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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 06, 2016
How user comments got ruined—and what to do about it
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I took the test
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and discovered I would have rejected all five of the
comments (they would have allowed three). Of course I've
never really had the fine-line judgements to make on my own
site (it was either well-considered criticism from a
regular reader or someone selling free essay services -
nothing in between). But in some previous incarnations -
most notably the 'NewsTrolls
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site I co-founded in 1998 - these questions came up. My
attitudes have hardened a bit since those days. I don't
care (much) what people wrote on their own sites, but if
it's going to show up on my site (or in my news stream) I
care a lot. When I reopen comments on downes.ca they will
be strictly moderated (I've thought a lot about how
to do this over the years, and it's going to take some tech
I still need to write).
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Bots are the new apps, only they suck (for now)
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I have resisted the urge (so far) to blast OLDaily to
subscribers through What's App and Messenger. But I could -
and I could even make it interactive - send me some
indication of what you're interested in, and I could keep
you up to date. Your wrist would tingle and you'd get a new
note any time something happened in the world of, say,
MOOCs. But should I do this? Goodness, no. I probably
shouldn't even have a Twitter channel (and I have shuttered
as useless my Facebook channel). But I want to be useful -
a stark contrast from advertisers, who want to be in your
face, no matter what. Privacy, security, trust - these
elude the world of social media, and will continue to so
long as we depend on centralized platforms like Facebook.
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Scaling Learning in an Exponential World
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You've been reading a lot of the same stuff by writers
featured in these pages over the years. In this article,
John Hagel argues that scaling learning "means developing
new shared practices that can increase impact in a world of
mounting performance pressure." It may seem like it's more
efficient to focused on standards and best practices, but
against this is the need to learn on an ongoing basis. "The
key imperative in a rapidly changing environment is to find
ways to develop new knowledge, rather than merely sharing
existing knowledge." This has to happen where the knowledge
is being used, and not in a research lab or training room.
"The goal is to improve performance more rapidly –
that’s why focusing on developing new shared
practices is so powerful. It provides us with results that
we can measure and learn from." See also: Institutional
Innovation
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For Tim Cook and Apple, the Future is AR
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AR stands for 'augmented reality' and it's the idea that we
can overlay the real world with digital objects. The first
instance of mass-AR is probably Pokemon Go, though people
have been trying with things like QR codes for decades, it
seems. The trick is to make AR (a) useful, or at least,
fun, and (b) easy. Using identifiers like QR codes have the
advantage of being very precise, but you need a reader.
Using GPS coordinates is easier, but less precise, and
doesn't really work indoors. We'll probably find there are
competing AR 'networks', each using the physical world, but
overlaying different (and incompatible, naturally)
interpretations. It won't be long where it will be as
natural for a web site to have a GPS identifier (latitude
and longitude, the way photos do now) as it is to have a
URL.
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Institutional Repositories: Response to comments
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Today's new word is 'Quasitory' and I believe it is
invented (in this use) in Stevan Harnad's response
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to Richard Poynder on the role of institutional
repositories. Poynder is clarifying emarks he made in a
recent interview, and in particular responding to the
Confederation of Open Access Repository (COAR) Executive
Director Kathleen Shearer's response
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-media/more-on-the-future-of-repositories-response-to-richard-poynder/("The
reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated").
Poynder writes, " 22 years after Stevan Harnad began
his long campaign
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persuade researchers to self-archive, it is clear there
remains little or no appetite for doing so, even though
researchers are more than happy to post their papers on
commercial sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate." These
commercial repository sites - which Harnad calls
'Quasitories' - "are doing just as badly as IRs." And the
largest Quasitory of all, Google Scholar, is waiting
patiently for academia to get its act together, writes
Poynder. The same story is being played out in the field of
open educational resources, and (as Harnad says) "the
optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The
Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one
global, interlinked virtual library.. and its [peer review]
expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the
[subscription cancellation] savings." Image: most image
search results were of British politicians, but here's a
picture of Laurel and Hardy which also turned up (from a
MoneyAM discussion forum
http://www.moneyam.com/InvestorsRoom/posts.php?tid=8123&from=20948
from 2005).
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Crafting Connected Courses: How The Web Is Won at DML2016
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I wish people would listen to old time radio westerns
LinkNot the kid shows
from the 40s, but the so-called 'adult' westerns like
GunSmoke, Fort Laramie, Frontier Gentleman, and others.
They're mostly from the 1950s - a time that included
post-war trauma, the Korean conflict, and the Red Scare.
But they work against all that - if you can ignore the
cigarette commercials, you'll be surprised to see how
progressive these shows are. Now all of this has nothing to
do with the Alan Levine article I'm linking to here, except
for this: you see the same values in today's open learning
movement that you do in those 1950s radio westerns: the
value of cooperation, the need for network, the importance
of every person in the community, the encouragement of
diversity, and more. "Connected is the way the web is won."
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From Dabbling to Doing: 6 Tools That Excite Kids About
Coding
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This is a bit of a listicle, but I liked the way the six
items selected progress from very simple stuff (Scratch,
Puzzlets) to more involved coding platforms (Google CS
First, Vidcode). Computer science today gets pretty deep in
a hurry and developing a basic aptitude for formalization
at an early age is probably essential. But like everything
involving learning, students have to want to do it, so
lively applications that get students creating (and seeing
what they've created) right from day one are the way to go.
I especially like the Karaoke machine students can create
and share with VidCode.
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Map of the Internet
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I think the presentation is the most interesting part of
this series of articles offering an overview of today's
internet. The individual articles address things like the
undersea cables, the physical infrastructure in pictures,
and challenges of censorship and the potential break-up of
the internet. At the same time, there's a well-deserved
sense of awe. "What allows all this to happen is the most
complex piece of physical infrastructure ever created."
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An Inside Peek Into the Education World’s Obsession with
Minecraft
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My own experience with MUDs served a similar function for
me, though of course I was a lot older. The closest
equivalent from my childhood is, I guess, the sand pile in
our back yard. ÈThe collaboration, engagement, and
exploration opportunities that Minecraft provides are
well-suited to give kids the experiences they need to build
tomorrow’s solutions—but Minecraft is just
where they start."
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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