...scholars of international education have always warned against "a one-way transfer of educational materials from the rich north to the poor south will amount to a wave of 'intellectual neo-colonialism.'" But, again, because the MOOC movement is dominated by providers eyeing the world "market" for education, whatever they proclaim to be their motive, their attempts to make MOOCs "accessible" to international learners goes to show that they are either ignorant or unwilling to acknowledge geopolitical dynamics that shape learning experience on a global scale.

The photo you choose to represent you says a great deal about who you are as an individual.

Why new users don't show up twitter searches. FYI if you use Twitter in the classroom. 

Howard Rheingold's list of resources.

Stephen Downes was asked (along with Dave Cormier and George Siemens): "How might it be possible to show that cMOOCs are effective for learning, in the sense of providing evidence that institutions might accept so as to support opening up more courses to outside participants (a la ds106, Alec Couros' EC&I 831, etc.)? Or, more generally, providing evidence that participation in and facilitating cMOOCs is worthy of support by institutions... What I'm looking for are criteria one might use to say that a cMOOC is successful. What should participants be getting out of cMOOCs?"

Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing. They learn some more and they learn they need to learn some more. What they forget is that most of the expertise that they already have is either becoming "obvious" to them or better yet, going into their "background thinking."

The Etherpad used for Howard Rheingold's presentation on Feb 19, 2013

The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other. I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of 'politically and financially motivated greed' on the one hand and 'an opportunity to find out more about learning' on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true.

Why new users hashtags don't show up at first

I'm on a PC. When I try to launch Blackboard Collaborate, the launch file (.JNLP file) saves but won't open...OR, the file saves and opens, but it opens with a browser instead of Java, so I can't get into the session! Help!

The Core Rules of Netiquette are excerpted from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea. Click on each rule for elaboration.

The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera that brought things to a screeching halt. But this experience can provide an opportunity for institutions to re-focus-identify the role and purpose of MOOCs and move forward with a thoughtful, purposeful strategy.

"At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags. Semiconductor firm Qualcomm's revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly's wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called "peripheral" knowledge -- that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task -- can influence breakthrough innovation. "The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates," says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can't think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? By bringing peripheral knowledge to core tasks, it is well known that work groups can recombine ideas in novel and useful ways. But the problem, Haas notes, is primarily one of attention: How do you get workers focused on a particular task to notice -- and make use of -- seemingly irrelevant information?"