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by Stephen Downes
Mar 17, 2017
Problems with Personalized Learning
Dan Meyer, dy/dan, 2017/03/17
Dan Meyer takes a swipe at this article (behind a paywall, for no good reason) in Educational Leadership on “personalized learning” and in passing also raises questions about potential conflicts of interest on the authors' parts (there's an interesting exchange with the publisher in the comments). "This isn’t good instruction," writes Meyer. "It isn’t even good direct instruction. When someone is explaining something to you and you don’t understand them, you don’t ask that person to 'repeat exactly what you just said only slower.'" On a related note: they could use the volume switch to have them repeat it louder as well! See also this MathiaX review (source of the image above).
Teachers’ Awareness of Guidelines for Quality Assurance when developing MOOCs
Ulf Olsson, Seminar.Net, 2017/03/17
This article at least gives a nod to Martin Weller's plea to let MOOCs define their own standards for quality. "Let people play and explore in this space without tying it down with the types of quality overhead we already have in formal education." And then it shrugs as says "whatever". "MOOCs must be shown to meet some of the same quality standards that other online courses are expected to meet," writes the author, without justification. It then proceeds to question "How aware are teachers of quality assurance systems when developing MOOCs?" along the usual lines. I've offered alternative accounts of quality in MOOCs: how diverse are the participants and technologies? How interactive is it? How open is it to different people and different types of participation? How free are people to define their own objectives and learning strategy?
The college transcript of the future — and the processes holding it back
Brian Peddle, EdScoop, 2017/03/17
Discussion of the concept of a "modernized transcript". It's similar to what I have been calling a "personal learning record", with the main difference being that it is specific to a single institution, as opposed to incorporating data from multiple institutions and specific to a single individual. And it also seems to be focused more on academic record - "secure, verifiable credentials that reflect more comprehensive data on student learning" - rather than a more general statement of competencies and achievements. What's holding it back? "A better way to track, communicate, and authenticate the depth and diversity of these experiences in a reliable and coherent way." That, I guess, and an affinity for fax machines.
Group Process Design Principles in Times of Turbulance
Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, 2017/03/17
This is an article that deserves a deeper discussion, but in the space I have here I want to make just one point: the list of effective leverage points in a system, as described by Donella Meadows, is exactly the inverse of the list of effective leverage points in a network. And we can understand this by understanding how any sufficiently complex system becomes, effectively, a network. To change a system, you change paradigms, objectives and rules. But a network is not based on paradigms, objectives and rules, and trying to change them is like trying to push a fog bank. In a system, a change to a small parameter, like the rate of return on a rental property, is insignificant. In a network, these small parameters are everything., because there are no higher-level parameters to which these must conform
Houston school allows students to make rules
Tera Roberson, Click2Houston, 2017/03/17
I'm not sure whether this is an experiment that will spread (because its successes won't be measured in any traditional metric) but I'm still happy to see it taking place. “You're in charge of figuring out who you are, what you will do with your time, what you want to learn, who you want to be, what kind of person, and kids who spend their whole life growing up in that system, when they go to college, they know who they are,” DeBusk said.
How Higher Education Leaders Are Making Great Teaching A Priority On Their Campuses
Higher Education Today, 2017/03/16
This to me reads like those articles from the 90s and 00s about how newspapers were making quality writing and reporting their top priority. I can see them now: "yes, even though we employ more lower-paid stringers than ever before and are walking all over each other to commercialize the offering, we will save our declining market share by doubling down on our core offering." OK, here's what they're really saying: "ACUE’s recommended teaching techniques are steeped in four decades of research. 'That was critical for faculty buy-in,' she said." Note: 40 years ago it was 1977.
Rationalizing Those 'Irrational' Fears of inBloom
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2017/03/16
On certain levels, I think this is a good article. It makes the point that "while 'personalized learning' might be a powerful slogan for the ed-tech industry and its funders, the sweeping claims about its benefits are largely unproven by educational research," and makes the case that "the public’s 'low tolerance for uncertainty and risk' surrounding student data is hardly irrational." But there's a false dichotomy in the idea that "the unreasonable effectiveness of data will supplant theory." For one thing, I think "theory" argues for its own replacement with something, anything. Maybe "data" isn't it (and certainly not the narrow data available to most systems extant today).
FutureLearn’s New Pricing Model Limits Access to Course Content After the Course Ends
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2017/03/16
As this article notes, MOOC provider FutureLearn is putting the squeeze on students, cutting off access to MOOC contents unless they pay. It's what we're seeing in the market as a whole. "As Matt Walton — Chief Product Officer at FutureLearn — notes, charging for certificates hasn’t proven to be an effective business model for MOOC providers. For many learners, certificates are not a priority. So now MOOC providers have started charging for course content." Of course, at a certain point, all of these enterprises are going to have to relinquish the name MOOC and go back to using the original product category name: commercial courseware.
What Colleges Should Know About A Growing 'Talent Strategy' Push By Companies
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2017/03/16
The purpose of this post is to advertise the founding of the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University. Based on the premise that there is "a mismatch between what employers say they want and what they believe colleges and universities are producing" the article looks at what are called 'talent strategies', a euphemism for the use of non-academic data to evaluate job applicants. "For one thing, bad grammar is a proven red flag.... (and) it turns out that which Web browser a candidate uses to apply correlates to later success for some coding jobs." What the article does not say (but should) is that a person's online presence and social media are rife with the data companies need to make these evaluations, and that this (and not college credentials, microdegrees or badges) will be the hiring data of the future.
Build a talking, face-recognizing doorbell for about $100
Lukas Biewald, O'Reilly, 2017/03/16
Even if (like me) you don't have the time and space in your life to construct one of these, just reading the article is enough to give you inspiration. It also gives you a 20-20 glimpse into the future. The idea is to hook up a camera to a $40 minicomputer called Raspberry Pi, take pictures of visitors, and then send them to the cloud where you'll apply Amazon Web Services (AWS) face-recognition technology to them. The expensive bit is the $50 Echo Dot, a hands-free, voice-controlled device that you use to control your device.
AT&T dismissed the idea that providers would redline
doctornemo, National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Metafilter, 2017/03/15
I first noticed this in the 1980s when I discovered that groceries in the suburbs were way better than the ones in the inner city where I lived. And now it's an internet is a problem I'm living with right now. I live in Casselman, a small town in rural Ontario, and even though fibre-optic internet cable passes right through town we cannot obtain high-speed internet. The phenomenon is known as 'redlining'. According to Wikipedia it's "the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic composition of those areas." Wikipedia's definition is too narrow, of course. "The data... show a clear and troubling pattern: A pattern of long-term, systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and to lower-income city neighborhoods." This article notes "AT&T dismissed the idea that providers would redline or cherrypick communities, and legislators apparently believed them." Of course, that's exactly what happens - in the U.S., in Canada, and around the world.
Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?
Bill Hicks, BBC News, 2017/03/15
I found this to be an interesting result. After cheating in Romanian exams was curtailed, "the pass rates of poorer students - those in receipt of financial assistance payments - fell by 14.3%, compared to 8.1% for better-off students." Now it might be tempting to say that the anti-cheating policy was anti-poor. But that would be simply to blame the messenger. "When corruption was widespread, we couldn't know the true scale of inequality… Our findings have revealed just how much greater the equality gap is. Once we know the true gap in attainment, the government can tackle the source of the inequality."
Microlearning: What It Is Not and What It Should Be
Alexander Salas, Learning Solutions, 2017/03/15
'Microlearning' is one of those terms that is becoming increasingly vague with use and popularity. According to this article, "the term 'microlearning' was coined by the Research Studios Austria as "learning in small steps," and it has been heavily popularized due to most of its interventions being Web 2.0 friendly." It is not itself a theory but can be associated with cognitive load theory (CLT). According to t he article, "CLT was first described by John Sweller, and it proposes that 'learning occurs in two mechanisms: 1) schema acquisition, or forming a mental map, and 2) transfer of knowledge into working memory.'” The idea is derived from George A. Miller's work in the 1950s (setting our cognitive capacity at 7 items, plus or minus 2). Microlearning, says the article, "is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a good companion for formal instruction. Microlearning may not be an optimal solution for complex tasks in workplace learning."
Kevin Ngo, CSS Tricks, 2017/03/15
Every day I'm online, it seems, there's a whole new technology to learn. Yesterday I was messing around with Bower, which has been around a while but which I hadn't time to learn previously. Today it's on to WebVR. This article looks at Mozilla's A-Frame, a web framework for building virtual reality experiences. A-Frame is based on HTML and the Entity-Component pattern." There's a demo based on "a basic VR voxel builder." Think Minecraft. "The voxel builder will be primarily for room scale VR with positional tracking and tracked controllers (e.g., HTC Vive, Oculus Rift + Touch)." It also works on desktop and mobile - see the demonstration here, and play with it yourself by downloading code from GitHub.
The open in MOOC must include the ability to create courses
Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, 2017/03/15
"If we want truly open education," writes Graham Attwell, "then we need to open up opportunities for creating and facilitating learning as well as participating in a programme." I agree. He also adds "Brian Mulligan responded... with a link to the Moocs4All web site. the web site includes this promo video for a free course held last year on ‘Making MOOCs on a budget.'" But as he notes, "it is possible to hack a MOOC platform together with WordPress or to install Open edX. But it isn’t simple." All true.
But. As readers know, my gRSShopper software has always been open source. This is what was used to launch the first MOOCs and what I still use to manage my newsletter. Like the other hacks, however, it is difficult to install. But this will soon change. I am almost completed work on gRSShopper in a box. This will be a fully contained gRSShopper server you can easily run anywhere. You will be able to use it as either a MOOC or as a PLE (and of course you can use your PLE to take MOOCs). It's not an official project so it has been slow going, but it won't be long now. Stay tuned.
Debate heats up over free higher education plan
Yomiuri Shimbun, 2017/03/14
Japan is the latest country considering free higher education. "Hakubun Shimomura, the LDP’s executive acting secretary general, said at a press conference on Friday that procuring funds for free higher education warrants careful deliberation... A special task force was created within the party on Feb. 15 to discuss the financial aspects of free higher education." This follows sharp growth in California's free college tuition programs. We're also seeing more voices opposed to such plans on the grounds that free tuition only benefits the rich. By that same logic, though, free health care would only benefit the rich, because only the rich can afford health care. Our experience with public health care in Canada, though, proves that the opposite is the case. The poor are the major beneficiaries.
MéxicoX: Meet the MOOC Platform Funded by the Mexican Government
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2017/03/14
As Class Central reports, "MéxicoX, which has over one million registered learners (is) a MOOC platform backed by Mexican government... unded by Mexico’s Ministry of Education, and it is managed by the General Directorate of Educational Television (Dirección General de Televisión Educativa from the Ministry of Education) in coordination with the National Digital Strategy."
JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours
Hugh Son, Bloomberg, 2017/03/14
Knowledge workers take note: "The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation."
Analytics isn’t a thing
Mike Sharkey, Blackboard Blog, 2017/03/14
By this headline Mike Sharkey doesn't mean that analytics doesn't exist, nor does he mean it isn't something important. Rather, he says, software is defined by the problem it solves, and 'analytics' isn't a type of problem. "Analytics isn’t a thing. Analytics help solve problems like retention, student success, operational efficiency, or engagement," he writes. He raises this point because 'learning analytics' is dropped from this year's NMC Horizon report." I wouldn’t say that analytics 'has arrived,' so I was a little surprised that it wasn’t called out as a specific trend," he said. It wouldn't be the first time a trend simply disappeared in a Horizon report - analytics also vanished in 2015 only to reappear a year later.
The OA interviews: Philip Cohen, founder of SocArXiv
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?, 2017/03/14
Interview with hilip Cohen, founder of the new social sciences preprint server SocArXiv. "Can the newly reinvigorated preprint movement gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the OA movement began in a more desirable direction?" Interestng response: Writing on the LSE blog last year he said, “I hope that SocArXiv will enable us to save research from the journal system.”
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Michael Nielsen, 2017/03/13
Between meetings with notaries today I was wondering to myself whether work had been done on using one neural network to train another neural network. I didn't find the answer (if you know, send me a note!) but I did find this nice guide to neural networks and deep learning. Michael Nielsen explains these a bit differently than I've seen before, but in such a way as to make some things clearer to me, so I felt it was certainly worth passing along. There are also examples you can work though.
The Coded Language of For-Profit Colleges
Tressie McMillan Cottom, The Atlantic, 2017/03/13
"For-profit colleges," writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, "target and thrive off of inequality." She calls these examples of "lower ed" - in contrast with higher ed, which is where the more economically successful go. "Flexible solutions, on-demand education, open-access career retraining, reskilling, and upskilling—these are terms that talk about inequality without taking inequality seriously."
An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy
Josh Jones, Open Culture, 2017/03/13
I read Manufacturing Consent many years ago. Its core claims are lavishly documented (indeed, most of the book consists of the documentation; the argument itself begins and ends in the first chapter). Here is an excerpt of the 'five filters' portion of the video:
Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.” Advertising—What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.” Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.” The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”I try to make OLDaily the opposite of all that. OLDaily is non-profit. The audience is not for sale to anyone. It functions as a check on power. It acts against the flack machine and restores the conversation. And it rejects the dialogue of demonization.
Collision Course — Why Are Funders Straying from Their Lane?
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/03/13
The pro-publisher website The Scholarly Kitchen is noting with alarm the shift in funding away from publishers and toward initiatives that compete with publishers. "What has led to this lane-changing behavior from funders and philanthropies with regard to researchers, technology, and publishers?" asks Kent Anderson. "Why are they moving into the publishing world with competitive attitudes? Why are they seeking to define publication choices for their funded researchers?" The responses range from antagonism to opportunism, he writes, with a dose of short-sightedness: "funders may not realize that there may be one or two Jenga blocks that, if pulled out, could bring major functions of the industry down in a tumble." Actually, I think they do realize this, which is why they're scouting for a replacement.
Learning is the Reward
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2017/03/12
This article makes a nice use of James Nottingham's concept of the 'learning pit' to make the point that "school, as we know it is driven by grades as the main reflection of what students do, or do not, know. What has resulted is a rat race of sorts where many kids and parents alike have their eye on the prize." It's nothing we haven't heard before, but I like the expression of it. Image.
Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/03/13
Tim Berners-Lee champions a vision of the web as "an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries." But this vision, he writes, is challenged on three major fronts (quoted):
companies (and) governments are also increasingly watching our every move online, and passing extreme laws that trample on our rights to privacy through the use of data science and armies of bots, those with bad intentions can game the system to spread misinformation political advertising online has rapidly become a sophisticated industry... political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users.These are significant issues, and as Berners-Lee says, they are complex issues. And they are the result of people and companies working directly against the idea of the web as an open and decentralized medium build by, and for the benefit, of everyone.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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