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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Nov 14, 2016
Meet the new IFTTT
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IFTTT - which stands for "If This Then That" - has long
enabled people to partner their services with each other.
For example, when I post a new photo on Flickr, I use it to
repost it to my art blog and send a notification to
Twitter. I also use it to create some RSS feeds out of
social media to make keeping track of the industry that
much easier. A similar (but expensive) service is Zapier
LinkAnyhow, IFTTT has overhauled its
technology, switching from 'recipes' to 'applets'. Applets
can do much more than exchange content, for example, this
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"Center the map on your home. When you arrive, your Android
device will be unmuted, automatically and the volume will
be set to 80%."
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Why do we test school kids anyway?
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The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC) is an
"independent think tank" that offers business-friendly
advice to governments and lobbyists. Normally they steer
away from education, but occasionally offer an item like
this recommending that we adopt a pro-testing
standards-based system that is definitely not
constructivist or 21st-century learning. Finn Poschmann
cites "evidence" (from another 'independent think tank',
the C.D. Howe Institute; actually a link error but probably
this
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to argue "too much emphasis on using differently coloured
blocks to represent 100s, 10s, and 1s, and not so much on
“what is 7 times 12?” seems to cause problems
for kids in later years." The evidence seems to say the
opposite; the highest-achieving students
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are in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta, and these are also
the most progressive schools
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in the country. It's where progressive education is
steadfastly resisted - as in Canada's Atlantic provinces -
where we see poor test scores dragging the nation down. See
also: high poverty school succeed
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by focusing on adventure, the arts, project based learning.
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Linked Research
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Linked Research "is set out to socially and technically
enable researchers to take full control, ownership, and
responsibility of their knowledge, and have their
contributions accessible to society at maximum capacity."
The idea is to have open calls for publication and open
reviews. The site is brand new; the most useful bit so far
is the resource page Link
Maybe it will go nowhere, but maybe it will become part of
the Solid Link(decentralised personal
data storage) and Linked Data Platform
Link (W3C standard for RESTful
read-write Linked Data resources) ecosystem. See this
paper
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from the same group from 2015.
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Towards a Trusted Framework for Identity and Data Sharing
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Good article discussing the emerging distributed framework
(a la resource profiles, now known as trusted data
ecosystems
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for digital identity. Two specific technologies are
discussed: a blockchain enabled system called Enigma, and a
lighter weight framework called OPAL. "Enigma
Linkis a
decentralized computation platform enabling different
parties to jointly store and run computations on data while
keeping the data completely private... a much simpler and
easy-to-deploy version called OPAL Link
(OPen ALgorithms) will soon be ready for pilot testing in a
few European countries.
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The Failure of the iPad Classroom
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I think it's far too soon to say the use of technology in
learning has "failed". But sceptics will enjoy this
thorough denouement of educational technology. But a
strand of thought half way through caught my eye. It was
this: the fear that computer screens will "will replace
more valuable, sensory activities, such as putting their
hands through a box of sand, or eating a tub of Play-Doh."
And I wondered: what is the impact of sand on test scores?
How about clay and paint? I don't think we'll find a
significant difference, but the argument against technology
is based on exactly that sort of data.
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Differences in Learning Style Preferences: A Study of
Mainland Chinese College Students Studying in Hong Kong
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There has been considerable argumentation in recent years
to the effect that learning styles do not exist. Such
argumentation, though, is firmly rooted in western culture.
What of the learning styles of different cultures? This
paper examines attitudes toward learning in Cantonese and
non-Cantonese students studying in Hong Kong, and 'local'
Hong Kong students. It concludes that there are significant
differences, and suggests these are based in Hong Kong
students' greater facility in English, which leads them
toward a more visual orientation. Similar results have
been found
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in previous
Linkwork
LinkThe
paper (36 page PDF
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is the subject of an open peer review process, and you can
read earlier versions as well as reviewer comments. Image:
South China Morning Post
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
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