Laden...
[Home] [Top] [Archives] [Mobile] [About] [Threads] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Apr 01, 2016
Feature Article
Types And Tokens
Stephen Downes, Mar 27, 2016.
Naming things, counting things, generalizing over things - these are really useful tools we have created for ourselves in language and in thought to make the world easier to navigate (and, sometimes, to rationalize after the fact why we navigated on one way rather than another).
Enclosure: 2016-03-25.jpg[Link] [Comment] [Tweet] 65159
Teens vastly prefer YouTube and Netflix to TV, don't mind ads, report finds
Saba Hamedy, Mashable, 2016/04/01
I always take it with a grain of salt when a report says people don't mind ads. People always mind ads. But the rest of this wouldn't surprise me: "Those surveyed said digital video serves as a mood lifter (57%) and stress reliever (61%), as well as a way to stay up to date on what’s trending or new (60%), to learn how to do something (47%) or to lull oneself to sleep (44%)." Remember that the survey samples an affluent North American population with good internet bandwidth.
Self-presentation in scholarly profiles: Characteristics of images and perceptions of professionalism and attractiveness on academic social networking sites
Andrew Tsou, Timothy D. Bowman, Thomas Sugimoto, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, First Monday, 2016/04/01
An actual study in a real journal - no fools! "This study used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to code 10,500 profile pictures used by scholars on three platforms — Mendeley, Microsoft Academic Search, and Google Scholar — in order to determine how academics are presenting themselves to their colleagues and to the public at large and how they are perceived — particularly in relation to professionalism and attractiveness."
Vacancy DOAJ Ambassadors
Announcement, Directory of Open Access Journals, 2016/04/01
This is a nice opportunity for 8 to 10 individuals living in developing nations to work as open publishing advocates on behalf of DOAJ in a project funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC). "The role requires knowledge of academic publishing, in particular online journals, editorial processes, best practices and publishing technology standards."
An Animated Carl Sagan Talks with Studs Terkel About Finding Extraterrestrial Life (1985)
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2016/03/31
Carl Sagan is one of my heroes, extraterrestrial life would be really cool to find, so of course this item interests me. Not so much you? Oh well. "The conversation touched on some the big questions you might expect: the compatibility between science and religion; the probability we’ll encounter extraterrestrials if given enough time; and more."
6 Reasons Platforms Fail
Marshall W. Van AlstyneGeoffrey G. ParkerSangeet Paul Choudary, Harvard Business Review, 2016/03/31
These are some good lessons; here they are, with some comments from me:
"Failure to optimize openness" - I see this a lot; the platform is 'sort of' open, but the developers hang on to key components of it (eg., 'we will only allow pre-approved content') which stifle the value. "Failure to engage developers" - I always think of that famous Steve Ballmer video. You have to engage the broader developer community to invest in it, otherwise it's a flop. "Failure to share the surplus" - everybody engaged in the platform has to win. If you favour one side over another in a buyer-seller marketplace, your platform will fail. "Failure to launch on the right side" - I'm not sure I'd say this the same way the article does. The problem is, if you have a pre-existing content monopoly, you have to find a way to break that monopoly, either by enticing existing producers into the platform (as Netflix did) or by providing viable alternatives. "Failure to put critical mass ahead of money" - I keep repeating the mantra here - companies don't acquire technologies nearly so much as they acquire audiences. If you're trying to sell a platform with no users, you have a real uphill battle. "Failure of imagination" - pretty much everyone I talk to is engaged in the existing platforms, and therefore see innovation in terms of those platforms, and as the article notes, fail to see the platform play at all.Good article, worth the read.
Microlearning, millennials and successful companies
Natalia Gan, teachlr blog, 2016/03/31
People are talking about 'microlearning' again. Today's learners, writes , "are equipped to research what they need to know and learn about it from various sources such as blogs, online courses, websites or YouTube videos." This, mocrolearning. "Microlearning is a method to teach and deliver educational content through short and concise segments that cover focused topics while fulfilling specific objectives." Try to ignore the hype and sensationalism (like, for example, "...has caused the attention span to fall to eight seconds (eight!)" or the broad over-generalizations about "millennials"). The main thing is to take the concept seriously, and maybe follow some of the links for more detail.
Stacking vs. Replacing LMS; Learner as Content Producer
Elliott Masie, Elliot Masie's Learning Trends, 2016/03/31
Some tereminology from Elliott Masie: "we are seeing more 'Stacking', which means accepting the role of the existing LMS as the base system for the organization and then adding Stacks or Layers on top that will create added and more targeted functionality... In other words, some organizations are shifting from replacing their LMS to adding these technologies on top of the LMS. Some may be limited to a specific line of business or segment of learners. Others are layered in almost as extensions of the LMS." No links, and not much content beyond this (because it's Masie) but I wanted to make sure I shared at least this.
'Passing on the Right'
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/03/30
I think the difference between me and them is this: I am an educator and philosopher, who happens to be a socialist. My politics are derived from my science. He, on the other hand, is a conservative, who happens to be a professor. His science is derived from his politics. I'm aware that this is a bit of a caricature, but it seems in the main to be an accurate representation. I have no particular objection to his being a conservative, but I would have an objection were he unwilling to accept the primacy of reason and evidence.
Deep Learning with the Analytical Engine
Adam P. Goucher, GitHub, 2016/03/30
Cool but challenging. "This repository contains an implementation of a convolutional neural network as a program for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, capable of recognising handwritten digits to a high degree of accuracy (98.5% if provided with a sufficient amount of training data and left running sufficiently long)." See also Neural Networks and Deep Learning, " a free online book by Michael Nielsen, which is almost certainly the best hands-on introduction to the subject of neural networks and deep learning. It gives a detailed and accessible introduction to how neural networks are structured, the details of stochastic gradient descent and backpropagation, and a brief introduction to convolutional neural networks."
Zuckerberg Education Ventures backs learning assistant camera app Volley
Josh Constine, TechCrunch, 2016/03/29
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 and it earned 3.2 million in seed money 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. But it’s planning more tools to aid students, teachers, and school systems." ).
Whisper's Master Of Content Moderation Is A Machine
Harry McCracken, Fast Company, 2016/03/29
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 - 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.
AppSmash these 2 apps to create endless multimedia possibilities
Tom Daccord, eSchool News, 2016/03/29
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!
Instagram changes cause growing backlash among posters
BBC News, 2016/03/30
There's an interesting lesson to be found in the backlash to changes being implemented by Instagram. The photo sharing site has traditionally employed a reverse-chronological listing of recent photos. This way, users could see everything. The change employs an algorithm to select the photos deems 'most interesting' to the user, and displays those. Gone is the serendipity of seeing, well, whatever. Users were outraged. Now celebrities and people who use Instagram are urging users to 'turn on notifications' to ensure they don't miss a photo. But user's don't want that either. "I'm tired of everyone telling me what to do on Instagram today," tweeted one US-based user. Choice, autonomy, diversity... who knew this would be what people want in a social network?
4 Ed-Tech Ideas Face The Chronicle’s Version of ‘Shark Tank’
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016/03/29
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 studentsIt'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.
What’s the Difference Between a VPN and a Proxy?
Jason Fitzpatrick, How-to-Geek, 2016/03/31
Useful and clearly explained description of how VPNs and proxies differ, and what they're best used for. With a proxy, you simply route your internet traffic through another server; there is no encryption, but it hides where your original request is coming from. A VPN, on the other hand, will encrypt the traffic between you and that second server. "In summary, proxies are great for hiding your identity during trivial tasks (like “sneaking” into another country to watch a sports match) but when it comes to more series tasks (like protecting yourself from snooping) you need a VPN."
Hyper Island Toolbox
Hyper Island, 2016/03/30
I'm always on the lookoput for collections of things that would be useful (if unexpected) things to import into a personal learning environment. This, I think, qualifies. How would these work? I'm not sure. But a meeting or event planner should certainly be part of a PLE, and these are the sort of resources I would want to have available when undertaking such a task. I think I'd put them under the heading of 'scaffolds', though I'd want to make them more interactive in order to fit with a proper event planning tool. Ah, the possibilities. Via Doug Belshaw.
Here are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
Sarah Cooper, The Cooper Review, 2016/03/29
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.
Update. Doug Belshaw reports that this post was satire. So I should have listened to the original doubt I felt when I wrote "If this article is accurate (and there's no real reason to think it isn't)...." Sadly, I didn't, and as a result, passed satire along as fact.
How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code
Keith Collins, Quartz, 2016/03/28
The headline overstates the damage and blames the programmer. But the internet itself was never in jeopardy, just a bunch of sites that run on Javascript. And the cause of the disruption was not the programmer, but rather a company that took some open source the programmer contributed and transferred ownership to a Canadian instant messaging company. Azer Koçulu wrote a piece of code called kik and hosted it at a package managing company called NPM. A lawyer for the company called Kik contacted Koçulu and said "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that." NPM responded by transferring ownership of the piece of code called kik to the company called Kik. Koçulu responded by removing the rest of his code from NPM. One piece of that code turned out to be vital to a number of Javascript libraries. From where I sit both Kik and NPM have a lot of answering to do. And I ask - again! - why it is that commercial enterprises seem to corrupt and ruin everything they touch?
How Pearson plans to force student participation and hurt creativity
Stephen Krashen, SKrashen, 2016/03/28
I do the New York Times crossword on a regular basis. Just as in the Poincare example described by Stephen Krashen in this article, I've found that if I'm stuck on a clue, or on a section, if I turn away from it for a bit - sometimes just a few moments - and come back later, the answer is right there. Why is this more than just a curiosity? The Pearson software under discussion here prevents students from turning away and focusing on something else for a few moments. Krashen explains, "This strengthens an error nearly all schooling makes and makes true creative thinking and learning impossible." It's an interesting point, and it sounds right to me. This is one of several few posts on the new Pearson software; see also The Most Intrusive Software of All Time, and Pearson's Plan to Close the Achievement Gap. Image: Testing for Kindergarten.
Classic 1939 book on graphs in its entirety
Nathan Yau, Flowing Data, 2016/03/28
Flowing Data writes, "Willard Cope Brinton is credited as one of the pioneers of information visualization, and I just found out his 1939 book Graphic Presentation is available in its entirety at the Internet Archive. You can download it in various formats. The book was an update to his previous book from 25 years prior, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. It’s also at the Archive." It's also interesting to note that not long after these dates we say the first graphical fallacies, detailed with care by Darrell Huff (73 page PDF). I cut my teeth on this work back in the 1980s.
What is 'Digital Wellbeing'?
Helen Beetham, HelenB's e-learning blog, 2016/03/28
"My work on the experiences of digital students had already led me to question what it means to thrive in a learning environment that is saturated with digital technologies," writes Helen Beetham. And I think the exploration of digital well-being is a good idea. But as is so often the case with educational researchers (maybe social science in general) the primary output is a hierarchy and a taxonomy. This is similar to what we've seen in digital literacy, and it's about as useful. We need to dig deeper. Is there anything about the use of digital technology itself that influences well-being? What are thee linkages? We won't get to it simply by replicating Maslow's hierarchy for the digital space. It's a serious question; let's begin by taking it seriously.
This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.
Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Laden...
Laden...
