Clint Lalonde

This is a good overview of open higher education models now emerging - Clint Lalonde

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the Readium Project, a new open source initiative to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the IDPF EPUB(R) 3 standard. This vision will be achieved by building on WebKit, the widely adopted open source HTML5 rendering engine. - Clint Lalonde

The principles of adult learning presented below are largely based on Malcolm Knowles' 1980 theory of "andragogy," which is defined as "the art and science of teaching adults." Principles from general adult learning theories have also been included. - Clint Lalonde

"To true. It does take courage (and a bit of energy) for learners to push beyond the mentality that the uni and college are the only way. But I wonder if everytime a potential learner sees a site like The Edupunks Guide (http://edupunksguide.org/) or reads a book like DIY U (http://www.amazon.com/DIY-Edu...), they get a little more courageous. I think resources like that are at least open eyes to the possibility that there may be another way." - Clint Lalonde

"Good, and important, questions Eugene. I think there is a lot of toying with various business models out there. Udacity, for example, is a for profit company so the people there are expecting to make money of their model of massive open courses. But I wonder if we won't start seeing more instructors go out on their own - the rise of the free range faculty. No longer tied to a single institution, with other avenues for a teaching career. Perhaps they will move from one intermediary to another - offering a course on Udemy (also for profit), or maybe forgoing the entire system and doing it fully on their own. For some, especially those who have some technical skills and understanding of online pedagogies, that may be a reasonable alternative - eliminate the university "middle man" and offering their courses directly to students for a fraction of the cost that it would cost at a post-secondary environment. Now, this won't work of all disciplines or subjects, but it might for some. I mean,..." - Clint Lalonde

What they found both confirms and flouts convention wisdom. On the one hand, sourcing, per their analysis, is the most significant predictor of the amount of tweets that an article will encourage. Similarly, stories that belong to popular topic categories (health! technology! cats!), tend to spread more readily on Twitter than stories that don't. As do stories that mention celebrities and, as the paper puts it, "a known place, person, or organization." Not too surprising. More unexpected, though, is the researchers' finding that the emotional component of articles doesn't seem to make much difference in how, or at least in how often, they're shared. Emotional content and more "objective" content, the team discovered, seem to effect about the same amount of distribution on Twitter. Brand matters - Clint Lalonde

The threats to universities may not appear overnight, but they will surely arrive - Clint Lalonde