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"Digg today announced that the first public beta of its Google Reader replacement Digg Reader will launch next week. Digg Reader will roll out in phases to allow the team to scale but the team promises that it will be available to everybody by June 26th."

"Google announced today that it'll be closing Google Reader's doors on July 1st of this year, meaning you'll need to find a new way to get your news fix. Here's how to export all your feeds and put them into a new reader."

"The session was insightful, and several readers may find the tips shared helpful, which is the purpose of this post. Strategies shared in the session are applicable to online course design in general and are not exclusive to Canvas. I'll include the highlights of the session-an insiders look at MOOCs based on Andersen's experience supporting thirty MOOCs in her role with Canvas as Director of Learning, and the methods she shared for creating activities that drive learning and sustain student interest. I have no doubt that many readers will find what Anderson has to say instructive and helpful, even more so for to those considering developing a MOOC, and/or planning to teach one in the future."

"Samsung's new Galaxy S5 arrived with an unexpected and underhyped feature. Like the iPhone 5S, it came with a fingerprint reader, but this reader plugs directly into PayPal, which in turn connects you to dozens of different payment systems. It's a clever trick: instead of a password, all you need is a fingerprint, carrying you through the entire web. If it catches on, soon you won't need a password at all."

"Tool designers who want to intervene in the new world of letters should look first to the social history, and to the social future, of reading. The web has made newly visible the diversity of interest groups among the general population of readers; it has also made the members of those groups more visible to each other, enabling them to define themselves and their needs in ways that perhaps change their behavior. The new and changed audiences that have emerged in the digital domain include data miners, professional readers who read scientific papers for industry, scientists on the semantic web, wiki contributors who treat their activity as leisure, and high school and college/university teachers who want to use digital tools to engage students or experiment with flipped-classroom pedagogy. "

"Comics are also great at abstracting away details so that readers uses their imagination to focus on what they want. You draw a character simply so that the readers can insert themselves or someone they know and relate to the character. This abstracted style of art also leaves room for comics to be incredibly expressive. Whether it's a smiley face, the dynamic motion of a superhero, or Charlie Brown missing a football, the medium communicates a lot with very little."

NewsBlur is a personal news reader bringing people together to talk about the world

"So today we're back with another huge list of content curation tools that includes some old favorites (like Google Reader, that we somehow overlooked on our original list…shame on us!), new players that have surged in popularity since the last time we published a list like this (hello, Pinterest!) as well as some up and coming curation sites and platforms."

"Comics have also been used to address social issues as well. They have done so over the years and while having controversial story lines they have helped to raise awareness about important issues. A comic can be an easy way to put your views (or make a joke easily!) and grab readers attention. If you can make your visitor smile, all the better. An engaged, smiling visitor will crawl longer and will be more likely to remember you."

The open educational resources model, including textbooks, has emerged as a response to rising text prices, a need for greater access to high-quality learning materials, the proliferation of e-reader devices, and a trend in publishing toward electronic media. Many contend that educational resources should be open and that instructional models increasingly depend on open content. Open textbooks can be offered by commercial publishers or found in open repositories. Open resources can promote active learning through student interaction with the text, particularly when they contribute to authorship. Although open textbooks face questions about the accuracy and reliability of their content, they allow higher education instructors to design content for their courses on an as-needed basis, choosing from an array of books, articles, videos, audio recordings, and readings.

"A gamebook is a work of fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making effective choices. The narrative branches along various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages."

As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college-the expansive campuses and large lecture halls-will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online.

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

" I was a bit concerned that some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to "Be Awesome Instead" of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open - truly open - is absolutely critical for reasons I will describe below. The point I was trying to make in my post is that we should be awesome instead of being whiny; we should be contributors rather than naysayers."

"Chief Education Officer" Steve Silvius reached out to introduce EmergingEdTech readers to Three Ring, a free application that allows teachers to quickly and easily create digital portfolios of student work, using a wide variety of devices for input.

"Reading and responding to comments can be one of the most rewarding aspects of blogging. Not only do they help you connect with your readers, they can also inspire later blog entries. The challenge, oftentimes, is following all the conversations around your content-on Google+, for instance, as well as on your website. So we're making things a lot simpler. Starting today, you can bring Google+ Comments to your Blogger blog. Once you've enabled the feature through your Blogger Dashboard, you'll enjoy a number of important benefits:"

"With this poorly articulated rationale in mind, I present first, some pros and cons to citing blogs within formal academic writing. Next, I put forth three main sub-questions that I think will help us-and by "us" I mean myself and the readers who grapple with the ethical and professional questions of rigor in standards of academic sourcing-organize our thoughts. "

"This book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining OER. It describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER's significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges"

"If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you're not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it's about the same."

"blogs with more frequent posts tend to receive more traffic than blogs that post once a month, as new content brings in new page views, but in this case the goal isn't necessarily to bring in hoards of traffic, it's to get your readers used to coming to your blog. It's to create a posting schedule people who follow your blog can remember, so that they know when to expect your next post. "