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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Jan 30, 2017


An Amazing Statscan Skills Study
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A recent Statistics Canada report
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makes for fascinating reading, though I caution that it's
based largely on perceptions, which as we know can be
misleading. Alex Usher does a decent job summarizing it.
Basically, they examine job descriptions to see what skills
are required, examine university graduates to see what jobs
they get, and through that determine what skills
characterize what university programs. It's interesting
because 'humanities' sits at the bottom of the scale on
just about everything, as does education (which does
marginally well in social skills). Scientific, technical
and professional programs rank the highest, even for skills
normally associated with the humanities, such as reading
comprehension and critical thinking. So what accounts for
this? Well, like I say, perception. If we look at the most
common jobs table, we find a disproportionate number of
humanities majors in sales and retail, the rest in
education. These are either not perceived as higher-skilled
occupations, not described as precisely as scientific,
technical and professional occupations, or really are
lower-skilled. Take your pick.
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The state of Jupyter
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If you've been doing any work in data analysis you might
have run across references to the Jupyter Notebook
LinkEssentially this is an application
that allows you to embed running bits of code into a text
document. So you have text, then a code sample, and then
(voila!) the graph that the sample produces. What's nice is
that you can mess around with the code and see the results
immediately - this is known as "interactive computing" and
has been a mainstay of the reserach community for some time
now (and you can also see web-based examples in code pens
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See also this item
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from Tony Hirst.
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The State of Personalized Learning
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Not all http://www.downes.ca/post/53501 personalized
learning the same. That's the main message in this article.
The authors write, "The current use of the term
'personalized learning' varies from:

small group instruction based on performance levels to
longitudinal history of all assessments students ever took
to provide them with knowledge of what to assign to
artificial intelligence based products that assess the
cognitive level and learning style of a student and provide
a variety of resources based on the student’s
learning style, current performance, and understanding of a
subject."

True enough, and I've read accounts of all three. But these
days people almost universally mean the third. Almost
universally. The first two versions are essentially terms
applied to in-person learning applied without the use of
technology.
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Continuous, Curated Learning: The Business Case
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Sometimes people call what I do here 'curation', but I
really dislike that word, because it's not what I do. Maxim
Jean-Louis came up with a better word recently:
scholarship. I think sometimes people have forgotten what
that means, and have substituted soulless academic
make-work in its place. Anyhow this article makes the case
for learning professionals to engage in scholarship (the
real thing): "You’re not just aggregating content
from multiple sources. That’s what machines do.
You’re acting as an intelligent human filter, drawing
attention to what really matters – because you
understand your audience, their needs and their context.
It’s a very personalised service – and it
scales really well if you use the right tools. As Beth
Kanter put it, you’re spotting the awesome
http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-3/"
target="_blank." Yeah.
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Why Are We Still Using LMSs?
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Good question. The author offers responses in terms of
convenience, consumerization, connectedness, and
compliance, but none of these responses seems to satisfy.
And so we should prepare for an inflection point. "The
technology has reached a stable, dominant design
http://edutechnica.com/2016/10/20/5-reasons-why-consolidation-of-the-lms-market-isnt-necessarily-a-bad-thing/. Typically
when this happens in a product category, a new wave of
innovation characterized by different ways to
address the same need." It hasn't happened yet to the
LMS, says the author, largely because of the way they're
procured - selection committees in large institutions. He
says the tipping point "will be driven by courageous
choices made by individual institutions," but more likely,
to my mind, it will be driven by forces outside the
institution. Image: edutechnica
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