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by Stephen Downes
Aug 25, 2017
Presentation
Becoming Connected
Stephen Downes, Aug 25, 2017, Konferencja Pokazać – Przekazać, Warsaw, Poland
Objective: To present the core ideas of connectivism in both a learning and scientific context, in a sense unifying the ideas of discovery, interaction and education. Live stream: https://www.youtube.com/user/StephenDownes
Share | A cloud-based content gathering network
The Morning Paper, 2017/08/25
This is an interesting concept thata makes the internet just a little bit more complex. The idea of a content delivery network (CDN) is that copies of web pages are sent to servers around the world, so when you access the page, you are sent to the server closest to you. That's great, but more and more pages are created dynamically from many different sources. You can send that through a content delivery network. But a content gathering network (CGN) can make the process a bit more efficient by gathering all the material clse to its source (say, in Palo Alto) and then sending the combined package in one simple delivery to your browser. This post is a summary of the original article.
Free College Is Now Here … Really
Steve Klinsky, Education Next, 2017/08/25
This is a sea change in North America. As the author writes, "anyone can go to ModernStates.org, the way they go to Netflix, and choose a college course the way they pick a Netflix movie. There is no charge for the course and no charge for the online textbook that comes with it." Sure, this is a plug by the founder ans CEO of Modern States, and it's for the first year only (still quaintly called 'freshman year' in the article), and there's reason to be sceptical (other such programs tend to add costs one way or another). But more and more, as the concept of a free education is more widely distributed, people will increasingly come to expect it.
Reality Is Nothing But a Hallucination: A Mind-Bending Crash Course on the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2017/08/25
It's a good thing I didn't get to looking at this post until after my talk today - I would have wanted to add a section on consciousness or some such, and that woud have been too much (what I presented may already have been too much!). But hey, there's still the seminar on Monday. There's the video and then this: "Perception has to be a process of 'informed guesswork,'" says the TED Blog's accompanying notes, "in which sensory signals are combined with prior expectations about the way the world is, to form the brain’s best guess of the causes of these signals."
The Myth of the Skills Gap
Andrew Weaver, MIT Technology Review, 2017/08/25
The proposition being defended by this article is a refutation of the "article of faith" among pundits that "America’s workers lack the skills employers demand." The 'skills gap' argument is in fact a global argument, not limited to American employers or workers. It has been challenged on numerous occasions and yet persists because the unemployment rate among lower-skilled workers is significantly greater than that for highly skilled workers. In this case, the author "looked for signs of hiring trouble in IT and clinical laboratory occupations" and found the skills gap does not seem to be manifest in the IT help desk industry. How this case becomes a refutation of the argument as a whole is a mystery. Still, this doesn't prevent the author from asserting that "instead of fretting about a skills gap, we should be focused on the real challenge of knitting together the supply and demand sides of the labor market."
The Bittersweet Convergence of Policy, Higher Ed and Tech
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2017/08/23
This article summarizes a panel at a recent BBWorld conference. The premise is that "even as technology continually promises to deliver a more effective education to a more engaged audience of learners, it hardly ever measures up." Instead, we see "a rush of bad actors coming in and providing subpar, poor-quality, crappy education, used by schools that are seeing this as a cheaper way to get folks through." But the "what I really want" response is equally bad - "What I really want — on our overhead projector, I want a rollof plastic, not individual screens." Yes, someone said that. In 2017. Of course, this is a policy panel, so we get the usual discussion about whether or not regulations stifle innovation. As though that were the problem. (I wonder how much money authors get paid to write panel summaries. Maybe I could get a gig doing that.)
Whatever happened to …
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, 2017/08/22
As I flip through old photos and presentation archives I am struck by the fact that the only evidence that some event or conference ever existed might be on my web page. So it may be with Educational Network of Ontario/Réseau éducatif de l’Ontario (ENOREO), recolleded by Doug Peterson in thiss post. He writes, "Through a text-based interface, you could connect with other Ontario Educators and discuss the educational issues of the day, 24 hours a day. It really seemed like magic." But it does have a legacy: the Flat Stanley Project. How about that!
Amazon’s Alexa: Your Next Teacher #elearning
Cait Etherington, eLearningInside News, 2017/08/22
Don't panic about the headline. The story here is that learning management systems (including, among others, Instructure's Canvas) has hooked into the Alexa API, so they can not accept (some) voice commands, and give audio responses. "This means," we are told, "that students will be able to ask Alexa key questions (e.g., What were the main points made in today’s class?), and Alexa will be able to offer a summary." For more coverage, see this report describing how Alexa is being supported by Canvas and Blackboard.
This amazing South-Bronx school grows 50,000 pounds of vegetables a year
Vicky Davis, The Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2017/08/23
This is a sponsored post on Vicki Davis's site, but don't let that slow you down, it's a great post (if you read it on the website there's a really annoying blocker, just click 'No Thanks' and the story will reappear. Also, you have to scroll past the "Sorry, this promotion is not available in your region" box - I hope she's making lots of money from the advertising because we're certainly paying for it with a miserable reading experience). The post itself features an interview with the author of The Power of a Plant, which describes the way an inner city school is supporting education - and its students - by growing vegetables indoors. "It’s all low-cost, replicable, and of course, there are our incredible tower gardens where we are growing food in a food-insecure community using 90% less water, 90% less space, and sending home 100 bags of groceries per week." There's so much hype and marketing in and around the article that it screams scam, but I want to believe there's something good there at the bottom of all that.
Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable
Ethan Zuckerman, 2017/08/23
This criticism of Mastodon - which, full disclosure, I use regularly - is odd. Here it is: "Japanese users had been looking for a Twitter-like platform where they could share lolicon writing and imagery for some time." For those unfamiliar with lolicon (as I was", it "includes animated cartoons and 2D drawings of young men and women in a way that is undeniably sexualized." As Zuckerman says, "some advocates for distributed publishing will be disappointed that Mastodon’s growth is so closely tied to controversial content."
But where's the problem? I don't see one. In Japan lolicon "is legal, widespread and significantly accepted." As Zuckerman himself notes, the rest of the world has to live with "the hypersexualization of tween girls in Americal popular culture," not to mention some more objectionable manifestations of 'free speech' that we find in cesspools like 4chan and Reddit. The big difference between Mastodon and, say, Twitter, is that that culture-specific content isn't blasted all over the internet and into our homes. The difference is that one country can't impose its values on the rest of us. I call that a win. I've been enjoying my time on Mastodon, far away from spam messages, fascists, Disney child princesses, and yes, lolicon. It's the internet before it became ewwww and I prefer it that way.
Don’t Complain About Charter Schools, Compete With Them
Arun Ramanathan, Education Next, 2017/08/23
The premise of this article is that public school supporters should cease complaining about charter schools and instead try to outperform them in the classroom. The main argument is that "neither side has a monopoly on the truth or a claim to the higher ground." And so, "In their rush to score cheap political points, both camps sidestep the reality that districts and charters are in a high-stakes competition for students." This competition - and the waste it creates - wouldn't exist were people not trying to privatize the school system. And while they may appear to be the same, charter school and public school organizations have very different objectives: the one to perform an essential public service for everybody, the other to cherrypick the most profitable parts of that service to make money. They are not equivalent, and it is an error to suppose that they are.
Re-humanise
Leigh Blackall, 2017/08/22
Text and slides at Leigh Blackall's presentation to E-Ldearning 2017 in Seoul. I appreciate the way he has used Korean in the titles of his slides, as well as the English heading and text. Blackall looks at the topic of technology hype and the responses to it, saying "my personal goal is to continuously seek out and build in questioning, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, history, theory, art, storytelling, criticism and debate, and to use these discoveries to find kindred spirits, to help refine meaning and purpose, and expand human-ness in the relentlessly technocratic world we live and work in." He cites a good selection of rehumanizers, from Carlyle to Huxley to to Curtis to Herzog. I would probably have included David Noble in the set.
The rise of robot teachers
Melissa Jun Rowley, Cisco, The Network, 2017/08/22
This article describes Amy, "an AI-driven, robotic math tutor.... so far, Amy prototype has been trialled in 10 different high schools across New Zealand" (of course, everything is 'AI xdriven' thesde days - web services, coffee makers, shampoo...). The idea i that Amy examines student work and identifies where tghey made theifr mistake. It then punishes them instructs them in that specific topic. But of course, teachers will still have jobs. "I think we will see humans and AI working in symbiotic relationships, where they are able to provide something much better together than either could do on their own," says Raphael Nolden, co-founder and CEO of Osnova.
If you’re a startup, you should not use React (reflecting on the BSD + patents license)
Raúl Kripalani, Medium, 2017/08/22
React is a Javascript framewowrk for content presentation. I've never used React because using something release by Facebook felt a little, well, greasy. That intuition is substantiated by this post. React is released under a 'BSD + patents' license. It looks like open source. But the license to use it is instantly revoked if you sue Facebook. "Bottom line: Open Source is not a “quid pro quo” trade. Open Source is about creating communities to build better software together. It should never be used as a marketplace to exchange rights."
Scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too
Jefferson Pooley, LSE Impact Blog, London School of Economics, 2017/08/21
The considerations in this post addressed to scholarly publishing could also be applied to open educational resources. "The profit motive is fundamentally misaligned with core values of academic life, potentially corroding ideals like unfettered inquiry, knowledge-sharing, and cooperative progress," argues Jefferson Pooley. It's a rich link-filled argument. "We have to convince our colleagues that a non-profit future for scholarly communication is within reach and worth fighting for. This means, among other things, encouraging boycotts, calling out the venture-funded startups, and promoting the alternatives. We need to make the case, in short, for a digital future that is not just open, but non-profit too."
[Comment]
Let’s Retire #MTBoS
Dan Meyer, dy/dan, 2017/08/21
This story is amusing from a distance and in retrospect, but I'm sure it was less funny for those involved at the time. MTBos - which stands for "Math Twitter BlogoSphere" - was set up as a hashtag and web site in order to welcome math teachers to the online community. It was not well received. People didn't know what it meant. People thought it was elitist. Were people 'qualified' to be a member of MTBos? It probably didn't help that it was set up with a limited list of tweeters. Anyhow, in this post Dan Meyer suggests that the term be retired. I'm not sure #iteachmath is the best replacement - I would have chosen something simpler, like #teachmath or even #mathK12. But the story does illustrate just what is in a name. And it's funny how passive people are - why would you need permission to use a hashtag? Nobody can own a hashtag, not even if they set up a Twitter identity and lay claim to it.
Dunce’s App
Audrey Watters, The Baffler, 2017/08/21
I think it's important to distinguish between 'behaviourism' - the theory that mental states are essentially equivalent to behaviours or (Ryle) dispositions to behave - and 'behaviour management' - methods and tools to encourage correct behaviour. Hero K12, described by Audrey Watters in this post, focuses on the latter. It's a bit like an in-school policing system, automating things like tardy slips, warnings and the like. It also seeks to identify and reward good behaviour - the "heroes" of our story. Watters says "that has always been the underpinning of behaviorism—an emphasis on positive reinforcement techniques in order to more effectively encourage 'correct behavior.'" True, but that doesn't make them behaviourists. Like the police, they may focus on encouraging correct behaviour, but the moment they start talking about cognitive phenomena, such as motivations, socialization, mental models, expectations, and the like, they cease to be behavioursists, and are just run-of-the mill product vendors interested in behaviour.
How to Engage in Pseudoscience With Real Data: A Criticism of John Hattie's Arguments in Visible Learning from the Perspective of a Statistician
Pierre-Jérôme Bergeron, McGill Journal of Education, 2017/08/21
This post is everything a proper refutation of education pseudoscience should be.It is a mistake to use Hattie's analysis as the basis for educational policy or instructional design, as this paper makes clear. Some context: in 2008 John Hattie published Visible Learning, which is essentially a meta-analysis of some 800 studies related to student achievement. The result was the Hattie Ranking of effect sizes. The work has been subject to numerous criticisms over the years, including this post noting "the Common Language Effect (CLE) is meant to be a probability, yet Hattie has it at values between -49% and 219%" , yet Hattie has continued to maintain his work is valid. He shouldn't. As this current post makes clear, the underlying presumption of the book is misguided. "Basically, Hattie computes averages that do not make any sense. A classic example of this type of average is: if my head is in the oven and my feet are in the freezer, on average, I’m comfortably warm."
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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