My previous attempts at staying current using social bookmarking were not satisfactory, although I still like to keep my delicious.com and Google Notes well fed with tagged items from the web.

In my attempt to regain touch with (a) State of Technology in General & Online Learning in Particular (b) Current Affairs in USA and (c) Current Affairs in India, I subscribed to some RSS feeds. When something useful would strike me, I would ask the stand-up comedian in myself, to write a one line joke for me, based on Dave Barry's highly original microblogging style.

After about a week of poking fun at the news, the information started to retain in my conscious brain and I was able to apply it - in my conversations with peers, friends and families. (Sometimes I even became the alpha-bore of the party: geeky opinionated know-all. That's an indication to cut-back on your RSS feed-greed.)

Adjusting the RSS feeds to remove redundancies and optimize focus of learning, I started realizing that the stylings of the inner comedian were now an inefficiency - so the one liners simply became comments and notes. The crutch of comedy and satire was no longer necessary to engage the mind in the target domains - the barrier to entry - spontaneous interest, had been breached. A sustainable-enough connection now existed between the mind and the knowledge domain to synthesize new information into fruitful conversation and writing.

I only hope that the trend of getting news and information from clowns does not raise a generation of skeptic jokers. These fake news outlets arise from a basic need of learners: barrier of boredom. When mainstream news started looking like sermons, propoganda or classroom lectures, the generation turned to fake news to stay current. Of course that is no justification for teachers to become clowns, however keeping learning active with or without humor is highly warrented.

...respondents felt quite liberal in their views of potentially cheating behaviors when there was no test-taking policy set by the course instructor. In addition, 73.6% of the students in the sample held the perception that it is easier to cheat in an online versus traditional course.

Towards the end of the paper, the authors suggest research based remedies for inhibiting cheating: open discussion in a classroom setting (which is done by some departments/schools), posting of honor code in print and online (which is supported by UM's testing tools) and keeping updated on strategies from Duke University's “Academic Integrity Assessment Guide’

Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney

via CampusTechnology.com

Whether you are an educational technology researcher, a learning scientist, a designer of web-based learning materials, or a teacher using technology, the DPD is a place for you to learn from the wisdom gained by dozens of researchers who have designed, enacted with students, and studied the use of technology for learning. This wisdom is translated in the DPD into pedagogical Design Principles

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