Multilitteratus Incognitus

I've been thinking about Rebecca's post for the past two weeks, the one titled What Trump means for academic conferences .  Now that the semester is over, and homework is off my plate (for another 35 days) it's time to commit some thoughts to (e)paper.  I'll say first that the whole travel advisory cited would carry more weight if it weren't coming from Turkey. There are things happening politically in that country that have nothing to do with Trump being elected (well, as of this writing there are 14 more days until the electoral college votes, so who knows...) In any case, I would say that academic conferences, both those hosted in the USA, and those hosted elsewhere, are a venue for the academic elite, and in some cases those who are lucky enough to have a conference happening locally that they can either crash or find some other free means to attend. I don't think organizers will see the USA as a second tier place to host conferences.  Even if they did, ...

Week 2 of mobiMOOC is underway - and there's been a ton of discussion during week 1! (much more than I expected actually).  It's amazing to me than mLearning has become synonymous (these days) with smartphones, apps on those smartphones and mobile data.  One doesn't have to go too far back in the research literature to find mLearning to be something that was based on regular phones, using regular SMS and MMS messages, and even voice communications! In the shuffle in the developed world we seem to have lost that simplicity of just voice and SMS/MMS and we've gone with things that require expensive handsets and expensive data plans.  Even if you get a sort of cheap Android phone (certainly cheaper and an iPhone ) you still have to pay for a data plan.  I don't know how data rates are in countries other than the US, but until recently (recent being 3 years of fewer) data on a phone cost a lot and you just didn't get that much of it! I know it's tempting...