Weekend Reading: “news may be in decline, but insight is booming”

– On Fastcompany I read a story about Lara Setrakian and her site Syria Deeply. The site is ultra-focused and makes good use of infographics and video. It not only provides news but also context to make sense of it. They are working on new software to facilitate policy crowdsourcing…. Continue reading

Digital Game Based Learning MOOCs: Join in September!

So nice. We already had the connectivist Massive Open Online Courses – based on learner-centric, distributed activities using a syndication engine to connect the various events. Then came the xMOOCs – more top-down like massive courses, experimenting with auto-grading systems. Now I learned about gMOOCs – game-based MOOCs. Have a… Continue reading

Journalism as a service: what it means

There are no journalists, there is only the service of journalism. That’s at least what Jeff Jarvis, author, journalist and entrepreneurial journalism expert wrote on his blog BuzzMachine. So what does this mean? In his post he explains: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves…. Continue reading

R.I.P. Google Reader and the Open Web

A friend of mine started a Facebook page, asking for one minute of silence for the demise of Google Reader. For many of us, Google Reader was a crucial part of the curating toolkit. Just subscribe to RSS-feeds, organize them in folders, view it in various ways. Save the interesting… Continue reading

Are our attention spans becoming longer again?

There has been an eerie silence on this blog for the past weeks. I was immersed in various learning projects. I had to focus for longer times, and this made me switch my attention away from social media streams, unless I could focus on certain topics via Twitter lists for… Continue reading

Teaching journalists to become entrepreneurs…

Student journalists, financing their projects through the French crowdsourcing platform KissKissBankBank, that’s what I encountered last Saturday in the offices of the Belgian startup accelerator NestUp at Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). The journalist/teacher/entrepreneur/blogger Damain Van Achter facilitates the project. He is a guy who teaches his students to first learn the rules, then… Continue reading

ds106 for digital storytelling

Let’s try another MOOC. A real one, along connectivist principles: ds106 for digital storytelling. This is what it’s about, and also why I like it – because it’s free, it’s adaptable to my needs, and I’m sure there will be serendipitous encounters along the way: Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known… Continue reading