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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Feb 02, 2018
Return of the MOOCs
Mene Ukueberuwa, City Journal, 2018/02/02
This article offers a bit of a history of MOOCs but is mostly (starting about a third of the way in ) an article about the Modern States "freshman year for free" project (no explanation why they couldn't use the long-established gender-neutral term 'frosh', as in 'frosh year for free', or even 'first year for free'). It's marketing. “'We want to be an on-ramp into the traditional system,' he (founder Steven Klinsky) tells me (author Mene Ukueberuwa), explaining how the platform’s courses could help, say, a cash-strapped college student finish a suspended degree or a full-time worker shave time off her course of study." Taxpayers, meanwhile, foot the bill, while Modern States operates in cooperation with EdX. Via Audrey Watters.
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Reflections on 20 Years of Open Content: Lessons from Open Source
David Wiley, OER18, Association for Learning Technology, 2018/02/02
David Wiley candidly admits that this history is written from his own point of view, which is a good thing, because my experience of these events was very different. For example, in the mid-1990s, when Wiley was working on an ISP startup, I was working on a FreeNet. I had been using and creating non-commercial shareware (including most especially extensive BBS systems and MUDLibs) for years by the time open source advocates gathered to launch the movement in 1998. When Wiley was writing Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond about his ideas for 'open content' in that same year my own non-commercial open content had been online for three years. When Wiley says we would be "close to nowhere" had we not commercialized free software and free content, I think that the appropriation of an already existing and robust sharing community by commercial interests is what is breaking the internet today. For some people it's cash; for other people it's community. I know where I stand.
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Information affordances: Studying the information processing activities of the core Occupy actors on Twitter
Sikana Tanupabrungsun, Jeff Hemsley, Bryan Semaan, First Monday, 2018/02/02
In research and design my focus is more on creating affordances than outcomes. This allows for the creation of different outcomes by different people, in different contexts. It's also, I think, a better basis for the study of media. This paper offers a good example. It examines how the affordances offered by Twitter influenced leadership and activism in Occupy Wall Street. The authors found that "the core actors used Twitter to resolve ambiguity more often than reducing uncertainty." For example, "retweeting resolves ambiguity by filtering noise, spam, and misinformation by adding credibility to a piece of information." This makes sense to me. In a turbulent and chaotic environment, the world is awash with information. Merely creating more information does not add value. Creating interpretation, context and connection - that creates value.
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Canada’s SOPA Moment: Why the CRTC Should Reject the Bell Coalition’s Dangerous Internet Blocking Plan
Michael Geist, 2018/02/02
Michael Geist is arguing against a proposal this week from Canadian telecom and media companies that would allow them to block websites. "The coalition’s proposal raises serious legal concerns," he writes. "It envisions the creation of a new, not-for-profit organization that would be responsible for identifying sites to block... The courts would remarkably be left out of the process." And the telecoms have a history of overreach. For example, " hen Telus restricted access to a pro-union website in 2005, it simultaneously blocked access to an additional 766 websites hosted by the same computer server." I think it's very likely we would see the companies use this power to block competition (like streaming media or TVAddons) or to rub out criticism and dissent. Moreover, as one commenter said, "This problem could easily be solved by some kind of functional separation. If Bell wants to own the content then it can't manage the pipe. Their censorious urges would probably evaporate pretty quickly then." More: Globe and Mail, Financial Post, OpenMedia, Buzzfeed, Telecom Trends.
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Tear down this paywall: Germany’s taz newspaper launches a reader revolution from Berlin
Anna Rohleder, ijnet, 2018/02/02
There's no reason why this model couldn't work for academic or educational content as well. "Berlin-based daily Tageszeitung (taz for short) has more than 10,000 supporters who make recurring donations to fund its operations; 50,000 subscribers to its print and digital editions; and more than 17,000 reader-owners who pay a minimum of EUR500 to join the taz cooperative." Access to the content is free; no paywall. Of course nobody is getting rich, but that's the point. Herde Hitziger, a member of the cooperative, writes, “For me, taz is part of my political identity… I think that the reader cooperative and taz zahl ich [“I pay”] is a visionary idea. Together we are making something available that is educational, including people who would not be able to afford it otherwise. I also feel that I am part of a community through taz.”
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Flipped Classroom Research: From “Black Box” to “White Box” Evaluation
Christian Stöhr, Tom Adawi, Education Sciences, 2018/02/01
Some realism: "There are no panaceas in higher education: interventions seldom work everywhere and for everyone." Because of this, according to this editorial, there is a need to shift from 'black box' modes of evaluation, also known as 'realist evaluation'. The authors write, "Realist evaluation emerged largely as a reaction to the traditional approach to evaluating interventions, using an experimental or quasi-experimental design. Rather than focusing on the question 'does it work?', realist evaluation is more theory-oriented and pivots around questions such as “how or why does it work, for whom, and in what circumstances?" This is the frame they set for a special issue of Education Sciences on evaluating flipped classrooms.
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The punk rock internet – how DIY rebels are working to replace the tech giants
John Harris, The Guardian, 2018/02/01
Count me as being among the punk rock rebels on the internet - even though my punk anthem might be something like Walking on Sunshine. As Laura Balkan says, " I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well." And she adds, "Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don’t care about anyone other than themselves." The story focuses a lot on the technical means being employed to create the indienet - distributed data and blockchain, for example - which may or may not work. But the tech isn't the objective, the outcome is. "If we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich. We’ve kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success,” he says. “You know: ‘Unless you’ve made a billion dollars and you’re on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you’re not successful.'" The point isn't to create a unicorn. It's to create an idea.
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Don’t Let Bad Journalism Get in the Way of a Good Online Education
Henry Kronk, eLearningInside News, 2018/02/01
I am often critical of traditional media in these pages (a tough sell in the age of fake news on social media) but my scepticism of what I read and view in supposedly trustworthy sources is well founded. This article makes a case. It cites as an example a Vox article from a few days ago that states that " virtual students statistically perform much worse than traditional students" based on a single study from 2015 looking at statistics from only 17 states. Now I'm no fan of charter schools but this report is not credible. It also cites a Wired article that says "online education, which is accessible, affordable and relevant, hasn’t lived up to its promise." This is supported only by a link to a previous Wired article which in turn cites no sources. Moreover, the author, Lior Frenkel, "created the online education initiative nuSchool, and serves as a partner with others such as Jolt and altMBA," which are cited in the article as "online educators that have the potential to disrupt education." Interestingly, I was unable to verify the existenmce of a connection between Frenkel and altMBA, which is run by Seth Godin.
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This is an alpha release of an application that uses blockchain technology to link the data in your various accounts around the internet. "Most people have dozens of profiles online, many of which include information that is not up to date, resulting in lost time and opportunities. dock.io solves this by connecting different websites and apps you use, allowing you to save information to one source, and control how and where your information is used across the web," wrote Remote.com CEO Nick Macario by email today while announcing their partnership with Dock. I like the idea of Dock.io but it feels skeevy because of the way it offers me money to invite people to connect. I get the sense that Dock wants to centralize all my information (and then what, sell it?) and my concern about that is precisely why my information is scattered across multiple services.
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Stop Fixating on the Size of Your Audience
Mark Carrigan, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/02/01
"Social media carries risks for scholarship, and many of them hinge upon these popularity metrics," writes Mark Carrigan. "Many scholars seem to think the huge scale of social media means they are talking to a vast undifferentiated public whenever they post anything. In reality, most of the time we are connecting with only the tiniest subset of potential readers." This seems reasonable to me. There is an upper limit to the size of the audience for the content in, say, OLDaily, and attempting to expand its reach carries with it the demand to change the focus and content into avenues of broader appeal, actually reducing its value. So I focus on content, not marketing. Related: the high price of popularity.
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2018 OLDaily Reader Survey
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/01/31
I got 64 responses to my survey, which is a response rate of 0.3 percent, which doesn't seem very high to me, but I've read refereed academic publications based on less robust statistics. This article summarizes the overall results and discusses some of the suggestions for improvements.
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Driving Excellence in Education
Katie Gallagher, e-learn, 2018/01/31
This article is basically a marketing message in the Blackboard-ownes e-learn Magazine, but I think we should take note. Katie Gallagher writes, "Academic effectiveness serves as central focus for institutions of higher education across the globe." I see this as an effort to define (and perhaps own) the term 'academic effectiveness'. What does it mean? The concept is explaiend in several different ways in this article, ranging from a list of practices (content delivery, assessment, continuous improvement,...) to product design criteria ("universal, accessible digital content that improves instruction") to more practices ("Creating inclusive learning experiences", "Plagiarism prevention and cultivating appropriate attributions,"...). The content was created in early January but only arrived in my email today.
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Why one professor live-streamed lectures for free on social media
Louisa Simmons, University Affairs, 2018/01/31
If things are important, you talk about them, you share the talks, and you celebrate the wide access that becomes possible. That, I think, is the lesson from this short article. "Graham Reynolds... is a professor emeritus at Cape Breton University who says he’s still got enough life left in him to teach a course called 'Viola Desmond’s Canada.'" A black businesswoman in Nova Scotia, Viola Desmond refused to vacate a whites-only section of a threatre in 1946 and the case that resulted kicked off the modern civil rights movement in Canada. “For me, this is a legacy course,” Reynolds said. “This is something that will be available as long as there’s a YouTube site that’s willing to hold the file.” As it should be.
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A night at the gun club
Theresa Tayler, University Affairs, 2018/01/31
I am not sure why there is a push to have gun clubs opened on campuses across Canada, and I'm not sure why University Affairs requested and published this puff-piece supporting the idea, but in my own opinion there's no good reason for universities (and especially public universities) to be promoting gun clubs. We read that "any significant contention around starting a gun club on campus isn't because of opposing moral or social views; hurdles come up because most student associations and university offices have strict protocols and rules around the administration of all clubs." But this is most certainly not true. Guns are not an appropriate educational technology. And let me be the first (and by no means the last) to say we don't need this, we don't want this, and we think it should stop. And I think University Affairs has some explaining to do. Image: Theresa Tayler.
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Darwin Would Approve: Levels of Learning Adaptation
Steven Loomis, Learning Solutions, 2018/01/31
While there is merit to this post I think the way it conflates different senses of 'adaptation' undermine its core message. We really have three very different senses of adaptation at work here: first, Darwin's concept of species adaptation in evolution; second, variability of individual responses to changing circumstances; and third, rule-based selection of responses based on varying trigger events. That's why the reference to the Darwin Awards and the Natureismetal subreddit is so inappropriate in this context. And even within these definitions there is a misunderstanding of adaptation; while we read that "organizations and workers recognize - we must be fast and nimble to survive" I can think of many occasion in which slowing down, acting wisely, adopting a defensive posture and waiting it out are much better survival mechanisms.
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Classes taught online on snow days
Amelia Harper, Rocky Mount Telegram, 2018/01/31
This could be any newspaper anywhere really. It could be snow, heat, torrential rain, whatever. "While most students in Edgecombe County were missing school during the recent January snow days, students at G.W. Bulluck Elementary School had the option to continue." You've seen the headline before, and eventually, you'll stop seeing the headline as it becomes common practice. Then, as it becomes common practice, administrators will be much less hesitant to declare snow days. At a certain point, shorter work weeks (made possible due to automation and a long-overdue sharing of productivity gains with workers) will converge with e-learning days. The future takes time to arrive, but one day, we'll wake up and discover that, like camera-phones, suddently it's here. Image: GW Bulluck Elementary
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EdX Quietly Developing ‘MicroBachelors’ Program
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/01/31
According to this article, EdX "is quietly developing a 'MicroBachelors' degree that is designed to break the undergraduate credential into Lego-like components." The work is funded by a $700,000 Lumina Foundation grant. “Education in five to ten years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong,” said EdX CEO Anant Agarwal. This targets higher education institutions at their weakest point: certification. The article also notes in passing Arizon State University's 'open-scale courseware,' "the university’s attempt to rebrand a concept that was once known as MOOCs, or massive open online courses."
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Higher Education's Top 10 Strategic Technologies and Trends for 2018
EDUCAUSE, 2018/01/31
Educause has a bunch of 'top 10 lists for 2018' and it's a bit hard to keep track. But I think this is the over-arching one. In any event, it's the most recent. The top 'strategic technology' for 2018 is "Uses of APIs," which would accord with my own thinking. The remainder of the list is taken up with old standards like active learning, mobile devices, and learning analytics. The 2018 'most influential trend' is "complexity of security threats." There's a separate list of Top IT trends for 2018 (which is actually three separate lists). One of these is the ELI key issues for 2018 which is headed by 'academic transformation'. Image: Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2018.
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PoodLL A\V Recording Plugin For Moodle Gets Deep Into HTML5 With Latest Update
Moodle News, 2018/01/30
Yes, it's pretty incredible that you can record live audio and video directly into your Moodle website. It is also, thanks to HTML5, relatively straightforward. From the developer side of things, it is a lot like uploading a file. It's just that you're uploading the file as it is being created, using the capture="camera" command in the input element. Here's the full specification. This is not to sell the Moodle module short. As designer Justin Hunt shows, nothing is simple.
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Education’s dirty little secret
David McQueen, TallBlackOneSugar, 2018/01/30
Writing about "how some schools maintain these outstanding high level attainment grades," David McQueen writes "they weed out the ones who might make the figures not look too good." This, he said, is widespread. "In the main they were black boys who were excluded for behaviour reasons but a quick chat with some of the pupils showed that they were under attaining and moved out." I can't verify whether this assertion is true, but I would suggest that the idea of having 'elite schools' and 'league tables' can certainly lead to these sorts of suspicions and accusations.
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The Central Challenge of Collaboration
Nancy Dixon, conversation matters, 2018/01/30
The more people make collaboration the core of sopcial, political and educational society, the more difficult it becomes to more forward. It's not simply because of our inclination to view those we disagree with as the enemy, as Nancy Dixon says. The difficulty with collaboration is that you have to work together to achieve some common objective. But that's usually precisely where you disagree with the other person. "How can we succeed, then, in working with people we don’t agree with or like or trust?" asks Dixon. My answer has always been to recommend cooperation. You don't need to share objectives, you don't need to share values, you simply need to enter into an exchange that leaves both of you better off. And leave the politics for another day.
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Things Experienced Speakers Wish They’d Known: Tips For First-Time Conference Speakers
Sophie Koonin, Medium, 2018/01/29
This sort of article is usually awful but this one is pretty good. I'm including it here because it suggests "tech folks might also like to try out Reveal.JS, which lets you write fully responsive slides in HTML or Markdown (perfect for code snippets!)." This remined me of things like Jupyter notebooks, which embed code into documents; it doesn't look like Reveal takes you that far, though. There are other good suggestions in the article as well: begin with the demo, have a version of the demo pre-recorded (just in case), and most importantly, "the audience is rooting for you" and "the audience wants you to succeed." Remember that and you'll be fine.
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What's behind the soaring cost of college textbooks
Kathy Kristof, CBS, 2018/01/29
Digital technologies have made just about everything cheaper and more accessible, but textbook publihers have managed to use it to make education more expensive for students. That's the overarching message in this news report from the United States. "The main culprit? Textbooks bundled with 'access codes' that expire at the end of the semester. These access codes largely force students to buy books at retail prices at campus bookstores and render the texts worthless in the resale market." You might think this is an advantage for open educational resources. "With open educational resources, there are no access codes, and students never lose access to their core content," said Nicole Finkbeiner, associate director of institutional relations for OpenStax. But let's not forget about the bundling of OERs with software students have to pay for - and to which, just like textbooks, they lose access to after a year or two.
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Edraak.org launches new platform for school learners, teachers
The Jordan Times, 2018/01/29
This article describes an expansion of the Arabic MOOC platform Edraak. "Developed with the support of a $3 million grant from Google.org, and complemented with engagement from Google employees to provide product design expertise, the platform has launched with Mathematics materials for grades 7 and 9, including more than 1,200 educational minutes of bite-sized video lectures." Critics might not like the idea, but I can't say enough about the value of making basic knowledge freely available to people through platforms such as this. "A child denied an education isn’t just a tragedy for that child; it leaves the rest of us vulnerable,” said Jordan's Queen Rania, adding “but the future doesn’t have to be this bleak – not in this age of innovation.”
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ePortfolio Assessment Instrument
University of Queensland, 2018/01/29
This is a look into the inner workings of an e-Portfolio assessment system. The 'instruments' themselves are "are rubrics that also contain settings for who will mark the assessment task and when the results will be released to students." The page (this isn't an article or anything like that) provides access to the ePortfolio system help documents as well. I always follow links like this when I find them not only because I am curious about the inner workings of things but because I'm looking for signs of the whole portfolio assessment process becoming automated. I don't think automated assessment will use rubrics like this in the long run, but rather I view rubrics like this as part of the training set that will be used to created the automation software.
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Facebook Only Cares About Facebook
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, 2018/01/29
This is a good article with a poor title. The overall gist is that it is Facebook, and not the user, that controls the algorithm. So whether or not changes to the algorithm eliminate fake news (spoiler: they won't) there isn't really anything the user can do about it. Enter a "provocation" created by Zuckerman and colleagues: gobo.social, a customizable news aggregator. It allows you to customize your newsfeed from Facebook and Twitter. I tried it out; the Twitter authentication failed but Facebook worked. Howver, "Facebook only allows us to show you Facebook Pages (the pages that are being de-prioritized in the News Feed changes), not posts from your friends, crippling its functionality as a social-network aggregator."
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Overwhelmed by size, underwhelmed by quality: A review of EdTech’s largest show, BETT 2018
Junaid Mubeen, Medium, 2018/01/29
This review of BETT by an educator left me with the impression of a reviewer completely convinced by the value of pedagogy and utterly unable to fathom the idea of people creating learning for themselves. Consider this: "They (the exhibitors) fell utterly silent when pushed on pedagogy. The learning content is often the most neglected part of a product demonstration because it exposes the absence of pedagogical intent ... In some cases, exhibitors were unable to direct me to the learning content at all." That's becaus contemporary learning is no longer about pushing content. It's about creating experiences. The tech vendors have their weaknesses, to be sure. But their failure to emulate traditional teaching isn't one of them.
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An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform
Kalid Azad, Better Explained, 2018/01/30
I love this analogy describing the Fourier Transform (quoted):
What does the Fourier Transform do? Given a smoothie, it finds the recipe. How? Run the smoothie through filters to extract each ingredient. Why? Recipes are easier to analyze, compare, and modify than the smoothie itself. How do we get the smoothie back? Blend the ingredients.If you like the analogy, go read the explanation. Via Kottke.
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Return to Roots
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning Solutions, 2018/01/29
"To me, THIS is why I use social media and networks," writes Helen Blunden. "To tap me into a world of people who can inspire my thinking, allow me to contribute, experiment, create and co-create and then to reflect on what I’m learning and how to apply it to the problem I’m trying to solve."
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Copyright 2018 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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