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"In essence, it is a just a distributed ledger to record transactions. What makes it special is that it is durable, time-stamped, transparent and decentralized. Those characteristics are equally useful for managing financial transactions as for a system of reputation. In fact, you can think of reputation as a type of currency for social capital, rather than financial capital."

"Despite the rapid advances in telepresence and distributed working tools, people still brave traffic and go to the office. Business travel is on the rise as people congregate for meetings and conferences. Attendees pay $7,500 for tickets to TED talks when the content is all posted free of charge on their website. And 250 leaders [including John Hagel] will attend Techonomy 2012 in Tucson starting Sunday. Are we just stubborn creatures of habit who are slow to adopt a better solution? Or, is there a fundamental value to the brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-bone world that cannot be replaced?"

"We should be justifiably proud of the remarkable and enviable triumphs of American higher education. Instead, we find most recent conversations about higher education echoing around this one tiny (and so far trivial) aspect of the complex and diverse ecosystem of higher education. This focus on technological platforms at the expense of actual threats, challenges, and successes robs us of the ability to have sober, informed debates about the proper level and style of investment in higher education. So I suggest we let MOOCs grow and do their best work, learn from successes and mistakes, and stop assuming that they are the simple answer to anything meaningful and profound in the production and distribution of knowledge. The world is just not that simple."

I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future. But to Gibson's point, not every region can claim to have self-driving cars on its highways or electric car ownership or smart phone penetration rates as high as the Bay Area. Why not?

"But how completely can online courses reproduce the college experience? Lexington writer and entrepreneur Jonathan Haber wanted to find out. This January, he set out to earn a "one-year MOOC BA." He is trying to cram about 32 courses, all free, into 2013-with enough breadth and depth to fulfill the distribution requirements for a bachelor's degree in philosophy. Already finished with his "freshman year," Haber has completed or is currently taking about a dozen classes."

A year and a half ago, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) released the first 42 of Washington state's 81 high-enrollment courses under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). Now they have released the remaining 39 under the same terms, which means that anyone, anywhere, including the state's 34 public community and technical colleges and four-year colleges and universities, can use, customize, and distribute the course materials.

"gRSShopper is a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. It allows you to organize your online content any way you want to, to import content - your own or others' - from remote sites, to remix and repurpose it, and to distribute it as RSS, web pages, JSON data, or RSS feeds."

OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials. Opening up learning and teaching materials does not equate to providing a free education. Open educational resources are components of a rich educational package which includes staff expertise, institutional facilities, tuition and feedback.

after teaching the class once and seeing the historical grade distribution instantiate itself, it seemed to me that if I wanted to do something about this acculturation problem, I needed to do three things that weren't happening already:

"The unpopularity of personal data encryption isn't a problem in itself but a symptom of a bigger issue: The increasingly social, distributed and proscriptive nature of computing means that if you want to use the latest software and services you simply cannot keep your personal data to yourself."

With almost 326 votes, I suppose it has some validity. What surprised me, but perhaps shouldn't have, was the even distribution of responses. I think that's a reflection of the new affordances and opportunities. People are finding value and learning in all kinds of tools and this truly represents a personalization of learning spaces

"The key to effective socialized course design lies in understanding and configuring the LMS as not (just) a content delivery mechanism for distributing grades and PDFs but also as a potentially valuable niche online networking platform that can support a series of socialized assignments."

With the new funding, he [Andrew Ng, Coursera co-founder] said, the company plans to focus on several key areas, including: New mobile apps (coming in the next few months) Deeper international expansion through translation and distribution partnerships Opening up Coursera to enable third-party apps and integrations (long term, the plan is to open up APIs, but in the short term they'll enable university partners to integrate other apps with Coursera) New features to encourage more collaboration between students When I pointed this out on Twitter, Burck Smith of StraighterLine got it right when he said "Sounds like an LMS".

""Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock"). The DOCC aims to challenge MOOC thinking about the role of the instructor, about the role of money, about hierarchy, about the value of "massive," and many other things. The first DOCC will be offered for credit at 17 colleges this coming semester, as well in a more MOOC-style approach in which videos and materials are available online for anyone."

"As to the vision of the company, they say they are a "movie and TV series network." Note that they see themselves as a "network" -- will Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and the BBC become the new television networks? But, they are not just a network, they are a "TV series network." That is a testament to their success producing multi-episode series for Internet distribution. People like to watch TV without commercials. They also like watching two, three or maybe all the episodes in one sitting. They like watching TV on phones, tablets, PCs or television sets whenever they want to. "

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."

Nevertheless, my prediction is that the MOOC 2.0 will enable one-on-one learning using personalized, video chat-based help, which is why I founded Teeays, a platform for on-demand TAs for MOOCs. Ultimately, the format of the MOOC 2.0 will be whichever format enables individual learning to scale as dramatically as content distribution has scaled in the MOOC 1.0. In a world where more than 2 billion people are connected to broadband internet, face-to-face learning is bound to go digital.

"FOAM is the movement that has spontaneously emerged from the exploding collection of constantly evolving, collaborative and interactive open access medical education resources being distributed on the web with one objective - to make the world a better place. FOAM is independent of platform or media - it includes blogs, podcasts, tweets, Google hangouts, online videos, text documents, photographs, facebook groups, and a whole lot more."

"Assumptions about young people's familiarity with technologies risk exacerbating inequality. Access to devices and connectivity isn't equal across all young people, and neither is support in developing skills - from peers, parent/carers, or schools, equally distributed. Socioeconomic status remains a key issue in relation to access, with a small but significant number of young people having very limited access."

"Our mission is to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally."