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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes ((56901))[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Dec 15, 2017
Presentation
Trends in the Future of Learning
Stephen Downes, Dec 15, 2017, Learning Futures Workshop, Gatineau, Quebec
Work in the future will require higher levels of analysis, access to experts, and greater autonomy. How can the College@ESDC equipped itself for what’s coming? What form(s) is learning, and especially operational training, likely to take in 10-15 years?
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Moodle News, 2017/12/15
Short article in Moodle News pointing to some interesting resources about a forthcoming MoodleNet: "Users and enthusiasts can follow the developments on a dedicated blog at blog.moodle.net, maintained by Doug Belshaw. There is also a (very preliminary) white paper available here." Some interesting bits: "Project MoodleNet should be a robust, decentralised, federated system that does not have on a single point of failure." Also, "Project MoodleNet should put the user in control of all of her data. All data held about a user should be compliant with the terms of the GDPR and be removable from the system." The unnamed Moodle News author is sceptical; "the image Moodle built already looks to be lagging behind."
Key themes in mobile learning: Prospects for learner-generated learning through AR and VR
Claudio Aguayo, Thomas Cochrane, Vickel Narayan, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15
"Mobile learning still requires the theories, methodologies, and practices of its own as a field," write the authors. "We also see a need for mobile learning to be conceptualised around ever-changing learning affordances and educational settings, rather than focusing on static structures such as content-delivery approaches, while embedding it within the scholarship of technology enhanced learning." All of which makes sense to me. The context is a literature review in a New Zealand project "targeting the origins, developments, and current state of the art in mobile learning across disciplines and educational sectors." The best quote from the report is from "Parsons (2014), who also recounts the key themes in mobile learning research over the past 20 years, concludes that '[T]he message from the timeline for current researchers is to cast their eye beyond current technology and practice and imagine the potential opportunities for the mobile learning that are not yet even possible or practical.'" Image: Paradiso.
Mobile augmented communication for remote collaboration in a physical work context
Jana Pejoska- Laajola, Sanna Reponen, Marjo Virnes, Teemu Leinonen, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2017/12/15
This report documents "field studies in actual work contexts to map how participants solve physical tasks with remote help powered by augmented video calls, and examined how the drawing feature was used in these contexts... augmented video calls enhance remote collaboration by allowing workers to point at task objects and locations, thus potentially improving informal workplace learning." It's interesting to see how far back work in this field goes - some of the early references date from the 1990s. The research involved the development and testing of the open source SoAR (Social Augmented Reality) Android app "that enhances video calls for the purposes of asking questions and providing guidance in context-dependent work situations." SoAR was created for the construction sector in Finland and incorporated a vision-sharing feature "that enabled augmented interactions on top of the live video stream and allowed participants to communicate by drawing on the video call."
The Fake News Culprit No One Wants to Identify: You
danah boyd, Wired, 2017/12/15
I waver back and forth on the topic of institutions. On the one hand, I find that they are capable of significant harm, as they concentrate power and authority and and easily usurped to work for an elite. Exhibit A: the university system. But by the same token, institutions create the fabric of society, without whiuch we exist only in a dog-eat-dog world of feudal authority. Whatever your views, institutions are being challenged in 2017. We have Umair Haque, formerly of Harvard Business Review, writing that American institutions are broken and near collapse. And here in Wired danah boyd asks, "what would it take to restructure the configuration of finance, political governance, and corporate activity for something that's a public good?" She argues, "the networks have become too fragmented and too polarized. Technology doesn’t help; it simply magnifies the poles... (we) were wrong to say that people would actively connect to those who were different than them because they could through technology."
Fake news and Facebook: Campaign kicks off to help Canadians separate fact from fiction
Clare Hennig, CBC News, 2017/12/15
This is an example of the deployment of education outside the usual channels. The public service message has been around for as long as there are ways to send messages (1950s radio dramas are full of them). Does the PSA actually work? There's a case to be made. Canada's Participaction program has a longstanding history of promoting fitness. We all remember the sounds from the Hinterland Who's Who program. And over the years the government has produced 86 Heritage Minutes to inform Canadians of our hgistiory and culture. We might just say that these are forms of advertising or propaganda, but any form opf education not explicitly designed to serve opnly the students' interests can be argued to be the same. But more to the point, there are many cases where the interests of society and the interests of the individual align; the four examples cited above are all instances of this (which is why they were successful), and so is the case in the present article, the eight PSAs being released to help people defend themselves against fake news.
Macmillan Learning Offers Educators Support for Open Education Resources via the Intellus Platform
Macmillan Learning, PRWeb, 2017/12/14
The hashtag to follow on this is #openwrapping. We had another announcement today of a publisher taking OER and wrapping commercial software and services around them, thus effectively enclosing the open resources. "Intellus, acquired by Macmillan last year, provides access to the first and only easily curated collection of open educational resources (OER) and academic library materials, enabling educators to easily select and deliver free and low-cost course materials to their students, all through the school’s LMS."
A 5-Step Guide To Help You Spread Social Learning Throughout Your Organization
Juliette Denny, 2017/12/14
Mostly I think this is a really bad guide, but it's bad in some interesting ways. One is the distinction between achievement and accomplishment Marc Prensky talked about last week. The suggestions here recognize achievement - "get 50 headshots" or "play the game for 10 hours" - which are simple accumulation measures, rather than actions that produce tangible good outside the learning environment. Another is the emoloyment of competition in recognizing learning, which may work in some cultures but will make people uncomfortable in many others (including probably my own). Finally, the suggestion of rewards can be a good idea (and can backfire) but I liked the idea of "a sit-down with your CEO." Again, though, maybe not for everyone.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping the Future of Education
PC Magazine, 2017/12/14
This is an interesting look at artificial intelligence in education (at least, a very traditional classroom-based education) but you have to read the article very closely to distinguish between what the systems will do and what the systems currently do. This is important because there is some distance between them. For example, "The algorithms driving AI can be trained to detect when a learner is struggling and what caused them to struggle, or when they are bored and what caused their boredom" is something that can be done, but isn't yet. So is this: "More advanced use of AI can involve the employment of complicated computer-vision algorithms to analyze facial expressions, such as boredom and distractedness." What exists now? "AI can currently relieve pain points by helping with record-keeping and with the selection and recommendation of resources for learners to use."
Big Data in Education book launch
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2017/12/14
I haven't read the book (and probably won't unless there's an open access version) but this assertion is interesting. "This book is about how educational data are produced and for what purposes, and about the technologies and companies that generate and process it. And it’s about fantasy. A ‘big data imaginary’ of education is not just hype dreamt up in Silicon Valley, but a normative vision of education for the future shared by many." Se also Audrey Watters, The Weaponization of Education Data.
Modern copyright law can't keep pace with thinking machines
Andrew Tarantola, Engadget, 2017/12/14
Copyright meets artificial intelligence. Who owns the product when one part is responsible for the digital input or data used by an AI, while another cerated the AI? For example, "Alex Reben developed and posted to YouTube, "Deeply Artificial Trees", an art piece powered by machine learning, that leveraged old Joy of Painting videos." The Bob Ross estate issued a take-down order. But "If a human can learn from a copyrighted book, can a machine learn from [it] as well?" Good question. We need to be careful, lest these things we learn in our education become the property of content publishers.
Promoting Research to the Masses: Assessing the Impact of a Poster Walk
Denise R. Adkins, Julie S. Lyon, International
Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2017/12/13
This paper (13 page PDF) describes a project where students created posters describing their research and displayed them in an open format on campus. The 'research' studies people who attended the poster session; there was a pre-test and post-test to evaluate 'learning' along with a survey where the participants were asked to rate their enjoyment. I find the concept intriguing. Wouldn't it be interesting is professors and graduate students did open poster sessions for the general public at a local mall? The purpose of such a session would of course go far beyond narrowly-defined 'learning' and even 'enjoyment'. Of course, the real question here is (as even this study acknowledges) the "intrinsic motivation" of the people presenting the posters. In this example the students were given extra credit, an incentive that doesn't apply to professors. Image: UVic, where "a student-oriented and student-run annual event" open to the public allows students to showcase their reserach.
The Learning Alliance Inventory: Instrument Development and Initial Validation
Daniel T. Rogers, International Journal for
the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2017/12/13
As usual I don't think much of the actual research (the data set consist of psychology students at a midwestern university, and the result evaluated is effect on GPA). But the concept of the 'working alliance' is intriguing. "In his 1979 paper, Bordin argued that a working alliance occurs when one person makes an effort to change and another person serves as a facilitator of that change." The purpose of the current paper (18 page PDF) is to "was to develop a theoretically grounded and psychometrically sound instrument for measuring students’ perceptions of the working alliance they experience with their teacher." They worked their way from 93 content-valid measures drawn from the literature to a set of 18 statistically relevant items divided into three major categories: collaborative bond, teacher competence, and student investment. See also Rogers's 2009 paper 'The Working Alliance in Teaching and Learning: Theoretical Clarity and Research Implications'.
Ethically Aligned Design, Version 2
The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, 2017/12/12
The term 'Autonomous and Intelligent Systems' (A/IS) stands for what we would commonly call AI and this is an extensive effort to describes the ethics of A/IS system design. This document (266 page PDF) will take some time to read. Take the time. I applaud the good intentions of the IEEE here but just as you wouldn't want a philosopher to design a bridge, a document that reads to me a bit like "Ethics by Engineers" feels wrong. For example, consider one of the "goals" of the document: "Prioritize metrics of well-being in their design and use." It's a basic error to substitute 'metrics' for outcomes, but they make it here. The "concerns" include automated weapons, safety, affective computing and mixed reality. OK. But where are the concerns about stereotyping and misrepresentation, which are the actual problems today? But beyond any such mundane concerns is "the seminal question of determining the key performance indicators (KPIs) of their success once introduced into society." Sigh. The IEEE website will make you fill in a form to access this document, so I uploaded a copy to my own site so you can access it directly. For more ethics as designed by engineers, see the IEEE Ethics in Action website.
Open Education and OER - A guide and call to action for policy makers
Maren Deepwell, Martin Weller, Lorna Campbell, Joe Wilson, Association for Learning Technology, 2017/12/12
This short paper (8 page PDF) is a "call to action for policy makers to mandate that publicly funded educational resources are released under open licence to ensure that they reside in the public." Interestingly the document cautions that "the 'open' in MOOCs is very different from the 'open' in OER," though this is the opposite of our intent back in 2008 when we first created them. The writers also assert (correctly) that "It is anomalous that while publicly funded research is mandatorily open there is no similar encouragement for learning resources to be openly available."
Is Alison The Answer To The World's Education Needs?
Peter High, Forbes, 2017/12/12
Forbes is reporting Alison's oft-debunked claim to have created the world's first MOOCs. It's hard to read this article as anything other than an advertorial (again, I caution people against trusting the traditional media where commercial interests are concerned). I have written to Allison in the past about this but there appears to be no legislation or constraint requiring that they represent themselves honestly. As for the question in the headline, the answer is "no" - free and open online self-study courses have been around since the 1990s (my own on logical fallacies course was published in 1995) and if they were the answer to to the world's education needs they would have solved the problem sometime in the last 22 years. Ditto the self-serve certificate you have to pay them for.
The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
John Hilton III, David Wiley, Jared Stein, Aaron Johnson, Brigham Young University, 2017/12/12
In the ongoing discussion on OER repositories David Wiley suggested today that "While many people are aware of the 5Rs framework for thinking about the legal openness of OER, but far fewer people are aware of the ALMS framework for thinking about the technical openness of OER." It was introduced in 2010 in Open Learning, a Taylor & Francis journal that throws up a subscription barrier if I want to read it. But there are open access copies here and here. The acronym stands for "Access to editing tools, Level of expertise required to revise or remix, Meaningfully editable and Source-file access." The authors write, "technical aspects of OER will affect how ―open‖ they really are. Creators of OER who wish to promote revising and remixing should ensure that OER are designed in such a way that users will have access to editing tools, that the tools needed to will not require a prohibitive level of expertise, and that the OER are meaningfully editable and self-sourced."
Shaping the university in a networked era
David White, Digital - Learning - Culture, 2017/12/12
I mentioned in a tweet the other dat that David O. White is new to me. But he's not in fact new; he is the same David White who introduced us to the 'visitors and residents' terminology back in 2011. This explains his placement on a panel with Marc Prensky. I've added his feed to my aggregator but since he posts infrequently don't expect to see a lot (his post prior to this one dates from September). Anyhow, this article will give you a sense of his current thinking. "It’s of great interest to me how an institution approaches the networked environments and practices. Most institutions now understand there is value in the network but often kill that value in the process of institutionalising it." he writes."Our challenge is in creating institutional structures (hierarchy) which can encourage and support those approaches while holding them in an open hand."
Weaving quicksilver: ‘We-searching’ for a pedagogy of small
Tanya Dorey, Small Stories, 2017/12/12
I've been on Mastodon for just over a year; my first post was last December 3. Since then I've written small stories, discussed theory, documented 1500 km of bike rides, and engaged in general banter. What I like about it is that it is a small and informal community I can share with. Some people call it a pedagogy of small. Others call it a pedagogy of slow. If it's a pedagogy at all, it's a pedagogy of harmony (which really, at long last, may be my answer to Friere). Tanya Dorey writes, "With that first step, we are again at an interesting starting point. Where do we go from here?" This article is a collection of thoughts from her and four others who share the same social space I share on this harmonious platform. P.S. be sure to explore trubox.ca as another interesting alternative form of pedagogical community.
Internet Pioneers and Leaders Tell the FCC: You Don’t Understand How the Internet Works
Frederick J. Baker, et.al., Pioneers of Net Neutrality, 2017/12/12
I don't know how much damage the end of net neutrality in the United States would cause, but over the long run, it's probably significant. This is in large part because it is based on a flawed understanding of internet technology. In this email Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, and other internet pioneers release a short letter linking to their earlier submission to the FCC (53 page PDF) in opposition to the ending of net neutrality. Beyond the obvious policy intent, this document is a great short-form introduction to the basics of internet technology, describing the principles on which it was founded, and the changes over the last 15 years. It also provides a significant number of concrete examples of cases where users were harmed in the absence of clearly defined rules.
Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.
Duncan J. Watts, David M. Rothschild, Columbia Journalism Review, 2017/12/11
One of the more salient stories this year has revolved around the phenomenon of fake news and (via fake news) managing and massaging public perceptions. The gist of this article is that, while social media manipulation is a problem that cannot be taken lightly, it would be misleading to attribute the U.S. election results (and the Brexit vote, etc.) to social media. Instead, write the authors of this report, we should look at mainstream media. For example, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." I find it interesting that it is this same media that is now affixing responsibility for the outccome on social media, when the scale of the coverage in traditional media dwarfs that found through alternativer sources. And finally, I attribute the election results to the voters (and I use the word 'attribute' rather than 'blame' when putting on my scientific or journalistic hat).
Wherefore Art Thou MOOC?: Defining Massive Open Online Courses
Stephanie J. Blackmon, Claire H. Major , online learning, 2017/12/11
I don't think this paper really succeeded in its stated objective of defining massive open online courses. What we do get is a sense that there are many interpretations of the form, and that if you sample mostly the xMOOC form, you'll find that xMOOC properties (like instructor-centeredness) predominate. It's interesting for me to observe that as the research moves from primary sources and into secondary sources (and tertiary sources, and more) that the researchers' understanding changes. Now instead of having direct experience they are reporting on what the research says, and with no real constraints on what can be said in research, assertions are replicated and become fact.
Care, Communication, Learner Support: Designing Meaningful Online Collaborative Learning
Heather A. Robinson, Whitney Kilgore, Scott J. Warren, online learning, 2017/12/11
The authors writem, "The three main themes that emerged from this study were: the importance of online communication approaches, challenges and supports for online collaborative learning, and that care is at the core of online learner support" (note that the abstract expresses this quite differently). I include this paper here not so much to address these issues (though I certianly have my own opinions) but to ask readers to think about the methodology. The study is based on interviews with four higher edeucation instructors. The authors assert "it was conducted through a post-Positivist paradigm and the findings are not intended to generalize," which is good. But why is this presented as 'research' rather than, say, 'argument' or 'perspectives'? The reserachers knew what they were looking for at the start; "the interviews focused on care expressions in digital delivery settings made within each instructor case." I think there are arguments to be made for the three themes, and they are cogently assembled here, but it just seems misleading to represent them here as discovered through reserach. Read more articles from the special issue on the AERA Online Teaching and Learning SIG.
A repository platform for OERs
Panagiotis Stasinakis, Open Education Platform, 2017/12/11
"I want to establish an on-line repository with OERs of primary and secondary education," wrote Panagiotis Stasinakis on a Creative Commons discussion list. "I am searching for a platform, an open-source platform, to install it in my private server and use it for the repository." The result was an interesting compendium of resouces, including:
Kolibri, which also offers a learning management system component. WordPress blogs, eg. this one, where each OER or group of resources is released as a blog post DSpace, with search functionality, categories, OER's meta data etc., but tricky to use Tsugi, by Chuck Severence, with integration into LMS systems like Sakai, Moodle, Canvas and work in Google Classroom Edu-sharing, developed in Germany Gitbook.com and Github.com to write, store, and share OER content, also Github at P2PU, and also github/jekyll OER Content Buffet - they use angular, and they offered to send the code if you write an email HackMD - a realtime, multiplatform collaborative markdown note editor Curriki provides the ability to create Groups for Discussions and create Group related and/or specific resourcesNote that the annotations are from the posts on the discussion list, not from me.
Government Adviser Says Stop Investing in Systems that Don’t Work
Press Release, Online Educa Berlin, 2017/12/11
According to this press release summarizing a talk at Online Educa Berlin, Pasi Sahlberg argued that education ministers in England, Australia and the United States are continuing to invest in the GERM (Global Educational Reform) model, in spite of evidence that it doesn't work. According to Sahlberg, "unsuccessful education systems are characterised by a belief in competition, standardisation, de-professionalisation, test-based accountability and privatisation. The outstanding features of successful education systems, on the other hand, are cooperation, risk- taking and creativity, professionalism, trust-based responsibility ('not test-based accountability') and ensuring an “equitable” public education for all."
Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines
David Mellor, Center for Open Science, 2017/12/11
I think this is an interesting idea, but the presentation is some of the worst I have ever seen. I've reproduced the basic standards in a post, here. In a nutshell, the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines are intended to describe different levels of openness (disclosure, requirement and verification) regarding data sources, algorithms, and other factors (eight in all) related to scientific research. The documentatins is broken down as best practices for funders, institutions and journals. There's a supposedly introductory article and the complete guidelines in a user-hostile content management system. They've been published, but you have to pay a subscription fee to see them.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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