Wednesday, May 1, 2013

tweets may 1 - web, atoms & moocs



Danny Weitzner (@djweitzner)
4/30/13 4:17 AM
@psd Thx @Differance1 for reminder that 10 years later, W3C required that *ALL* Web standards be Royalty-Free.bit.ly/15WzAny

Paul Downey (@psd)
4/30/13 2:37 AM
"On 30 April 1993 CERN [made] World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish" — Happy 20th, WWW


Deb Mills-Scofield (@bluelobsternets)
5/1/13 6:10 AM
Very cool! RT @DavidGrann: Scientists make world's smallest animation with atoms. Watch:tgr.ph/18oqDQv

nancyflanagan (@nancyflanagan)
5/1/13 6:13 AM
"every school needs to figure out to how help its students use online learning WHEN better than school-based courses" blogs.edweek.org/edweek/indepen…
not an exaggeration to say that independent school lheads in the 21st century spend more of their time dealing with the corporate, fiscal, and advancement side of school management than they do overseeing the academic programs. Friends in the business have commiserated in private over the simultaneous pressure and attraction they feel to become fundraiser and marketer in chief, leaving others--assistant heads, academic deans, division leaders--to manage the teaching-and-learning side of things. (The parallel for public school principals and superintendents is the need to build support via non-stop community and political engagement, a similar distraction from traditional ideas of educational leadership.) 

from same author nancy posted
The best of these--and I was fortunate to be a part of the mildly famous MOOC MOOC this past summer--can be rather like an enlarged, digitally moderated version of the very best kinds of speculative but tightly reasoned conversations one can have with really smart, thoughtful, and creative peers--or with kids who match that description.

Here is a vast audience for the well tempered MOOC. Even the tiny percentages of kids who qualify for things like National Merit recognition (as distasteful as some may find its one-dimensional selection method) or who make up programs like the Stanford Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) or the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) would comprise a pretty huge legion. Legions more, I suspect, could be found among kids who have been turned off by school but remain turned on by learning and ideas.

Here is the audience for exploratory MOOCs, where kids can explore in a structured but not limited way the things that fascinate them but never much come up in many school situations. And they can do it with a big bunch of like-minded peers. The folks organizing these MOOCs had better be up to the task, and they had better lean hard on the students for guidance in shaping each MOOC as it rambles forward. A great MOOC of this sort will demand clear thought and excellent communication skills. It's a matter of winding up a roomful of really engaged intellects and seeing where they go.

umair haque (@umairh)
5/1/13 6:16 AM
We labour under the strange delusion that our hearts can be engineered to feel and our minds engineered to think.

Will Richardson (@willrich45)
5/1/13 6:19 AM
Need 15 new subscribers to our Raising Modern Learners free parent newsletter before we publish later today. You?raisingmodernlearners.com