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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
May 19, 2017
Presentation
A Model of Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, May 16, 2017, 1er Simposium Internacional de Investigacion, Desarrolle e Innovacion en la Sociedad Digital, Mexico City, Mexico
Academy, Moodle's take on a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, has launched. It's in a very preliminary state, with one institutional partner (Dublin City University) and seven courses (or, more accurately, seven course placeholders, as they are in pre-enrollment stage). Announced last year, the idea is that it "will be a centralized MOOC hosting platform run and managed by Moodle. This is for institutions or Moodlers who want to hold a MOOC but don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to deal with the short term (massive) hit on their internal resources."
Walking the line of predictive analytics in higher education
Marlen Rattiner, Blackboard Blog, 2017/05/19
This is a column from Blackboard addressing the ethical implications of learning analytics. First, to set the context: "Predictive analytics are not about perfect future outcomes; they are about analyzing historical and current data to project a likely future outcome." In particular, "it allows for sharing of output analytics to enable institutions to act... Implementing predictive analytics comes with a responsibility to define a process for appropriate and timely intervention responses." All fine, but this post elides the question of ownership. Analytics are discussed here exclusively in the institutional context, and without reference to the right of learners to know about and manage the employment and distribution of performance data.
Designing Microlearning
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2017/05/19
I agree with Clark Quinn to a point. "we’re talking about layering learning on performance in a context. However, it’s more than just performance support... To make it learning, what you really need is to support developing an ability to understand the rationale behind the steps, to support adapting the steps in different situations." Fair enough. But this is a step too far: "here we’re talking about models. What (causal) models give us is a way to explain what has happened, and predict what will happen." I don't agree that a learner requires an explicit semantic representation in order to have learned.
Why Harvard Business School is under fire
The Economist, 2017/05/19
The Economist not surprisingly rejects the idea that "HBS is responsible for the ills of Western civilisation" but is willing to countenance the idea that it has behaved badly: "It has failed to manage conflicts of interest adequately: for example it gives companies a veto over case studies written about them and academics can be paid by the companies they teach about." The school has failed to diversify and tuitions have increased 30% in five years. But the key point here is that HBS, by virtue of its position, establishes these as normal business practice. It makes clear that academic integrity and ethical behaviour are irrelevant to business. And that's a problem.
How the Internet has changed in the past 10 years
Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2017/05/18
Let's take stock. "In 2007, the Web was triumphant. But then came apps and Facebook and other semi-walled gardens... Facebook did open up…they turned themselves inside-out and crushed the small pieces loosely joined contingent. They let the Web flood in but caught the Web’s users and content creators before they could wash back out again." See also Alexis Madigral in the Atlantic, The Weird Thing about Today's Internet.
Compliance is Not the End Goal of Education
George Couros, Connected Principals, 2017/05/18
It shouldn't have to be said, I suppose, but it bears repeating that there are several outcomes above and beyond 'compliance' sought in a quality education. Outcomes like 'engaged' and 'empowered', for example. "Focusing on 'empowering' students is seen by some as 'fluffy'," writes George Couros, but "This is not my belief at all. Empowering students teaches them to have their own voice and follow their own direction."
I Don’t Believe in Blockchain
Onging, 2017/05/18
I'm sure Don and Alex Tapscott don't want to read this, but Tim Bray (who has a long history of internet standards development) has called the recent attention being paid to blockchain "an overpromoted niche sideshow." He writes, "I’ve seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting technology sweep through the IT space: Personal computers, Unix, C, the Internet and Web, Java, REST, mobile, public cloud. And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs.That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it."
JSON Feed Version 1
Brent Simmons, Manton Reece, 2017/05/18
I've had a JSON version of OLDaily since 2010 but since nobody was using JSON for feed syndication it didn't really matter. Fast-forward seven years and we have the release of JSON Feed version 1, so I updated my JSON format to match theirs, added the autodiscovery and new icon, and am now among the adopters of the format. You can see my JSON feed at http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.json and subscribe to it using your web browser or an (as yet non-existing (but I'll see what I can do)) JSON feed reader. See also this Brent Simmons blog post on JSON feed.
Boy, 11, hacks cyber-security audience to give lesson on 'weaponisation' of toys
Agence France-Presse, The Guardian, 2017/05/18
This is too good to pass by. At a cyber-security conference in the Netherlands 11-year old Reuben Paul used a Raspberry Pi ("a small credit-card size computer") to hack into attendees' bluetooth devices to control a teddy bear, successfully recording and playing back audio from the conference. “IOT home appliances, things that can be used in our everyday lives, our cars, lights refrigerators, everything like this that is connected can be used and weaponised to spy on us or harm us.” The real message here isn't that this can be done - I think we knew that - but that it can be done by an 11-year old. Image: Joost vander Vleuten.
Tracking of Teachers and Students in Edmodo
Bill Fitzgerald, 2017/05/17
If there's a constant in our field, it's the claim by service providers that they aren't tracking students for the purpose of selling the data to advertisers. Sometimes this comes back to bit the vendors, as it did this week when Edmodo was hacked. Now they face some hard questions. "How aware are teachers in the Edmodo community that they are being tracked by ad brokers permitted on the site by Edmodo? How aware are students, teachers, and parents that ad brokers can collect data on students while using Edmodo?"
Pearson, an Investor in Knewton, Is ‘Phasing Out’ Partnership on Adaptive Products
Tony Wan, EdSurge, 2017/05/17
When you partner with a large corporation you put the future of your company in their hands. It's not a good place to be, as Knewton is discovering this week. "Pearson will no longer use Knewton’s adaptive learning engine for some of its digital offerings.... Now, Pearson is 'investing heavily in product development and is developing its own in-house adaptive learning capability,' Scott Overland, Pearson’s Director of Media and Communities, wrote." Knewton currently has 32 partners, so it will probably survive.
Facebook promised to tackle fake news. But the evidence shows it's not working
Sam Levin, The Guardian, 2017/05/17
The problem with flagging fake news as "disputed" is that it encourages people to try harder. "A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” said Winthrop, who published the story that falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves. “With Facebook trying to throttle it and say, ‘Don’t share it,’ it actually had the opposite effect.”
From where I sit, Facebook faces an unsolvable problem. You can either have both advertising and fake news, or you can have neither. There isn't an in-between. If you have advertising, then you have to have a centralized broadcast network, but unless you control all content (like a TV station) you open the door to fake news. Facebook's problem is structural, and there's probably no way out of it.
After Lots Of Talk, Microsoft’s Bots Show Signs Of Life
Mark Sullivan, Fast Commpany, 2017/05/17
This is quite a good read, moving from the hype ("bots are the new app") to the practical application ("'Good morning,' says the Language Learning Bot, in Chinese") and quite a bit in between. The latter half of the article has a number of good examples from Microsoft: the Calendar.help bot (helps set meetings and other events), bots in Teams, Microsoft’s work messaging platform, WhoBot, which identifies people in Microsoft’s workforce who have a desired skill set.
20 Best Platforms for Selling Online Courses
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, Small Business Trends, 2017/05/17
This is a bit of a throw-away article but I'm including it here, first, to make the point that an increasing number of people and platforms are focused on selling online courses, and second, to preserve a list of 20 platforms offering this service. A number of them were new to me, so this post fills a gap in the e-learning landscape.
What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation
James Manyika, McKinsey, 2017/05/17
As I was reading this overview (12 page PDF) it occurred to me that despite all the attention being paid to learning analytics the major impact of analytics and machine learning in academic institutions will be in much more mundane areas: the physical plant, facility allocations, faculty workload allocations, and the like. The traditional academic institution is like a factory, and so the first applications of AI will be factory-like applications. That thought aside, this report is well worth the read. It's accurate, it's compelling, and it has useful data points.
Why Haven't MOOCs Eliminated Any Professors?
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/05/17
I clicked on this post by accident but while I'm here I may as well comment. Joshua Kim asks "why haven’t the MOOC robots taken the faculty jobs?" The first thing you should always ask of a why-question is: is it really true? Inside Higher Education itself reports on a tightening PhD job market, so maybe job losses are actually occurring. Also, terminology matters. What are "MOOC robots"? Does he mean robot tutors, which appear to be everywhere? This is more evidence that job losses are probably already taking place. Image: Birmingham Mail.
21st-century propaganda: A guide to interpreting and confronting the dark arts of persuasion
Gideon Lichfield, Quartz, 2017/05/15
Good article looking at how the internet is being used to support influence and propaganda, with a good helping of George Lakoff (and the theory of frames and metaphors) and a typology of modern media manipulation. None of which, at heart, is new. "What’s changed, of course, is the internet, and the many new ways it creates for falsehoods to reach us. The power of populism today lies in its ability to combine 20th-century propaganda techniques with 21st-century technology, putting propaganda on steroids."
One business case for OER examined
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2017/05/15
Tony Bates looks at the most recent edition of Distance Education and in particular at an article focused on the business case for open educational resources. The case, in a nutshell, is that people can use open access to decide whether they want to invest time and money in a particular program. This of course is a very old argument, and it's rooted firmly in the institutional perspective, as it becomes a 'business case' only when these same students start paying tuition fees. "Without that funding, and other costs, OpenLearn will quickly become unsustainable." Well - no. It's a policy decision to require colleges and universities to earn revenues from their users. Many other government services do no such thing. The only real business case, to my mind, is whether the intended benefit of the institution is being delivered. Tuition impedes that benefit, just as the subscription fees charged by Distance Education impede that benefit.
How Google Took Over the Classroom – The New York Times
D', Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Net, 2017/05/15
"Natasha Singer wrote a piece for the NYTimes on Google in the classroom," writes D'Arcy Norman. "Is it a marketing ploy? (of course it is – there is no such thing as a free lunch, etc…) Google says 'of course it isn’t – we just want kids to learn! It’s about the learning!'" The main point here, though, is that Google is tracking the students' every move, all in the name of 'improving education'. It's hard to believe that this is necessary. And "we can trust Google absolutely and without question, they aren’t applying their established multibillion-dollar-per-year business model here." Can't we?
I’m a Deleter
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/05/15
It never occurred to me that this could be a thing. "The cool ed-tech kids are deleting tweets," writes Alan Levine. "I’m not cool," he says. He runs contra Audrey Watters. "I now delete all Facebook and Twitter posts that are older than 90 days," writes Watters. "I also delete all email that’s older than a year." And as Michael Tracey writes, "Lots of prominent Twitter personalities who could be vaguely situated under the banner of 'political media' have taken to mass-deleting their old tweets." I don't have an issue with it either way. People should decide for themselves how to use social media. There's no one right way to do it.
Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns
Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 2017/05/15
I always thought it was just me: that deep need to yawn in class, or that feeling I can't keep my eyes open. It hit me throughout school and university, and more recently while attending conference presentations. But it's not just me: it's what will happen to most people if you force them to sit and listen all day. That's one of the lessons learned by this teacher doing everything a student does though the day. Another lesson? I see math classes still start first thing in the morning (at 7:45!). This is why I did poorly in math throughout my education (save for the one year it was 1:00 pm). (p.s. yes the headline is total clickbait.)
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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