Siva Vaidhyanathan [twitter: sivavaid ] has a really well-done (as usual) article that reminds us that for all the excitement about Massive Open Online Courses — which he shares — we still have to figure out how to do them right. There are lots of ways to go wrong. Feel free to stop here.). Hundreds of thousands. MORE >>

Malcolm Gladwell is going further out on his cranky branch. His reading of the role of social media in Tunisia and Egypt actually seems to lead to conclusions that I think he would acknowledge are extreme and extremely unlikely. I look at his new post in some detail after the big box below.). Why would we think they were? Now, back to the sit-ins. MORE >>

Why did the world shatter at the touch of a hyperlink? Social forms and major institutions, many set in the Earth on stone foundations, fell down at the flick of a hyperlink. How could that have happened? Every discipline has its answer: economics, business, media, anthropology, sociology, religion, linguistics. You name it, and they have a theory. MORE >>

(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”). Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and most comprehensive such contribution. MORE >>

Of course Aaron was a legendary prodigy of a hacker in the sense of someone who can build anything out of anything. But that’s not what the media mean when they call him a hacker. Neither the JSTOR nor RECAP downloads were cases of hacking in the sense of forcing your way into a system by getting around technical barriers. source ]. source ]. MORE >>