OLDaily Text Edition ~ Oct 27, 2016

Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Oct 27, 2016
Wednesday at Educause 2016: Power of introverts, top IT
issues
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So if there's no such thing
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as learning styles, why is a talk about introverts an
EDUCAUSE keynote? "Susan Cain's keynote on the
often-untapped potential of introverts was particularly
relevant to an IT crowd that, when asked to raise
hands, was roughly split 70/30 on introverts and
extroverts." Interestingly, a survey of teachers will give
almost the opposite result. It turns out there are
differences between people, and some of them can classify
us in some interesting, albeit superficial, ways.
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Twitter is killing off Vine
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The news today spread faster than any Vine video (it came
and was over while I was watching a single Bill Mahar
video). Twitter "said it would not delete any Vines that
have been posted — for now, anyway. 'We value you,
your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,' the
company said in a Medium post. 'You’ll be able to
access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the
website online because we think it’s important to
still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have
been made.'" Translation: download your videos now and put
them in your own archive, before they disappear forever the
way your Google Video, Blip and Ustream videos did.
Interestingly, you can read the announcement
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on Medium but not on the Vine website Link
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Patterns in Course Design: How instructors ACTUALLY use the
LMS
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I'll save you the suspense: they mostly use it to
distribute course content and announcements. They also use
it as a gradebook. Even in the 11% use of the 'social'
course archetype, more than half the use is content
distribution. John Whitmer writes, "in initial exploration
we have found a similar distribution in final grades in
courses across all categories, and uneven results across
tool use by course category. This suggests,
counter-intuitively, that grade may be independent of
course category." It's not that counter-intuitive. The
majority of courses are based largely on the transfer of
content from instructor to student. Grades reflect suvvess
using that methodology, and are not some sort of
independent arbiter between methodologies.
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Prosthetic hands link to nerves to make touch feel real
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The leading edge and obviously best use for this technology
is of course to help amputees gain feeling in their
artificial hands. But there is no reason why the technology
developed would stop with amputees, especially if the
interface between mind and machine were not excessively
invasive. The applications could literally redefine what we
mean by "hands on" training and development. Imagine
working with a simulation that could respond to your touch
exactly the way the real environment would. The work was
published in Science Translational Medicine
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Emily L. Graczyk, et.al.
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Against Assessment: You Can't Measure The Unmeasurable
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"Looking at student work completed as part of course sounds
much better than trying to create standardized
assessments," writes John Warner.  But "the
massification and standardization of this kind of
assessment seems likely to hold many potentially bad
unintended, but entirely foreseeable consequences." This
sort of focus would shape teaching into certain types of
'best practice', which is the opposite of what classes
should be like. "We should be keeping it as diverse and
exploratory as possible," he says. For example, students
must find meaning in assignments, and this depends on their
individual preferences and needs.
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Riding the Wave: Personal Professional Development in an
Age of Chaos
Stephen Downes,
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In this talk, delivered to the Technology Education Special
Interest Council in Gander, Newfoundland, I discuss how the
changing nature of knowledge and learning reshapes
professional development. S5 Slides
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an MP3 Audio recording ../files/audio/gander1.mp3 (13 meg).
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Collaboration and Technology
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Sadly, the audio for my presentation in Manchester died, so
all we have are the PowerPoint Slides
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and some very useful blog commentaries, one by Derek
Morrison
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another by Christopher D. Sessums
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more (in Dutch) by Marc Dupuis
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and some stream of consciousness from Juliette White
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(which included a visit from the Fire Brigade just a few
hours after having landed) I enjoyed my time in Manchester,
and especially the jet-lag assisted bloggers meet-up
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And if you enjoy my photos, you won't want to miss my
stunning new collections from Britain: from Manchester
../photos/Manchester, from Lancaster ../photos/Lancaster,
and the pièce de résistance, from the Isle of
Man ../photos/Isle_of_Man
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Principles of Distributed Representation
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Learning object metadata will be rewritten. Or maybe
bypassed entirely. It's going to be rewritten because it
has to be, because as we work with learning object metadata
as it is currently incarnated, unless we're working within
a large monolithic entity like the U.S. military, learning
object metadata will be found to be too rigid, too
inflexible, too narrowly defined, to do the sorts of
tghings that we want to do with it.
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How to be a Good Learner
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PowerPoint Slides Link
and MP3 Audio ../files/audio/northbay.mp3 from my talk at
This Is IT in North Bay. The title is descriptive as I
survey three major characteristics of good learning
behaviour - generating interactivity, making your learning
content usable, and ensuring relevance. The talk was given
in an airplane hanger at the local airport, a huge
concrfete block building with the accoustics of, well, a
huge concrete block building. So the sound quality on the
audio isn't great, which is too bad.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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