Presentation
Online Learning and MOOCs: Visions and Pathways
Stephen Downes, Nov 07, 2017, China International Distance Education Conference, Beijing, China
This talk delivered in Beijing, China, traces the history of online learning from learning objects and LMSs through to open educational resources and MOOCs, then describes some trends for the future. See also here and here for conference websites. English with Chinese translation (audio, video) provided by Li Chen. 
#OpenedMOOC Week 6: The Triumph of the Immaterial
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2017/11/10
I don't know if it counts to say I've been 'attending the Open Education MOOC' for the last six weeks if all I've done is create some videos ahead of time and read some blog posts during the course. But hey, it counts for me, and I'll chalk it up as a 'completed MOOC' even if I didn't really visit the course website (sorry Dave and George, it was an EdX page-turner, I hope you understand). As usual, Jenny Mackness captures some really useful insights, including especially the idea of OER as ephemeral art. Anyhow , the course did what it was supposed to, generated some controversy, and a good time was had by all. Now we'll all wait for the open analytics from the course.
If You Adopted H5P On Moodle Early, You Are A Pioneer. If You Haven’t Now, You Are Missing Out
Moodle News, 2017/11/10
This is pretty interesting. According to the documentation, "H5P is a plugin for existing publishing systems that enables the system to create interactive content like Interactive Videos, Presentations, Games, Quizzes and more. Currently we support Wordpress, Moodle and Drupal. Everything is open source and free to use." My experience is that it's really hard to get ed tech developers to think that content creation tools are important (I have a long history of arguing with developers about this). Now the moment here (or if we believe the headline, just past here). No matter."Educators and designers can already take advantage of the growing list of interactive “content types” H5P offers, which continue to grow, improve, and become easier to customize." Yay. I mean, YAY. Now, next step, put this into students' hands.
CIOs: OER will storm campuses in next 5 years, “high cloud” just isn’t happening
Laura Ascione, eCampus News, 2017/11/10
The trends reported here are the result of the Campus Computing project, an ongoing research initiative (flip through the slide show on their page). The term 'high cloud' was new to me; it refers to cloud support for enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, high performance computing (HPC) and business continuity. By contrast, by 'low cloud' they mean stdudent email, and by 'middle cloud' they mean calendar, learning management systems (LMS) and customer relations management (CRM) applications. Meanwhile, on OER, "Eighty-two percent of institutions say open educational resources (OER) will be an important source of course content in 5 years." Nice.
College Complaints Unmasked
Yan Cao, Tariq Habash, The Century Foundation, 2017/11/10
According to this report, the vast majority of complaints about being defrauded by a college are against for-profit institutions. This from "new data from the U.S. Department of Education about nearly 100,000 “borrower defense claims”—applications for loan relief from students who maintain that they have been defrauded or misled by federally approved colleges and universities." According to the data, out of the total of 98,868 complaints, "for-profit colleges generated more than 98.6 percent of them (97,506 complaints). " Via the Chronicle.
Teaching Newsletter: One Way to Fight Fake News
Dan Berrett, Beth McMurtrie, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/11/10
This article covers a study (covered here October 29) explaining how fact checkers are more able than studens or historians to spot fake news. I'm not sure why the Chronicle is two weeks late with this story. Anyhow, it makes a good point: "The students and historians tended to read 'vertically,' the report notes, delving deeply into a website in their efforts to determine its credibility." Right. What's key is the method: "That, the researchers point out, is more or less the approach laid out in many checklists designed to help students use the internet well, which tend to suggest looking at particular features of a website to evaluate its trustworthiness. This is why I complain (for example, here) about the 'pop' critical thinking found so often on education sites. The fact checkers, um, check facts - and don't rely on tone, source, motive and how it makes you feel. A checklist is not enough. Image of a checklist: National Geographic.
YouTube to restrict 'disturbing' children's videos, if flagged
BBC News, 2017/11/10
I've been reporting on the disturbing videos on YouTube (here on October 23 and here when James Bridle's article appeared November 6). According to this article, Google will remove the videos if they are reported. But the scale of the problem is overwhelming. As James Bridle noted, "the videos had been algorithmically generated to capitalise on popular trends. 'Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos,' he said." How many human hours would it take human viewers to report these? Thousands? Millions? And why is Google trying to offload its responsibilities on its viewers? There's a limit to what companies should expect to crowdsource - this is one of them.
The Case(s) Against Personalized Learning
Benjamin Herold, Education Week, 2017/11/09
Good article summarizing the major arguments against personalized education* today (* term yet to be defined). Here are the three top arguments: first, the research doesn't show significantly improved learning outcomes; second, personalization is a type of behaviourist reductionism on a screen; and third, personalized learning is (or could be) a thinly disguised push by the education technology industry toward a massive data collection effort. I think we need a bit more substance behind each of these three arguments; the first, for example, is based solely on a single RAND study, which is hardly a comprehensive reserach outcome. And even if "critics believe that personalized learning boils down to kids working alone on software," it doesn't follow that this is actually the case. Still, there may be merit to this broad spectrum of opposition, and it shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
Designing Authentic Personas for Open educational Resources Designers
John Baaki1, Jennifer Maddrell, Eric Stauffer, International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2017/11/09
I'm not really a fan of personas but they are widely used in software and product design so it's appropriate to see them deployed in the development of OERs. This article describes the process undertaken by Designers for Learning, "a nonprofit organization in the United States that coordinates service-learning opportunities for those who seek to gain experience in creating instruction to support important social causes." The journal article (13 page PDF) emphasizes that "When designers visualize the end user of a design, they can influence the design process... relying solely on traditional descriptive information (i.e., demographics) about the intended audience does not help designers develop empathy toward the audience." The design process is also a pdagogical process, as suggested by the 4-phase framework of empathy in design practice (illustrated).
Mapping the open education landscape
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2017/11/09
This post and a previous one from Martin Weller, along with two sites from Katy Jordan, go to support the argument that people working in different domains of open education do not talk to each other, and that they especially do not learn from the lessons of the past. I am not even remotely convinced by the evidence. Only 170 articles were collected on the topic (including a grand total of three by me, including one duplicate listing). The articles are very unevenly distributed over time; it's not at all surprising to see so few references to the early years when there are so few articles listed from those years. Finally, most of the work in open education takes place outside the domain of scholarly publication (the grouping simply reflects the different waves of academics who come to graze on the primary material and take credit for 'discovering' the concepts and ideas wthin).
Global Education for Canadians
Margaret Biggs, Roland Paris, The Centre for International Policy Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, 2017/11/09
I am broadly supportive of the objectives of this report (40 page PDF) though I don't find all of the argumentation convincing. The old "Canada is falling behind" argument is meaningless; we are also "falling behind" in gun ownership and in clearcutting forests, but that doesn't mean we should reverse course. The main argument is the argument in the strategic objectives section: supporting international study opportunities will support long-term economic growth and innovation in Canada by reinforcing the values of openness and inclusion that are essential to Canada’s success as a diverse society, and fostering intercultural and international cooperation. But the program should not be for students only. It should make a diligent effort (far beyond the token support in the report) to include disadvantaged and working Canadians, including especially aboriginal youth. And it should enlarge the scope of Canadian travel beyond the u.S., the U.K., and Europe. We will learn more by studying diverse cultures in Africal, Latin America and Asia. Via both the Globe and Mail, and Academica, neither of which included a link to the actual report (why oh why?).
Unequal Classrooms: Online Higher Education and Non-Cognitive Skills
Jennifer M. Morton, 2017/11/08
Jennifer Morton has won an APA prize for a series of articles along the same lines, though sadly this is the only one that is open access. This is ironic as much of her work revolves around the idea of teaching in conditions of scarcity, and it looks (for example) at the cultural transformations students from low-incomes need to undergo as a part of progression into a higher class. In the current paper she pursues similar themes, arguing "a bricks-and-mortar college education bestows not just cognitive skills and mathematical, historical, scientific knowledge, but also non-cognitive skills... for example, the social and emotional abilities required to connect and talk to people from different backgrounds, the confidence needed to have an intellectually rigorous conversation with an intimidating adult, or the resoluteness to overcome one’s shyness and be able to articulate a position in front of a group of peers." It's not that the students lack these skills, rather, the skills they have are appropriate for their previous (lower class) communities. Read more from Jennifer Morton on her web page (including, if you're wealthy, more of her articles)
Day One
Ben Saunders, 2017/11/08
Ben Saunders is attempting the first unaided solo crossing of Antarctica by land (which makes me feel cold just typing it) and this is his ongoing blog of the expedition. This is one sort of online learning I like a lot: the sort where a real person doing something interesting shares their experiences with the world. It's not about teaching or curriculum or anything like that, it's about being open and unleashing the imagination. I've subscribed to the feed - it's hard to find but it exists here - and will be shivering along with Ben through the trip.
Setting Up a Learner Activity Hub Like #YogaMOOC or #OpenEdMOOC
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2017/11/08
This is the best kind of ed tech post - something that tells you how to do something really interesting written with one foot planted in tech and the other foot firmly planted in a contemporary understanding of learning and education. We get both feet here. The method described is very similar to what I did to create the networks for the connectivism courses. The technology was different but the workflow was the same. Core to the whole process: link back to the original website; don't import it all as a wall of text. "It is pretty easy to dump all course blog posts in one place and have a never ending scroll of text. But that is hard on the eyes and a little counter productive to getting people to connect."
Persona Non Grata
Nick Roll, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/11/08
Student journalists are barred from a hedge fund course at Duke. As a former university Board member and as a former student journalist I head this argument a lot: "we have to have meetings behind closed doors so we can speak openly and candidly." I understood exactly what that meant. It was to allow them to lie in public, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't reveal the truth. And I have always agreed with this: "If speakers are saying things they don't think can withstand the light of public scrutiny, that's probably a pretty good signal that they're saying something indefensible." It is sad, but no surprise, to see an 'elite' institution of higher education complicit in this. They tell us no student journalist has ever been barred from this course - but why would we believe that? Image: Paste.
Building and Sustaining National Educational Technology Agencies : Lessons, Models and Case Studies from Around the World
Michael Trucano, Gavin Dykes, World Bank, 2017/11/07
It took a bit of time to read this report (226 page PDF) but it's worth the effort, especially if you're in the position of designing a national education technology initiative. "This study on national ICT/education agencies seeks to provide some insights that may help answer two lead questions: 1. What do we know about the form, functions and characteristics of such organizations? 2. What are some key considerations and lessons related to their establishment, operation, and oversight?" The introductory section is probably the most use (especially the section describing the "key issues for policymakers"). The recommendations are probably too vague to be helpful, but the wealth of detail in the eleven cases from countries around the world (including two which were eventually shut down, Australia's EdNA (by Gerald White & Lesley Parker) and Britain's Becta (by Gavin Dykes)). Canada gets a paragraph about Schoolnet in the closing 'Other Initiatives' chapter, though given the focus on the role of national agencies in technology deployment I would have thought CANARIE might also rate a mention.
The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books?
Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Agata Morka, Ros Pyne, Springer Nature, 2017/11/07
"Increased visibility and wide dissemination of research are the most common motivations behind both publishing and funding OA books," according to this report, and "both authors and funders also cite ethical motivations, stressing the fact that publicly-funded research should be available to everyone and calling for equal access to knowledge." The research in this Springer Nature report bears that out. "On average, there are just under 30,000 chapter downloads per OA book within the first year of publication, which is 7 times more than for the average non-OA book." So, yes, open publication means more access than closed. But we shouldn't be lulled into thinking it's a numbers thing. I don't count the downloads of my books (I can tell you how many were downloaded so far this month, and that's about it). I do check to make sure that people can access my books without constraint. It's the quality of access, not the quantity, that counts.
Access vs. Accessibility in Scholarship and Science
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/11/07
The type of accessibility being discussed is that of "the degree to which the scholarly content itself can actually be understood by the generalist reader." A piece of work might be more or less accessible for a number of reasons, including the quality of the writing, the use of subject-specific jargon, the use of formats inaccessible to people with disabilities, the inherent complexity of the material, and the inherent coherence of the writing itself. The author's main point is that "Not all complexity can be reduced to simplicity without a real sacrifice of meaning." That's probably true. But it's not an either-or proposition. I think all audiences can understand anything to a certain degree. The purpose of quality writing is to extend that degree to the greatest extent possible.
xAPI Video Profile Demo
Pankaj Agrawal, Next Software Solutions, 2017/11/07
This is a demo of the xAPI video profile. It's an extension of xAPI that provides activity reports on the use of video. "Progress is tracked as actual percentage of the video watched. Completion is calculated only based on entire video being consumed. Video resumes from where the user left." You can log in to the reports interface and view the activity logs for yourself (Email: demo@nextsoftwaresolutions.com Password: demo). Here's the reference implementation on Github.
How To Lie To Yourself And Others With Statistics
Eric Ravenscraft, LifeHacker, 2017/11/07
The original is of course Darrell Huff's 1954 classic book How To Lie With Statistics (74 page PDF). The examples are all dated, of course, and the dollar amounts should be multiplied by 10 to make sense in today's world. But the advice is still spot on. The Lifehacker article is a bit of an update, with a more modern take, but it all just goes to show that news media and marketers have been manipulating the truth long before social media ever came along. What has happened in the last two decades is that deception has been democratized. It has always been a problem; maybe now society will finally deal with it.
'We're designing minds': Industry insider reveals secrets of addictive app trade
Virginia Smart, Tyana Grundig, CBC News, 2017/11/07
This story is interesting on several levels. The first is the surface, where the not-so-secret method is revealed: "It involves three steps: a trigger, an action and a reward. A push notification, such as a message that someone has commented on your Facebook photo, is a trigger; opening the app is the action; and the reward could be a 'like' or a 'share' of a message you posted." OLDaily works on the same model, except it rewards you with insights instead of likes. The second level is the pedagogical, and the question of why educators find influencing people to be so difficult when advertisers do it with ease. And third, with a note of irony, the number of people posting "I just turn off the internet" in the comments following this internet article. I wonder whether they're rewarded with reads.
47% of jobs will be automated... oh yeah...10 reasons why they won’t….
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2017/11/07
Donald Clark takes the easy sceptic's route with this article. I found myself disagreeing with most of it. For example, when he says "human fears and expectations that demand the presence of humans in the workplace" I think he has forgotten about the similar arguments around self-serve gas stations and automated tellers. Similarly, when he says "automation will not happen where the investment cost is higher than hiring human labour," I think he misses the fact, first, that automation is usually pretty cheap, and second, it is often much more reliable than human labour. But there is a good point here: "What matters is not necessary the crude measure of ‘jobs’ being automated but rather activities’ being automated." A job is a collection of activities, some of which will be automated, and some not. But (and this is key): unless we radically reform income inequality, there will be few jobs. Rich people don't employ poor people; poor people employ each other, and this is only possible when they have the means to do so.
Something is wrong on the internet
James Bridle, Medium, 2017/11/07
I've covered this before, but this article has a much wider range of examples. "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level." I want to look at Google and Facebook and Twitter in the eye and ask them, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this? What's the matter with you?" But of course, you can't.
Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye
Bob Lutz, Automotive News, 2017/11/07
The prediction may be plus or minus a few years, but the outcome is undeniable. "The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents. Of course, there will be a transition period. Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module." What does this have to do with learning technology? Nothing. Everything.
Teaching Kids to Argue—Respectfully
Suzie Boss, Edutopia, 2017/11/07
Yes, students should learn critical thinking at an early age. But they should learn criticial thinking. Not some pop version of what passes for critical thinking. And that's what concerns me about this article and the sources it cites. This and so many other resources are far more concerned than they should be about tone, source, motive and how it makes you feel. And there's almost nothing at all about clarity, evidence and reasoning (save the awkwardly explained ARE framework in this publication).
Against Allegedly
Diana Moskovitz, Deadspin, 2017/11/06
In addition to meanings, words have connotations. This is what the word makes you think over and above what the word actually says. My favourite, from decades of journalistic misuse, is "claimed". Compare "He said he was abducted" and "He claimed he was abducted". The use of 'claimed' injects doubt and scepticism into the sentence without ever changing the fact it describes. This article is about the use of the word 'allegedly'. It's the same sort of thing. Your average newspaper or news broadcast is filled with dozens, maybe hundreds, of these words every day. It may report facts, but it is telling you what you should believe. Unless you are aware of this impact, you have no way to defend against it. That's why children should learn critical literacy before they are taught 'facts'.
Why Moodle Supporters Should be Concerned
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/11/06
Phil Hill and Michael feldstein have each taken to posting this week to defend their assertion that the rate of new installations of Moodle has declined significantly. The first, from Phil Hill, is a detailed description of the data used to construct the argument. The main point is that it's not US-only, and that Moodle continues to dominate in terms of total installations. In the second, Michael Feldstein explains why institutional higher education adoption is important for Moodle overall: these are the source of revenues for Moodle Pty, which is the source for code updates, and Moodle Pty took in $6 million in investment money from VCs who will expect a return.
Any computer that can be replaced by a teacher, should be
Steve Wheeler, Learning With es, 2017/11/06
The main point of this post isn't the silly headline, it's this: "humans have many characteristics it would be impossible to mimic, including empathy, emotion, appreciation for aesthetics, and most importantly deviance - also known as breaking or bending the rules... Teachers won't be replaced by computers because it is nigh on impossible to describe accurately what teachers do." This is wrong. It represents computers as rule-following devices. This may be true of your laptop, but it is not true of today's artificial intelligence.
Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making
Claire Wardle, Hossein Derakhshan, Shorenstein Center, 2017/11/06
In view of the epistemic crisis in the U.S. today this report on informaation disorders (109 page PDF) is a timely contribution. But I fear it does little better than identify the problem; the solutions are stale, sterile, and would be ineffective. The analysis is interesting: it proposes that media are being used not for the transmission of information, but rather the conduct of a ritual. "A ritual view of communication does not consider the act of reading a newspaper to be driven by the need for new information. Rather, it likens it to attending a church service. It’s a performance in which nothing is learned, but a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed." Or as McLuhan said of newspapers, "You get into them, like a warm bath." But the solutions they propose show no recognition of the consequenses of this analysis. Media collaboration, fatc-checking, metadata sharing, etc., will have no impact on the phenomenon. Via Michael Caulfield.
The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here's How
André Staltz, 2017/11/06
I don't think that the increasing market share of Facebook and Google by themselves mean that the web is dying, no more than the domination of Internet Explorer and netscape did back in the day. But these two giants have been exerting their influence in less than benign ways, and this is what is injuring - if not outright killing - the web. In both cases, a combination of marketing, the limiting of diversity, and the manipulation of public perception have combined to create a web designed to promote page views and attention to the trivial (and often, the false) instead of to allow us to forge genuine connections with each other.
What a Trip to China Taught Me About Global Collaboration Projects
John Spencer, 2017/11/06
I have just returned from China so this post caught my attention. It describes some of the issues he encountered while working to develop collaborative projects with Chinese classrooms. "I wonder if we need to start with shared values and desires," he writes. "What are the bridges we can build? What are the things we have in common?"
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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