jon Dron 15 September 2017 @ 3:26pm Comments (2)www.alphr.com - The title of this Alphr article is a little misleading because the point the article rightly makes is that it all depends on the type of praise given. It reports on research from the University of Toronto that confirms (yet again) what should be...E-Learn 2017, Vancouver, 17-20 October - last day of cheaper registration rates
By Jon Dron 13 September 2017 @ 11:11am Comments (3)www.aace.org - Today is the final day to get the discount rate if you are planning on coming to E-Learn in Vancouver this year (US$455 today vs US$495 from tomorrow onwards). It promises to be quite a big event this year, with an estimated 900+ concurrent...Not true: coding bootcamps you can take online are an "oxymoron" no one has yet solved
By Jon Dron 1 September 2017 @ 9:50pmqz.com - A Quartz article that claims (accurately) that p-learning bootcamps dominate for those learning programming and other technical skills and (inaccurately) that the reason for that is that e-learning is much less engaging. In fact, there's a sneaky...Making the community the curriculum | Dave Cormier
By Jon Dron 30 August 2017 @ 7:48pmdavecormier.pressbooks.com - The always wonderful Dave Cormier is writing a book (open, of course) about rhizomatic learning and, as you might expect given Dave's eclectic and rich range of skills (from uber-tech-guru to uber-learning-guru) not to mention his cutting edge...SpyStudent: hidden wireless video live transmission camera
By Jon Dron 25 August 2017 @ 3:12pm Comments (1)www.dron.si - "Who does not know the problems with the driving test or studies testing? You have not time to learn and have more important things to do! And suddenly, the date for the exam or test in a few days.If your exam is important to you and you do not know...Professor Jon Dron | Beyond Busy
By Jon Dron 13 July 2017 @ 2:13pm Comments (1)getbeyondbusy.com - An interview with me by Graham Allcott, author of the bestselling How to be a productivity ninja and other books, for his podcast series Beyond Busy, and as part of the research for his next book. In it I ramble a lot about issues like social media,...Higher Education Whisperer: MIT For Credit edX Course Shows How to Market e-Learning
By Jon Dron 29 June 2017 @ 1:55am Comments (1)blog.highereducationwhisperer.com - Great critique by Tom Worthington of an alleged for-credit MOOC from MIT that was anything but a MOOC. As Tom rightly points out, two instructors, 31 students, and online materials from EdX do not a MOOC make. As he notes, this kind of instructional...Posts by Matthew Prineas - Athabasca University's new Provost and Vice-president, Academic
By Jon Dron 26 June 2017 @ 10:03amevolllution.com - I suspect everyone on Athabasca University's staff will be very interested in these posts by Matthew Prineas, who we will welcome on September 5th as our new provost and VPA, that show a great understanding of at least some of the benefits and...Computer science students should learn to cheat, not be punished for it
By Jon Dron 31 May 2017 @ 10:45am Comments (1)thenextweb.com - This is a well thought-through response to a recent alarmist NYT article about cheating among programming students. The original NYT article is full of holy pronouncements about the evils of plagiarism, horrified statistics about its extent, and...State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition
By Jon Dron 16 May 2017 @ 11:44ammfeldstein.com - Hat-tip to Tim Terry (@tterry) for sharing this one from Phil Hill. tldr; - Blackboard and its acquisitions continue to shrink (great!), Canvas continues to grow (good), Moodle continues to thrive (very good), partly driven by Blackboard's hosted...Universities must do more to tackle use of smart drugs, say experts
By Jon Dron 10 May 2017 @ 4:07pm Comments (1)www.theguardian.com - Oh good grief. I wonder why students would be taking such risks? Oh, right... "Modup, a website selling Modafinil, told the Guardian that during exam time the volume of Modafinil shipped to the UK doubles." Funny that, in the whole article, there...Learnium
By Jon Dron 25 April 2017 @ 4:54pm Comments (5)www.learnium.com - Learnium is yet another attempt to overlay a cloud-based social medium on institutional learning, in the same family as systems like Edmodo, Wikispaces Classroom, Lore, GoingOn, etc, etc. I deliberately exclude from this list the far more excellent,...Study reveals scale of antisemitism online (tldr; no it doesn't)
By Jon Dron 29 March 2017 @ 12:02pm Comments (1)www.alphr.com - Researchers analyzing millions of posts across an assortment of popular social media assert that 63% of antisemitic posts were to be found on Twitter. The writers suggest: "The larger proportion of such hate speech found on Twitter could be because...post-reality fictoid-facts
By Jon Dron 21 January 2017 @ 12:55pmwww.theguardian.com - Satirists are mostly flummoxed by Trump, because there's no absurdity they can dream up that is more absurd than the evil orange turd itself, and that is not out-trumped by some yet more appalling and improbable excrescence oozing from its tiny...Bridge champion who played her cards right (From The Argus)
By Jon Dron 11 January 2017 @ 3:27pm Comments (1)www.theargus.co.uk - Sad news for the world of bridge, about which I know almost nothing apart from what Sandra Landy, several-times world and European bridge champion, occasionally shared with me, and sad news for me. I learned today that she died last week, at the age...DeepDyve - Your Personal Research Library
By Jon Dron 6 January 2017 @ 7:28pmwww.deepdyve.com - 'Like Spotify for academic articles', the slogan says. It gives access to a claimed 10,000 paywalled academic journals for $40USD/month ($30/month for a year). The site correctly claims that you can therefore get a whole year's access to all...Leonard Cohen Dead at 82 - Rolling Stone
By Jon Dron 10 November 2016 @ 7:55pm Comments (1)www.rollingstone.com - Another sad piece of news in a year of much sad news. To be fair, it does not come as a great surprise. He had been preparing for this for a long time, approaching death with the same style, creativity, and elegance as he approached his...The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats
By Jon Dron 9 November 2016 @ 11:45am Comments (3)www.poetryfoundation.org - My creeping horror at what happened south of the border yesterday is hard to express. For some reason, though, these words from Yeats keep repeating in my head.Scraping Google Scholar to write your PhD literature chapter
By Jon Dron 13 October 2016 @ 4:50pm Comments (2)mystudentvoices.com - This looks really excellent - it scrapes Google Scholar, starting with a search that reveals work you already know about and that you think is significant. From those search results it generates an exportable Gephi map of authors,...What’s So New about the New Atheists? – Virtual Canuck
By Jon Dron 3 May 2016 @ 12:44pmvirtualcanuck.ca - This is a nicely crafted, deeply humanist, gentle and thought-provoking sermon, given by Terry Anderson to members of his Unitarian church on atheistic thinking and values. I have a lot of sympathy with the Unitarians. A church that does not expect...To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil...
By Jon Dron 11 September 2015 @ 4:16pmqz.com - Delightfully deadpan and believable philosophical investigation into the ethics of animal activism and some ethical justifications for vegetarianism. In fact, it is so believable that some people have taken it at face value and have been up in arms...Wiping out species may boost evolution – study — RT News
By Jon Dron 19 August 2015 @ 10:53amwww.rt.com - Brief report on some interesting research that demonstrates that mass extinctions speed up the evolution of those species that are left. What is particularly nice about it is its support for the principle that evolvability is itself selected by...WATCH: 13 Conservative MPs drone on like robots reading the exact same script
By Jon Dron 5 August 2015 @ 5:39pm Comments (1)www.pressprogress.ca - Marvellous. Unlike the protagonists, this speaks for itself.Expertise and the Illusion of Knowledge
By Jon Dron 22 July 2015 @ 9:42pm Comments (3)theness.com - A post about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically claims (and, in a series of studies) demonstrates that ignorance is often typified not the absence of knowledge but by the illusion of it. People think they know more than they do and, at least...From Representation to Emergence: Complexity's challenge to the epistemology of schooling -...
By Jon Dron 9 July 2015 @ 3:21pm Comments (2)onlinelibrary.wiley.com - This is my second post for today on the subject of boundaries and complex systems (yes, I am writing a paper!), this time pointing to a paper by Osberg, Biesta and Cilliers from 2008 that applies the concepts to knowledge and education. It's a...Boundaries and Hierarchies in Complex Systems
By Jon Dron 9 July 2015 @ 12:25pmblogs.cim.warwick.ac.uk - This rather elderly paper by Paul Cilliers peters off to an unsatisfyingly vague and obvious conclusion, but it does have some quite useful clarifications and observations about the nature of boundaries as they relate to hierarchies, networks and...Surprise! Our Attention Spans Aren’t Dead!
By Jon Dron 31 May 2015 @ 5:14pmmedium.com - Interesting bit of analysis from Medium, the makers of Pocket (which, self-referentially, I used to save this link to read - and bookmark here - later), showing that users of Pocket save and read articles of 2000-5000 words more often than those of...The new axis of evil — Canada: One third of American 8th graders think we live in a dictatorship
By Jon Dron 18 May 2015 @ 8:38pmwww.theprovince.com - You could look at the 'fact' that a third of American 8th grade students think Canada is a dictatorship as just another tragi-comic indictment of the US educational system, or of the blindness of the US to the existence or validity of any other...Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans
By Jon Dron 13 May 2015 @ 11:28amwww.newyorker.com - "The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them." Marvellous.BusinessTown
By Jon Dron 3 May 2015 @ 1:01pmwelcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com - Richard Scarry meets silicon valley. Wonderful and true.The Logical Fallacy Collection: 30 Ways to Lose an Argument
By Jon Dron 9 February 2015 @ 12:34pmthevisualcommunicationguy.com - A nicely designed infographic presenting a few common fallacious approaches to argument, both informal and formal, in an easily digestible form.Challenge Propagation: Towards a theory of distributed intelligence and the global brain
By Jon Dron 4 January 2015 @ 2:24pm Comments (1)cleamc11.vub.ac.be - Fascinating paper from the always thought-provoking and often inspirational Francis Heylighen, in which he draws together various models of distributed intelligence, distributed cognition, evolution and complex adaptive systems, incorporating...For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal
By Jon Dron 18 December 2014 @ 7:23pm Comments (4)www.scientificamerican.com - A Scientific American article on the prevalence of plagiarism and contract cheating in journal articles. The tl;dr version lies near the end of the article: "Now that a number of companies have figured out how to make money off of...Chill-inducing music enhances altruism in humans
By Jon Dron 2 December 2014 @ 2:39amjournal.frontiersin.org - A neat bit of research that apparently demonstrates people appear to become more altruistic after listening to music that affects them positively. Feeling good leads to doing good! Makes sense.Nature (the journal) to be free to view
By Jon Dron 2 December 2014 @ 1:38amwww.nature.com - There are lots of caveats and some rather serious and mostly pointless restrictions (publishers have not figured out how to let go yet) but, on balance, this is pretty darn good news.StudentLife: Assessing Mental Health, Academic Performance and Behavioral Trends of College...
By Jon Dron 22 September 2014 @ 3:03pmstudentlife.cs.dartmouth.edu - A totally fascinating study of students conducted using a massive amount of automatically collected data from smartphones along with other data collected from other systems and via surveys to come up with a large set of correlations relating to...Professor forces students to buy his own $200 textbook
By Jon Dron 19 September 2014 @ 11:37am Comments (2)www.washingtonpost.com - This article is actually purportedly about the very unsurprising discovery that students who can't afford textbooks are downloading them illegally, even for ethics classes. Shocking! Not. However, the thing that really shocks me about this article...Komar and Melamid: Most Wanted and Least Wanted Paintings
By Jon Dron 29 August 2014 @ 1:36pm Comments (2)awp.diaart.org - I don't know why it took me so long to find this, but I'm very glad I did. This is a wonderful art project dating back to the mid 90s in which Vitaly Komar and alex Melamid asked people about their aesthetic preferences and taste in painting in...Book: Reusing Open Resources
By Jon Dron 27 July 2014 @ 10:13amroutledge-ny.com - Now in print, a new and interesting edited book by Allison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler on open educational resources, (disclaimer: includes a chapter by me and Terry Anderson). Apart from us, Allison and Chris have gathered a great bunch...There's a fitness tracker for your vagina. Quantifying your life has gone too far
By Jon Dron 14 July 2014 @ 11:57amwww.theguardian.com - A Guardian article from Jess Zimmerman. The arguments are inelligent and Zimmerman recognizes the value as well as the dangers of socially-enabled biofeedback devices. The kGoal (tagline 'Fitbit for your vagina') actually sounds like...Academic Publisher Fights Publication Of Paper Criticizing Publishers' Price Increases And...
By Jon Dron 13 June 2014 @ 11:36amwww.techdirt.com - Taylor & Francis doing the evil thing, censoring, annotating with disclaimers and delaying publication of an article critical of the company and its greedy, exploitative brethren. For-profit journals have no place in academia any more, if ever...Affinity space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
By Jon Dron 29 April 2014 @ 7:52pmen.wikipedia.org - Terry Anderson drew my attention today to the concept of the 'affinity space' from James Paul Gee (always an interesting writer), which bears a marked resemblance to our understanding of the set as a social form for learning, and with which I was...Journal of Interactive Media in Education - Open for Learning Special Issue
By Jon Dron 14 April 2014 @ 10:36amwww-jime.open.ac.uk - A special issue of JIME on open learning with 5 chapters (full disclaimer: including one by me and Terry Anderson) from a forthcoming book edited by Chris Pegler and Allison Littlejohn, 'Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work,...George Siemens Gets Connected - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Jon Dron 13 January 2014 @ 4:07pmchronicle.com - My friend and inspirational thought leader George gets well-deserved recognition in this in-depth Chronicle article that gives George's background as well as an overview of some of his ideas, particularly as they relate to MOOCs. The article has one...Peer Learning Handbook | Peeragogy.org
By Jon Dron 31 December 2013 @ 6:16pmhttp://peeragogy.org/ - Interesting and free evolving handbook for learning with and from others without formal structures and courses. It's a little overblown in singing its own praises and a little lacking in much substance yet, not to mention having a cringeworthy...Boston Study: What Higher Standardized Test Scores Don’t Mean
By Jon Dron 20 December 2013 @ 12:22amcommonhealth.wbur.org - Interesting report and interview on the relationship between test scores of 'crystallized skills' (what schools teach) and 'fluid intelligence' (basically, the ability to think). Of course, there is none. Futhermore, teaching makes almost no...Top UK headteacher: Michael Gove is 'pressing the rewind button'
By Jon Dron 19 December 2013 @ 11:46pmwww.theguardian.com - An article from the Guardian that makes me glad my kids have already gone through the UK school system. The pigeon-brained fool in charge of UK education right now, Michael Gove, is doing his level best to set school education in that country back a...Who's Cheating Whom?
By Jon Dron 29 November 2013 @ 11:32amwww.alfiekohn.org - I love Alfie Kohn - his writing is consistently clear, constructive and filled with sound arguments based on bulletproof research that continue to surprise even though the conclusions are completely obvious to anyone who spends a moment thinking...Donald Clark Plan B: When Big Data goes bad: 6 epic fails
By Jon Dron 8 November 2013 @ 2:54amdonaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk - Donald once again in brilliant form cracking open a bunch of academic memes that still pervade the education system and have way too much influence on those that fund it. Especially good on challenging the awful data underlying standardization and...IGI Global: Open Access
By Jon Dron 4 September 2013 @ 1:20pmwww.igi-global.com - This is a very interesting development. I've not looked fully into the fine print but it looks on the face of it as though IGI, publishers of my first book and a number of chapters and articles I have written over the years, may have seen the light...Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education - NYTimes.com
By Jon Dron 3 September 2013 @ 12:04pmwww.nytimes.com - This is a report on the What Works Clearinghouse, a set of 'evidence-based' experimental studies of things that affect learning outcomes in US schools, measured in the traditional 'did they do better on the tests' manner. It's a great series of...Killing stupid software patents is really easy, and you can help
By Jon Dron 26 July 2013 @ 1:01pmboingboing.net - 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...The Psychology of Hiring: Why Brainteasers Don't Belong in Job Interviews : The New Yorker
By Jon Dron 1 July 2013 @ 10:23am Comments (2)www.newyorker.com - 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...The Roots of Grades-and-Tests
By Jon Dron 18 June 2013 @ 3:36pm Comments (4)www.alfiekohn.org - 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...Do Online Students Cheat More Often?
By Jon Dron 31 May 2013 @ 9:56amwww.onlinecollege.org - 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.Spy ebook reader
By Jon Dron 25 April 2013 @ 6:59pmwww.spystudy.com - I like this device but I love the way it is being sold. This and other products on the site are sold (at exhorbitant prices, incidentally, that can all be greatly bettered elsewhere) as devices intended to help people to cheat in exams....Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility | Daniel | Journal of...
By Jon Dron 3 March 2013 @ 6:08pmwww-jime.open.ac.uk - Nice to see that a few journals are starting to run articles on MOOCs. This is a straighforward and quite well-informed JIME article describing the state of play in MOOCs last year (2012).Active Learning Not Associated with Student Learning in a Random Sample of College Biology Courses
By Jon Dron 25 February 2013 @ 4:49pm Comments (1)www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov - Very well conducted research showing that, in the study sample, active learning does not produce any significant gains compared with the inactive variety. What is most interesting is the reason the authors discover for this, which fits perfectly...What’s going on at Athabasca University?
By Jon Dron 25 February 2013 @ 12:26pmwww.tonybates.ca - Tony Bates on recent events at AU, including a list of facts that are known about what may lie behind the very sudden and unanticipated (at least by the victims) firing/resignation/termination of four of the most important and well-respected...Athabasca University - Public deserves to know what's happening
By Jon Dron 25 February 2013 @ 12:09pm Comments (1)beaconnews.ca - A post providing speculation but mainly questions about the causes of recent events affecting and affected by AU's leadership.Failure-triggered training, or, secret shoppers go phishing
By Jon Dron 2 February 2013 @ 2:21amwww.daveswhiteboard.com - This is also reported on (wonderfully) by Donald Clark at http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca/2013/01/cool-research-happy-sheets-hopeless.html and the original slides are at...Reconsidering Moore's Transactional Distance Theory
By Jon Dron 20 November 2012 @ 6:30pmwww.eurodl.org - An interesting paper from the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning that attempts to redefine Moore's notion of transactional distance as a distance in understanding between a learner and a teacher that needs to be closed. I'm...Donald Clark Plan B: IDI – 7 reasons why online degree students outperform University campus-based...
By Jon Dron 5 November 2012 @ 3:10pmdonaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca - Further proof, if it were needed, that online learning can outperform face to face learning. But, like everything in education, it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it.Education Technology Innovation 2013 Conference : Industry : Research Centre : Athabasca University
By Jon Dron 5 November 2012 @ 10:48amresearch.athabascau.ca - Education Technology Innovation 2013 Conference If you are a researcher, an education R&D company, or a public or private sector user of education technologies, please join us for this upcoming event, hosted by Athabasca University. May 1st:...Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence hypothesis
By Jon Dron 27 October 2012 @ 11:57amrstb.royalsocietypublishing.org - Excellent paper in support of social learning in both theoretical and empirical terms. Abstract: If social learning is more efficient than independent individual exploration, animals should learn vital cultural skills exclusively, and...Scolaris
By Jon Dron 22 October 2012 @ 4:16pm Comments (1)http://scolaris.ca/ - A great idea - modelled broadly on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, this provides an opportunity to connect students with funders for scholarships, tuition fees, courses, etc. For funders ('philanthropis'), this is a great way to pay it forward...Open Access Week :: Athabasca University
By Jon Dron 14 October 2012 @ 12:25pmopenaccess.athabascau.ca - The theme for the 2012 Open Access Week is "Set the Default to Open Access”. Athabasca University is proud to participate in its fourth international Open Access Week, between October 22-28, 2012 to broaden awareness and understanding...Flickr: The Commons
By Jon Dron 6 October 2012 @ 11:21am Comments (1)www.flickr.com - Flickr Commons contains a vast array of free-to-use public domain images from many collections, well tagged and annotated. In general, I prefer Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org) though it is slightly harder to find public domain...Abstract Science
By Jon Dron 4 October 2012 @ 10:24am Comments (1)www.huffingtonpost.com - By Noah Gray. This is a great and very concise tutorial on how to write a scientific abstract (applies equally to education, social science, computing, etc). I wish over half the very many papers I get to review followed these simple guidelines....Top 10 Open-Source Platforms to Build Your Own Social Network
By Jon Dron 21 September 2012 @ 11:03amdzineblog.com - An eclectic mix of tools for creating social sites, including one or two that are simply free hosting sites (e.g. Mixxt) rather than open source platforms.Simple XSLT Tutorial - XSLT in 5 minutes - YouTube
By Jon Dron 13 September 2012 @ 11:56amwww.youtube.com - A fairly straightforward and pleasantly informal show-me introduction to transforming XML files into something else - in this case, into HTML documents. Aimed at those who already know a little about programming though others should be able to...University of the People
By Jon Dron 27 August 2012 @ 11:04pmhttp://www.uopeople.org/ - The University of the People aims to be a truly open university, intended for those that cannot afford a university degree, especially in developing countries. It is not completely free but there is just a single enrolment fee and, soon, small fees...Interactive on-line formative evaluation of student assignments
By Jon Dron 27 August 2012 @ 11:12amespace.library.curtin.edu.au - I've referred people to this work by Heinz Dreher many times over the past few years but usually forget where the original paper resides, so here is a bookmark to this interesting research. It provides a useful literature review that covers some of...$25 million investment backs startup aiming to create elite university | Inside Higher Ed
By Jon Dron 18 June 2012 @ 12:47pm Comments (1)www.insidehighered.com - An interesting model intended to create a cut-price for-profit top-class university. It could work. The combination of online learning with a novel approach to kindling a traditional face-to-face academic community, mixed in with a focus on high...Dr Jon Dron, 'Baby Bear's Bed: open learning through social media' on Vimeo
By Jon Dron 15 June 2012 @ 10:28amhttp://vimeo.com/44026336 - A recording of my presentation at the Follow the Sun 2012 conference on finding the pedagogical spot that is not too hard, not too soft, but just right. The context was open learning and my take on this was that open access is only part of the...ePortfolios - Overview (Helen Barrett)
By Jon Dron 24 May 2012 @ 11:31amsites.google.com - A great post by Helen Barrett that very clearly describes, in detail, the two distinct facets of e-portfolios, as process and as product. The rest of the site contains great examples, explanations and ways of using Google Docs (and many other tools)...Constructionism - Telearn Thesaurus
By Jon Dron 14 May 2012 @ 1:54pm Comments (1)www.tel-thesaurus.net - The TeLearn dictionary and thesaurus is a useful growing resource of information giving overviews of concepts and ideas relevant to online and technology-enhanced learning. It's in wiki form so will hopefully grow further. The entry pointed to by...Wikipedia founder to help in government's research scheme | Science | The Guardian
By Jon Dron 2 May 2012 @ 10:20amwww.guardian.co.uk - The UK government (not my favourite government on the whole) is making great strides towards openness, bringing Jimmy Wales in to help make all academic and other public-funded research openly available and, interestingly, socially enabled. This...50 theorists in 50 days from Donald Clark
By Jon Dron 27 April 2012 @ 12:56pmdonaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca - Donald Clark's ongoing series of 50 blog posts in 50 days on (very loosely speaking) learning theorists. I've been tempted to bookmark the majority of Donald's posts in this series so far but it's hard to single any out and there are just so...The wealthiest university on Earth can't afford its academic journal subscriptions
By Jon Dron 25 April 2012 @ 3:11pmio9.com - Interesting and heartening article reporting that Harvard faculty and students are being strongly encouraged by their Faculty Advisory Council to submit articles to open-access journals, "or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription...The Cost of Knowledge: petition and pledge
By Jon Dron 22 April 2012 @ 8:56pm Comments (3)thecostofknowledge.com - An opportunity to join over 10,000 academics (so far) protesting against publisher exploitation of a lucky advantage that puts them in a position of abusable power. This particular petition is aimed at Elsevier, whose abuses are worse than most.Academic publishing doesn't add up | Technology | The Observer
By Jon Dron 22 April 2012 @ 5:35pm Comments (2)www.guardian.co.uk - Another decent article about the absurdity of the academic publishing model. What surprises me is that the billionaire publishers of stuff we provide for free, review for free, edit for free and then sign away copyright (which is sometimes not even...The myth of learning styles: Change Magazine - September-October 2010
By Jon Dron 13 April 2012 @ 10:21pmwww.changemag.org - A nicely succinct explanation of why all learning style theories are wrong and some good thoughts on both the damage they cause and the reasons so many people believe in them. There are many much more compelling and rigorous critiques than this one,...New study analyzes how faculty pay compares worldwide | Inside Higher Ed
By Jon Dron 6 April 2012 @ 5:51amwww.insidehighered.com - Canada currently tops the list as the best place to be if you are seeking an academic career, at least in terms of salary. Good to hear, especially in these times of economic uncertainty, hiring freezes, dropping salaries (in real terms) and...Pedagogies of Deferral and Difference: tracing a rhizomatic connection to learning.
By Jon Dron 3 April 2012 @ 1:37am Comments (1)deferralanddifference.atwebpages.com - Brilliant student post-human essay looking, ostensively, at rhizomatic learning and Connectivism but that is, in reality, a self referential deconstruction of academic essays and connected knowledge in which every singleword is hyperlinked....Advanced Learning Technologies Journal List | CELSTEC
By Jon Dron 28 March 2012 @ 8:00pmcelstec.org - Useful list of TEL and distance/open learning journals from the good folk at OUNL Handy for those researching e-learning who are seeking good places to publish their work, or simply for finding things that are worth reading in the field.Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?
By Jon Dron 18 March 2012 @ 1:56pm Comments (6)healthland.time.com - The answer to this question seems to be a guarded 'yes'. The issue seems to be that we remember things in books not just because of content but because of context - where it was on the page, where it was in the book. In fact, i can sometimes recall...Unbundling Education, A Simple Framework | M. P. STATON
By Jon Dron 9 February 2012 @ 8:18pm Comments (1)edumorphology.com - Excellent visual analysis of what universities and colleges etc do - and maybe of how they will die."Don't lecture me" (with Twitter track) - Donald Clark at ALT-C 2010 - YouTube
By Jon Dron 15 November 2011 @ 6:02pmwww.youtube.com - Donald Clark giving one of his marvellous signature incendiary talks about how to avoid bad ways of teaching (lecturing in particular) with Twitter accompaniment. The tweets are almost as interesting (though not in a good way) as the talk itself. He...Can Everyone Be Smart at Everything? | MindShift
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 7:07am Comments (2)mindshift.kqed.org - This is a very fine article that provides excellent arguments and evidence about the fundamental dangers of rewarding results rather than effort in learners, and the extreme silliness of learning styles. The notion of a 'learning quotient' rather...Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | Smithsonian Magazine
By Jon Dron 12 September 2011 @ 1:03amweb.archive.org - A great article on the success of Finnish schools. They are doing pretty well: In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students...Natural brain state is primed to learn - life - 19 August 2011 - New Scientist
By Jon Dron 30 August 2011 @ 10:18amwww.newscientist.com - Just need an MRI to catch the brain in the right state and thus to boost your ability to memorise stuff by 30%Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google?
By Jon Dron 18 July 2011 @ 2:19pm Comments (5)arstechnica.com - Depending on your point of view, the results of the research reported on here may be a cause for great concern or for celebration. Most notable among the findings is that, in the Internet age, we tend to remember how to find facts that may be useful...Learning with 'e's: Learning is learning
By Jon Dron 7 July 2011 @ 4:07pmsteve-wheeler.blogspot.com - Steve Wheeler on good form discussing whether there are (or should be) a different term for adult learning than for child learning. He thinks not and I agree with him up to a point. Many differences between adult and child learning relate to an...Open Source Textbooks
By Jon Dron 17 May 2011 @ 6:49pmwww.onlineschools.org - A well reasoned infographic (is that possible?) showing the value to be had from open textbooks. Rather an odd use of the words 'open source' but forgivable as the meaning is clear and compelling.Half an Hour: Crowdsourcing the Future of eLearning
By Jon Dron 7 May 2011 @ 9:16amhalfanhour.blogspot.com - Quite interesting lecture notes on an alternative future for online learning. Nothing new, a bit gung-ho about the potential and not a lot on the risks, but nice to see people are thinking about this and consolidating ideas in this area.The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Jon Dron 22 April 2011 @ 9:35am Comments (1)chronicle.com - This is brilliant. Please can we redesign our educational system now? Pretty please?Woz to educators: "be brave, use the new technology"
By Jon Dron 7 March 2011 @ 10:47amarstechnica.com - Steve Wozniak in great inspirational form discussing a very straightforward, pragmatic and obvious approach to education which is hard to argue with. It is, as he observes, very very far from the norm. The interview ends with a few comments on the...Why LMSs Aren’t the Answer « Educational Technology and Change Journal
By Jon Dron 22 February 2011 @ 10:46pm Comments (4)etcjournal.com - I've just (this morning) given a talk making almost exactly the points mentioned here so, unsurprisingly, I like the points being made here. The LMS makes things easier by reducing choice - the result is a tendency to limited creativity and...Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com
By Jon Dron 21 January 2011 @ 12:31pmwww.nytimes.com - An interesting article (thanks to Mary Pringle for alerting me to this). The claimed finding is that fact retrieval is improved through taking tests. Or, to put it another way that better reflects what is actually being researched here, taking...Multitasking: The Brain Seeks Novelty
By Jon Dron 9 January 2011 @ 10:16am Comments (3)www.huffingtonpost.com - This is your brain on Twitter/facebook/email/iPhone/TV/crack cocaine. Very simple and what should be an obvious message for site designers in online learning: never show exactly the same page twice. In learning we move from one novelty to the...The Educational Benefit of Ugly Fonts
By Jon Dron 5 January 2011 @ 7:54pm Comments (3)www.wired.com - Disfluency turns out to be rather good: people seem to learn better from things that are harder to read. Time to rethink those strategies about always making things as easy and clear as possible!Year-End Stats from MIT Point to Increasing Popularity of Open Educational Resources
By Jon Dron 4 January 2011 @ 9:32amwww.readwriteweb.com - Big numbers. Very big numbers. Open courseware has been wonderful for MIT and wonderful for learners around the world. The costs of infrastructure to support this may be high but the payoffs seem more than worth it.NIXTY - Empowering Education for Everyone?
By Jon Dron 9 October 2010 @ 2:10amnixty.com - Not at all, I fear. A primitive bit of technology but a sophisticated business model that might well work if the technology offered more. The crossover between open and closed approaches is potentially very powerful. But, as far as I can tell from a...Donald Clark Plan B: Faceless schools?
By Jon Dron 6 October 2010 @ 4:29pm Comments (1)donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com - Very nice article from one of my favourite bloggers on education, Donald Clark, covering a multitude of issues including a scary story of a positively evil self-serving, exam-result-drive school, the benefits of mobile technologies, outsourcing,...Honors Course Using StarCraft Is for Gamers Only
By Jon Dron 7 September 2010 @ 2:25pm Comments (1)www.technologyreview.com - Very interesting approach to teaching that sounds surprisingly sound in concept and execution. Students learn skills through playing Starcraft and reflect, discuss, explain etc. Great idea!Are final examinations on the way out at Harvard? | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2010
By Jon Dron 2 September 2010 @ 9:35pm Comments (2)harvardmagazine.com - Excellent. One down, a few million to go, it's time to end this barbaric, anti-learner practice. I exaggerate. Exams per se are not wrong and in some cases may be a very sensible way to accredit people - driving tests, for instance. I can even...WMSCI 2010 - peer review of peer review of...
By Jon Dron 25 April 2010 @ 10:53amwww.iiis2010.org - A delightfully recursive peer-reviewed symposium on peer review. On the bright side, it does use at least three different forms of peer review in reviewing the papers on peer review so I guess you might expect some very high quality papers as a...Why We Can't Do 3 Things at Once | LiveScience
By Jon Dron 17 April 2010 @ 12:17pmwww.livescience.com - An interesting brain-based explanation of why we can only multitask two things at a time, with some fascinating connections to motivation, goals and rewards. The medial prefrontal cortext in each hemisphere deals with calculating rewards, with each...Education Futures - Three alternatives to temponormative pedagogy
By Jon Dron 11 April 2010 @ 1:02pm Comments (1)www.educationfutures.com - Interesting article that re-treads a lot of old ground in slightly different shoes. However, as a conceptual framework for thinking about approaches to learning design it's quite thought-provoking and might be useful.Getting teens interested in science, technology, etc
By Jon Dron 17 February 2010 @ 2:05pmweb.mit.edu - It's not big news that learning-by-doing is good in the sciences but, as interestingly, opportunities to find out what it means to be a scientist/technologist/engineer/mathematician are even more important to young learners... "Teens listed...
