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"You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What's that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that's not what actually happened. No, it's not your opinion. You're just wrong. "

Since 2012 many people have expressed the opinion that MOOCs will, or have the potential to, change higher education. However, before MOOCs begin transforming the manner in which higher education operates in the United States, there are at least a few current educational policies and practices that will hinder the advancement of MOOCs.

we really don't own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools. Modern cars are part horsepower, part high-powered computer. Microwave ovens are a combination of plastic and microcode. Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own.

Kevin Wilcoxon, Instructional Designer at University of Nevada Las Vegas, created the following infographic to simply describe the Blooms Taxonomy. In my opinion, this infographic is a 60-Second guide to Blooms Taxonomy with no necessary words or graphs, straight forward and up to the point.

"If someone wants to engage as an "authentic" human across all channels without automation they quickly face the burnout scenario. Or they neglect other business duties. That's true of the professional or the individual voice, in my opinion."

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

"from time to time I have had the luxury of developing learning materials relating to my own specialities in workplace learning. These are the projects I have most enjoyed and which, in my opinion, delivered the best results. So, what works best: designing with your own content expertise, or concentrating on the process, without necessarily having content expertise?"

"Some, including Groom, have gone on record as very unhappy with my appropriation of the term "edupunk" for the ebook, which surprised me because they didn't object to the Fast Company article or to the book. Maybe that's the difference between a title and a subtitle, or maybe it's because Gates is too closely aligned in people's minds with Microsoft and all that is creepy and corporate on the Internet. They're entitled to their opinion."

An important thing to remember is that networks are about people, and making connections with people. If cultivate my PLN to support gaps in my formal education - I connect with people who can help me learn. I have a local PLN with professors and physicians that support my formal education, but I also have a connected network of academics and professionals around the world who share interests or are experts in areas where I need someone else's opinion. But for a PLN to truly work, there needs to be a give and take. You cannot expect to just cultivate information from others without giving something back - you need to share your expertise as well.

I am increasingly of the opinion that we don't have to find "the solution" to "this problem." The question of what students are learning and how they have created the work that they submit is one that is as old as teaching, and the change in technology in many respects introduces only an incremental change in how we must approach this. If we are to be effective as instructors we have to be thinking hard about what students know and how we know it, and these are not things that are dependent on technology.

"At the same time, MOOCs called into question our basic assumptions about college. Free access to content from prestigious institutions revealed that content didn't need to be proprietary. Without having to waste time re-creating the same lectures and class materials, particularly for lower-division courses, many professors saw the opportunity to be even more connected and hands-on in order to make existing content come alive for students. Despite the intense trepidation that technology would somehow replace teachers, it became clear that MOOCs didn't preempt interaction; instead, they forced more contact and accountability on both the student and the teacher."

"When Facebook users see favorable comments on the social media site about a political candidate, those opinions positively influence their own views of the politician, while unfavorable comments have a negative effect, according to a new paper by University of Delaware researchers."

The intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher education associations. The consensus opinion was that intellectual property questions for MOOC content merit wide discussion because they affect multiple stakeholders and potentially carry significant consequences. Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC's potential for global reach. Nonetheless, fair use and MOOCs are not mutually exclusive ideas. MOOCs remain an experiment. Initiating discussions with a wide range of campus stakeholders will ensure clarity of purpose and a common understanding of copyright issues in a MOOC environment.

The dashboard is a highly useful service for marketers to get an idea of their most popular posts and to aggregate performance data over a period of time. It lessens their reliance on third party companies, who often charge for their analytics tools. But is it useful for users, beyond a quick navel gaze? The jury's still out.

This report, funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with additional support from Pearson, examines the attitudes, opinions, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) among teaching faculty in U.S. higher education.

"Even so, modeling values of fairness, empathy, acceptance, kindness, respect, and responsibility to and for other people in an online setting can remain elusive. The same thing can be said for capturing students' excitement for discovery, satisfaction and pride in their accomplishments. Rather than an inherent characteristic, inclusivity in an online classroom should be pursued in an intentional and ongoing way."

"we cannot be dependent on Facebook's benevolence for protection in a world where so much of our daily activities are codified into data and collected by third parties. Indeed, we should be skeptical of Facebook's own efforts to use artificial intelligence to monitor user data for what it deems dangerous content. To continue down this path is to passively accept a surveillance society and sacrifice the liberty that enables a democracy to flourish."

"The first part of this opinion piece finished by reporting there are over one hundred different models and frameworks claiming to describe the nature of digital literacies. Given the messy topography of the field this follow up blog post briefly describes some of the higher profile or more widely known frameworks from the United States, United Kingdom and Europe. The discussion identifies an inherent tension between universal and contextual definitions of digital literacies, and finishes with an example of a current Irish initiative. This local example (for me), and the other major models critically reviewed below, illustrate why we need to challenge some of our taken-for-granted assumptions, and metaphorically 'get off the tracks' in order to develop more transformative frameworks for digital literacies."