Kristina Hoeppner's collection of open badge links from her Shar-E-Fest workshop

Article refutes five commom myths about MOOCs 1. Fail to engage students in effective pedagogical practices 2. Deny students mentoring experiences with scholars passionate about their research 3. Lack the rigor of an on-campus curriculum 4.Provide, at best, superficial and narrowly defined training rather than deep understanding 5.Are an attempt to replace faculty"

New Google features - especially like the 'card' style layout for search results and the 'football vs aussie rules' comparison searches

Jackie Gierstein explains Education 1.0, Education 2.0 and Education 3.0 in terms of pedagogical frameworks and how the Internet is used for each framework.

Different tracks online students take with MOOCs e.g. do the bits which clear up the muddy points in the topic, take the course because the professor is famous, want to find out what MOOCs are like etc. These are the students lumped together as 'drop-outs' and unpacking their experience shows useful learning takes place, but they don't complete the course.

First MOOCs now SMOC = synchronous massive open online course

Backwash effect of running a MOOC leads a Harvard academic to revises his FTF classes - less lectures more 'flipped'. Not sure what the comment about Google hangouts is about.

Version 2(updated) of the seven things you should know about MOOCs from Educause

Deakin trying out a MOOC with some interesting assessment ideas - mainly assessed via peer review and awarding of badges, formal credit on payment of $495 fee involves an interview with the student as well as learning artefacts. 

Vince Ham from CORE Ed discussing the factors which make professional development in e-learning 'effective'. 

coffee shop meetings boost productivity and creativeness because of moderate level of background noise. More meetings in coffee shops to enhance WCEL team performance!

Sugata Mitra (TED talks and hole-in-the-wall computer innovator) critiques traditonal 'pencil and paper' exams and learning and gives an alternative which is (I think) a problem-based learning approach which he calls SOLE (Self-organised learning environment). 

Grainne Conole proposes 12 dimesions for better classification of MOOCs. the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. She then evaluates five example MOOCs against these dimensions.

Class2Go is an open source platform(LMS?) is to be integrated with the edX platform and released on Github from June 1 2013. Will be interesting to see what its like...

a thought-provoking article that puts forward the thesis that MOOCs and Coursera are the wrong direction for higher education - that personalisation and customisation of learning are the direction we should be working to develop.

some interesting stats on what happens in 60 seconds on the Internet, with some growth projections

data is from 2005 - 2009 and has some statistics specifically relating to NZ. Seems a long time to wait to publish the results...

Antioch University Los Angeles becomes one of the first universities to offer credit for two undergraduate courses from Coursera. 

School of Open will launch its first courses during Open Education week March 11 - 15 2013. Four facilitated courses launched during March 11 week - two may be relevant to NZ (i) Copyright 4 Educators (Aus) and Writing Wikipedia articles: the basics and beyond. 

collaborative collection of digital research tools organised by function i.e. I need a tool to.... analyse data, edit images etc.