Gamification by design

There are not that many books available about gamification, I learned at the Coursera Gamification course. A colleague at the newsroom wants me to read the O’Reilly book Gamification by Design, by Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham. The publisher’s description: Discover the motivational framework game designers use to segment and… Continue reading

Coursera doubles number of university partners, increases focus overseas — GigaOm

Coursera grows fast, and looks – rightly so – overseas. For the moment, almost all courses seem to be in English. Will that language become even more dominant in higher education, because of the rapid expansion of American platforms? Or is it just the initial phase?  via Diigo http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-number-of-university-partners-increases-focus-overseas/

Sometimes, the reputable university press wins out

Interesting. George Siemens, together with Bonnie Stewart and Dave Cormier have agreed (and been contracted) to write for Johns Hopkins University Press. George Siemens launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008 (with Stephen Downes). His book, about the scope and nature of higher education (HE) change, will… Continue reading

The Rapture of the Nerds

I’ve just finished reading The Rapture of the Nerds, written by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. It’s an often almost dream-like book about life in the era of the technological singularity. Wikipedia explains: The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.Since the capabilities of… Continue reading

(Learn)streaming

I wrote a column for my newspaper about media streams and how also education should happen in streams (it’s in Dutch, and no, it seems that translating is not something which can be automated easily). Examples I used are the videostream at The Wall Street Journal, Worldstream, and Howard Rheingold’s… Continue reading

Build your own course

I’m looking at Course Builder – as it is explained on https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/ it packages the software and technology used to build the Power Searching with Google online course. The guys at Google say: We hope you will use it to create your own online courses, whether they’re for 10 students… Continue reading