Great keynote by SF author Bruce Sterling on "fantasy prototypes," startups, austerity, empire, and disruption. "As long as you are making the rich guys richer, you are not disrupting the austerity, you are one of its top facilitators."... read the full post.

“"There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX [the edX version of the Justice class] solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course,” the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University writes. “Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments and provide a diminished education for students in public universities."... read the full post.

"Your historical analysis of the causes and consequences of the Crusades, while interesting, would have benefitted greatly from being a list of a bullet points. A-"... read the full post.

What is a college credit worth? Jonathan Haber, who's putting together a degree solely from MOOCs, does some math. "While one can make the argument that the free price for MOOCs evolved from cultural and technological vs. purely economic factors (having come about during an era celebrating open software and open learning), the failure of AllLearn (an earlier experiment in bringing top-level university courses to the online masses) indicates that people interested in learning for the sake of learning are not interested in paying all that much for the privilege."... read the full post.

"But the end result — what we ended up with — is arguably worse. Once you start charging tuition, you can’t go back: you build a huge amount of infrastructure for students who feel entitled to certain amenities, given how much they’re paying. And the college becomes a business with a P&L, having to chase revenues and persuade potential students that it’s a better financial deal than the various alternatives they have."... read the full post.

"...In the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."... read the full post.

Jonathan Haber is conducting a one-year experiment, piecing together a degree based only on MOOC courses. In this piece, he tackles the difference between xMOOCs and cMOOCs, as someone new to online education -- its history, pedagogy and practices. Haber starts his post, "I only learned recently that I’ve not been enrolled in MOOC classes at all, but have instead been involved with something called an xMOOC." He describes Siemens' explanation of connectivism as "abstract," and adds that "There is an understandable appeal to this model (given that it mirrors the open vision of the web itself). And I can understand why people who have been experimenting this area (and either creating or participating in courses built on the cMOOC vision) might look askance at newly popular xMOOCs based on traditional college courses that seem to be replicating the pedagogy of the low-tech classroom, but doing so in a way that eliminates the intimacy between a teacher and his or her students (who, within a MOOC, can number in the tens of thousands)." But Haber says he realizes he prefers the "sage-on-the-stage" model. Ian Bogost tweeted today (in response to the visualization in The Chronicle) that the xMOOC and cMOOC distinction isn't clear or useful, and reading Haber's response here seems to confirm that.... read the full post.

This awful visualization in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests "the major players" in MOOCs are only in the US and primarily concerned with money. "Disruptive" messaging.... read the full post.

"So it turns out the United States is not, in fact, the educational wasteland tech industry lobbyists would have you think."... read the full post.

"In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes Huntington, a writer living in Maine, thought of ways to spend her time. She confided in a letter: 'The radio has been a source of unfailing diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be broadcasted.' Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses."... read the full post.

A great "explainer post" by Micah Vandegrift about the DPLA...... read the full post.

John Scalzi’s “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” in a classroom setting... ... read the full post.