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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 26, 2016
Chatbots with Social Skills Will Convince You to Buy
Something
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What happens when the chatbot we think is there to help us
is actually a skilled sales agent? This adds a different
flavour to the use of such applications to, say, support
students or provide advice. We might think that's what
they're doing, but in fact they may be more interested in
persuading us to buy some software or to sign up for the
advanced tutorial. Or they may be programmed by some
company to recommend their staff and affiliates as experts
within a domian. If there's no truth in advertising, what
will we then say about adbots? This article discusses Sara
http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/projects/sara/"
target="_blank, an unreasonably persuasive chatbot was
developed by Justine Cassell
http://www.justinecassell.com/" target="_blank at Carnegie
Mellon University.
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Responsive Design and Vertical Video Add Up to Engaging
eLearning
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Most readers will be familiar with responsive design - web
pages and services that adapt to different device sizes and
capabilities. But vertical video? These are the videos shot
in vertical mode (like 'portrait mode', they're taller than
they are wide), like the screen of a mobile phone. They are
typically seen as "as amateurish and was resoundingly
ridiculed." But "that's changing," according to Pamela
Hogle. "Pairing responsive design with innovative use of
vertical video, eLearning designers can create content that
is appealing, usable, and attractive on phones, tablets,
and laptops." Quite so - but it typically also means
shooting two videos, one in each mode.
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The myth of the sophisticated hack
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Good article about hacking. It relevant as there has been a
spike in recent activity, probably timed to coincide with
the election (I'm hoping so; my own website is being caught
in the crossfire). It's important to note, though, as this
article makes clear, the majority of hacks are really very
simply technologically. Hackers often go after the must
vulnerable component: the user. Whether trying commonly
used passwords, or tricking people into giving up personal
information, these attacks rely not on technology but on
social engineering. The article also looks at other attack
types, such as the 'man in the middle', SQL injection, and
endpoint attacks using USBs or mobile devices. If you're
not familiar with these terms, read this article. I would
have includes 'denial of service
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(DOS, or DDOS) attacks, not because they're hacks
(technically they're not) but because they're behind so
much recent disruption.
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Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems
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I'm looking forward more to the latter two parts of this
three-part series in which Terry Anderson "explores the
learning management system (LMS), social media, and
personal learning environments – and how they might
best be used for enhanced teaching and learning" but as
only the first part is available today we'll have to settle
for that. Anderson offers a brisk overview of the LMS and
then examines the challenges: "as the number of features
increases, so does the complexity and challenges of easy
adoption," he writes, while " perhaps the greatest
challenge is the inherent 'school focus' of the LMS." We
don't really get to the promise of this article - how to
get the most out of an LMS - but perhaps what that means is
using social media or personal learning environments
instead.
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'Star Trek: Bridge Crew' finds a new frontier in VR co-op
gaming
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I spent the summer of 1981 in a basement programming every
bit of a TI-99 computer in order to build a Star Trek game.
It wasn't much (but for the time it was great, with a
strategy view and a viewscreen view and enemies that
avoided being shot). You couldn't do a lot with a computer
in those days, but this was always my objective: a fully
immersive Enterprise bridge crew simulation. So, some 35
years later, for me, the future has arrived. Or will
arrive, when I get to play this puppy.
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The NYT buying Wirecutter and Sweethome is so much more
amazing than you think
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You can just imagine the sceptics, says this article: "You
can’t build a tech site that doesn’t publish 20
times a day. You can’t build a content site that
isn’t covered with advertising. You can’t build
an entire business on Amazon affiliate revenue. You
can’t take on Consumer Reports and expect to get any
traction. You can’t pay for this level of in-depth
reporting. Ok, great, you built this, but why would anyone
ever come back?" If I wanted to monetize OLDaily, this
would probably be the route I would take.
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Deep-Learning-Papers-Reading-Roadmap
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This is an unfinished work, but it illustrates nicely the
use of academic papers as open educational resources by
sequencing useful and important resources in such a way as
to guide the reader through the essentials of a discipline.
"The roadmap is constructed in accordance with the
following four guidelines: from outline to detail; from old
to state-of-the-art; from generic to specific areas (and)
focus on state-of-the-art." It's best to think of this as a
proto-MOOC. People can (and should) add resources (not just
papers and books), and these can create branches and
sub-branches. The resources themselves are all openly
accessible. GitHub does provide limited social interaction,
but you would expect a social network or community to grow
around this collection. Actual MOOC classes would involve a
self-managing cohort moving through the material together.
Yes, it takes commitment and effort to learn a subject this
way, and a lot of people don't have the skills. That's
where educational institutions and student support should
come in.
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What is the difference between CSS variables and
preprocessor variables?
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The world of web page style has become complicated and
complex, partially because of the need to support numerous
browsers (both PC based and mobile) and partially because
large-scale projects require variables and functions to
facilitate management. This article looks at one aspect of
that, CSS variables. Of particular value is the discussion
of the role of CSS preprocessors like Stylus
LinkLess
Linkand PostCSS
LinkThese take
youir default values for things like colours and text
styles and turn them into standards-compliant CSS code. Of
course, you could just use CSS variables to accomplish the
same thing without so much work. And you can use Javascript
to manipulate these directly. But you begin to run into
cross-browser implementation issues.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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