Bitcoin is touted as a virtual currency controlled by a peer-to-peer network that apparently places it out of the reach of traditional monetary authorities. I have to admit that when I first heard about Bitcoin I couldn't see the point. What BitCoin is — near as I can make out — is a token that …
What is the biggest load of drivel you'll read about books today?
That would be Andrew Piper whose book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, was excerpted in Slate today. Actually I wouldn't recommend reading it. So let me save you the trouble by commenting on it. Piper's point is this: electronic reading sucks compared to physical book reading because with out the touch of a real …
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Accreditation and MOOCs: How about we just don't do it
Continuing on the MOOC discussion of this week, Tyler Cowen points me to this Inside Higher Education article about accreditation and MOOCs. The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera …
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What is good teaching?
Two posts came out in the last day on online education. One is by Clay Shirky and the other is by Alex Tabarrok. Both are worth reading. Both make a similar point although in very different ways. They argue that critiques of massively online open courses (MOOCs) are misplaced because they are comparing them to …
What are publishers afraid of with device restrictions?
These days publishers are moving towards DRM free options. This has the advantage of freeing customers from Amazon lock-in as well as just making it easier for them to control their content. So for consumers who want to pay, this makes their product more valuable and gives them a reason to pay. But for the …
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I suggest a new strategy George. Let the mouse win.
The news yesterday that Disney was acquiring LucasFilm and along with it, the Star Wars franchise led many in the blogosphere, twitter and every sub-editor in the media jump for joy. Never before had so many puns become available for some many headlines in such diversity. But at the same time, there was the realisation …
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I'm a Mac. You're a PC. There really are two types of people
This week saw the unveiling of Apple's iPad Mini and the launch of Microsoft's Surface. I want to focus on the latter as I think that it reveals something fundamentally important about the personal computer/mobile computing/mobile phone market that no analysts are really appreciating: the type of person you are really matters. And for that …
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Opening up library subscriptions to scholarly publications
The people at PHD comics have posted a video summarising the case for open access to scholarly publications. It is a good summary of the issues and particularly salient as I spent yesterday at a Workshop that was looking into the economics of these issues. One part of the video was interesting. It was about …
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Selling an idea: Onion Style
Now, you might think this is all in jest but, actually, it is pretty close to something else we have already discussed on this blog: Scott Adams' plan to see if he can sell an idea. If you recall, Dilbert creator, Scott Adams actually does not believe it is possible to sell an idea (unlike …
Health Information Wants to be Shared
Information Wants to be Shared focusses on business models for information content provision. But the principles behind it, that information is more valuable if it is exchanged freely, obviously extend to many other matters. One such matter is health-related information. John Wilbanks is a crusader that has taken the issue of health sharing on. As …
Digitopoly 