OLDaily Text Edition ~ Mar 29, 2016

Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 29, 2016
Zuckerberg Education Ventures backs learning assistant
camera app Volley
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This is a lovely idea. "Students point their phone’s
camera at a textbook page or piece of homework, and
instantly see resources about key facts and tricky parts,
prerequisites, and links to snippets of online classes or
study guides that could help." The application is
called Volley
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and it earned 3.2 million in seed money
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to develop and commercialize the app (it doesn't appear to
actually exist yet; it "is now in private alpha that you
can sign up for here http://www.volley.com/"
target="_blank. But it’s planning more tools to aid
students, teachers, and school systems." ).
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Whisper's Master Of Content Moderation Is A Machine
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What if one of the most onerous online learning tasks -
content moderation in online forums - could be farmed out
to a machine? According to this article, that's exactly
what Whisper has done. Whisper Link-
an app that allows people to share secrets anonymously - is
particularly vulnerable to abuse. "But the company has a
secret weapon: The Arbiter, a piece of software that uses
the artificial intelligence techniques known as deep
learning to moderate content in the same way a human would,
only faster and at far greater scale." The Whisper
philosophy - "don't be mean, don't be gross, and don't use
Whisper to break the law" - can't be enfoced simply by
banning a few words. It takes a neural network intelligence
to recognize inappropriate messages.
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AppSmash these 2 apps to create endless multimedia
possibilities
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AppSmash is a pretty neat idea for tablets, "the process of
combining multiple apps to create new multimedia content."
One of the greatest weaknesses of traditional tablets (a la
the iPad) is that you can only view one app at a time. This
makes them more like portable TVs or game consoles, and
less like computers. AppSmash doesn't exactly address this,
but in joining separate applications it does do something
unique. For example, "with Book Creator, students can
record their voice directly into a page and, for instance,
comment on the images, shapes, audio, or video on that
particular page." Consuming content and creating it.
Imagine!
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4 Ed-Tech Ideas Face The Chronicle’s Version of ‘Shark
Tank’
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The four pitches are, well, exactly what you would expect
the Chronicle to be interested in:
location-tracking technology that makes students a part of
in-person educational simulations
an online tool to help colleges find, screen and hire
adjuncts
education guides to help students choose between different
colleges
face-to-face counseling and support for working adult
students
It's the sort of perspective that cannot imagine a future
without a fairly traditional picture of universities (up to
and including low-paid adjunct labour). But the main
problem with these ideas is that they've all been invented.
These pitches all take existing ideas and add "... for
colleges" to the end of them. It makes me wish I was on the
panel. Every jury needs a Simon.
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Here are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring
the Best People
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If this article is accurate (and there's no real reason to
think it isn't) then it speaks against the idea of career
preparation based simply on competencies. The things these
interview tactics are testing for won't be developed or
evaluated in competency-based training - they're trying to
see whether people are ready foir the job at any moment,
whether they can cope with distractions or with conflict,
whether they can manage conflicting priorities, and similar
'soft' (very soft) skills. Via Doug Belshaw.
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Copyright 2008 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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