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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Jun 02, 2017
Intro to Firebase and React
Simon Bloom, CSS-Tricks, 2017/06/02
Firebase is a new service from Google enabling you to create and manage a cloud-based database. Reach is a Javascript library from Facebook that creates dynamic forms. Combine the two together and you get an innovative serverless application. This post documents creating a demonstration app in which "you and your friends will be able to log in and be able to see and post information about what you're planning to bring to the potlock." Why is this relevant? Imagine an online course as a database interface rather than a series of content pages.
Toward a Canadian Knowledge Transfer Strategy: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Michael Geist, 2017/06/02
Presentation by Michael Geist to a Canadian government committee on a study on intellectual property and tech transfer. He suggests that the government should look at knowledge transfer more broadly, and focus less on IP and patents. "The emphasis on university-based patenting is misplaced. It can have a corrosive effect on universities, who forego important, publicly-funded research in favour of potential licensing or patenting opportunities. With properly funded institutions, there is no need to chase licensing dollars." I've made similar arguments internally, with respect to government-produced research, and called for open access to government resources, publications and data.
Scholar.Social: A Mastodon Network For Teachers
Aaron B. Smith, Academic Aesthetic, 2017/06/02
This post introduces scholar.social, a Mastodon server for teachers and educators. "scholar.social is not JUST for teachers, but anyone involved in academics. The tag line they use is 'The Mastodon profile that you’re not embarrassed to put on the last slide of a presentation at a conference.'"
Facial recognition tech makes it official: There is no privacy anymore
Cate Lawrence, ReadWrite, 2017/06/02
This has actually been going on for a while, but now it is becoming commoditized and widespread: "electronic billboards in restaurants and shopping precincts that utilize advanced facial recognition techniques to not only provide personalized advertisements but also measure and record the consumer and their response." Of course the proprietors don't tell you that they're doing this, but sometimes their actions are exposed by accident. There's probably no stopping this. And there's no escape for students. "Today we’ve seen the use of a French education provider utilizing the tech to determine if students are paying attention during remote learning."
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/06/02
According to Doub Belshaw (assisted with quotes from others), "Personalised advertising isn’t useful. It’s invasive, and it’s used to build a profile to manipulate you and your ‘friends’." If we say this about personalized advertising, what do we say about personalized content? If personalized content, working exactly as intended on Facebook, is so harmful, what are we to say about personalized learning? There's a big gaping question here that people are not answering.
A toolkit for predicting the future
The Economist, Medium, 2017/06/02
It's a toolbox with only three tools, but they're good tools:
Confessional technologies of the self: From Seneca to social media
Norm Friesen, First Monday, 2017/06/01
Norm Friesen argues that personal self-expression on the web is a continuation of a tradition of externalized identity that dates from centuries in the past. "It is not difficult to regard Facebook — a social media site with over one billion registered users — as a powerful, interpellating, confessional technology of the self," he writes. We can see the link between Facebook's injunction to answer the question "what's on your mind?" and the confessional catechism. But it's also a practice of personal discipline. As Foucault says, "technologies of the self" are “reflected and voluntary practices by which men not only fix rules of conduct for themselves but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their particular being, and to make their life an oeuvre.” Which, arguably, is what I'm doing with this website.
From digital commons to the data-fied urge: Theorising evolving trends in the intersections of digital culture and open education
Giota Alevizou, First Monday, 2017/06/01
This paper could be clearer, but the mapping of trends evolving from open education in digital culture is important, as is the warning it contains. The trends are as follows (quoted, my emphasis):
Platform Capitalism in the Classroom
Ben Williamson, DMLcentral, 2017/06/01
According to this article, 'platform capitalism' is "a business model based on the extraction of value from connecting people into networks and mining their data." So companies like Google and Facebook practice platform capitalism. The author suggests that it has made its way to education as well, citing the example of ClassDojo. These platforms, according to Tarleton Gillespie, are also “curators of public discourse” because their choices “affect the design of social media interfaces." Just so, we read, "ClassDojo is acting as a curator of educational discourse and practice, particularly around social and emotional learning. ClassDojo has already distributed the vocabulary of growth mindset, mindfulness, character development and influenced the uptake of social-emotional learning practices among millions of teachers."
Internet Trends 2017 - CODE Conference
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins, 2017/06/01
Mary Meeker is back with her influential report documenting the latest internet trends (355 page PDF). This year's take: overall internet use growth is strong, but the rate of mobile internet use growth is leveling off. Advertising is growing (and increasingly measurable). Search and advertising go hand-in-hand, and following trends in user-generated content (UGC) a lot of search in the future will be image-driven. The ads themselves are becoming targeted storefronts, leading to a new type of store: the subscription store.
Building Competencies for Careers
Maria Ferguson, Diane Stark Rentner, Nancy Kober, Matthew Frizzell, Matthew Brau, Center on Educational Policy, 2017/05/31
This report (16 page PDF) explores how deeper learning competencies apply to the workplace through an analysis of the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database. The deeper learning competencies include such things as learning to learn, critical thinking, academic mindset, collaboration and communication. The deep learning competencies were required in all 301 occupations evaluated, especially necessary in those occupations with a "bright" outlook. According to the authors, this " validates the idea that employees still need a range of skills and competencies even if they already have extensive content knowledge."
Cognitive Access to Numbers: The Philosophical Significance of Empirical Findings About Basic Number Abilities
Marcus Giaquinto, University College London, 2017/05/31
We teach children about numbers, but how do people come to know what numbers are, given that they are abstract? There must be some process of learning that takes place. This paper explores this problem, offers several alternative accounts of what a number is, and argues that the concept of a number can be learned by learning to recognize the size of a set or collection of entities.
Learning Technology Research Project Report
Tim Buff, Agylia, 2017/05/31
There are no real surprises in this report (despite what this summary says) but it offers a useful refocus on learner needs and preferences in mobile learning (27 page PDF). "Personalised content selections that reduce the mass of available information to the items most useful to the individual learner, are increasingly important... The timeliness and accuracy of content is still vital. However, the form that the content takes, the ease of use and the ability to find the short, sharp piece of content, which is relevant to the individual, is even more crucial."
Docker Compose: A better way to deploy Rocketchat, Wekan, and MongoDB
Dave Lane, OERu Technology, 2017/05/30
I'm posting this mostly for my own future reference. It's basically a set of scripts that allow you to automate a cloud-based web application. Rocket.chat is an open source messaging application similar to Slack. Mongo is a no-SQL database engine. And Wekan is a project management tool. Together they create a single working environment for a project team. Or a cool planning environment for your students.
Create Web Pages for Free and Save Them as PDF
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2017/05/30
What I love about the internet is that there are ways to do almost anything you want. Suppose you wanted a nice PDF document, for example, but don't have any software other than your browser. There's a way to make one! Here's a PDF I made of my website home page. Just for fun.
User Facing State
Scott O'Hara, CSS-Tricks, 2017/05/30
I've been thinking a lot lately of non-linear languages. The idea has been around for a while. You might recall the concept from the movie Arrival. Fast-forward now to this article describing what the author calls 'user facing state' " talking about how to let our users know about state (think: whether a button is disabled or not, or if a panel is active or not)." In a certain non-trivial sense a web page (or any other visual representation) is a non-linear language. And thought of as such, the concept of reading and writing in a non-linear language isn't so far away from our everyday experience as one might thing. Now, let me talk to you about reading a city...
After the Hype, Do MOOC Ventures Like edX Still Matter?
Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/05/30
This is an interview with Anant Agarwal, chief executive of edX, so the answer is going to be 'yes'. But don't think of it as a technology project. Agarwal at one point says, "one of the big innovations, really, at edX has not been technology-focused. It has to do with policy and new credentials." The interviewer, Goldie Blumenstyk, sputters in response: "But does that really — that doesn't help educate the world, which I think was the big vision and maybe too much of the hype."
With state budget in crisis, many Oklahoma schools hold classes four days a week
Emma Brown, Washington Post, 2017/05/30
It's hard to imagine a four-day school week. It would have been my dream in my childhood, of course (exceeded only by the three-day school week). But no doubt it's a source of concern for parents and teachers. The shorter week is a cost savings measure, of course, though one wonders how much it actually saves. But it raises the question of how shorter school weeks could work with online learning. And how you manage something like this with childcare and meals for students whose parents can't afford it.
The Digital Revolution Will Not Be Powerpointed (nor MOOCed)
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/05/29
There's a lesson in the metaphor of a Stanford-based MOOC on activism that has students create PowerPoints and form teams to write mission statements. "I am deeply engrossed in reading Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas with her direct experience participating in the Mexican Zapatista uprisings in, Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and the protests in her home country of Turkey in Gezi Park," writes Alan Levine. "I have yet to read of any of these efforts starting with people crafting a mission statement." And as the course content seems so far removes from actual activism, so also the course itself seems so far removed from what can and should be done in online learning. "I am most certainly being judgemental, but I cannot be part of such a cloistered, bubbled experience," writes Levine. "I cannot see any relevance to what is happening right now."
Micropub is a W3C Recommendation
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2017/05/29
You can find the specification here. "The Micropub protocol is used to create, update and delete posts on one's own domain using third-party clients. Web apps and native apps (e.g., iPhone, Android) can use Micropub to post and edit articles, short notes, comments, likes, photos, events or other kinds of posts on your own website." It defines a multipart upload specification that can include JSON data and attachments such as jpeg images.
Google’s 3 Secrets To Designing Perfect Conversations
Mark Wilson, 2017/05/29
Google's approach to interaction is based on the work of British philosopher Paul Grice, who "theorized that people employ all sorts of norms (which are known as Grice’s Maxims) to make sure that conversations flow normally." What's interesting is that a lot of the time the response doesn't depend on having understood the other speaker. It might be more important to simply keep the conversation flowing than to ask for a clarification. Grice's maxims aren't rules per se but generally they distinguish between people we want to and people we find to be a bore.
Demystifying the Connections Between the LMS, LRS, and xAPI
Brian Carlson, Margaret Roth, Michael Hruska, Learning Solutions, 2017/05/29
The sort of this article is a set of use cases (they're hardly case studies though they're labeled as such) describing storage and use of "data in the Learning Record Store (LRS) from multiple platforms including asynchronous learning in an LMS, synchronous in-person training, a soft-skill development game, and team member collaboration in a mobile communication app." I think it makes a lot of sense (and would be surprised if this weren't done) were the LRS also used for performance data; we could see how a game, for example, and a real-life application could be very similar. Ultimately the purpose of the LRS is to be examined with data analytics, and comparisons of training and performance results would seem to be core to this.
How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything
Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 2017/05/29
"Google's geographic data may become its most valuable asset," writes Alexis Madrigal, "not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable." It makes sense. Location - specifically, geolocation - creates otherwise unknowable relations between entities. The map is the first representation of that set of relations, but eventually the map will also contain the data that my cup is located six inches away from my elbow (which, if it is well designed, will prompt it to close its lid, just in case). Via Doug Peterson.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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