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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes ((56901))[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Nov 24, 2017
A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks
GitHub, 2017/11/24
This, or something like this, defines at least in part where we're headed with digital learning resources (formerly known as learning objects). This web page provides links to several dozen 'notebooks' - these are files that can be run on an application called Jupyter Notebooks. You can also view them in your web browser. But running them in the notebook allows you to change and execute the code visible in cells throughout the page. So it's a web page you can reprogram on the fly. Jupyter Notebooks runs on Python, and is included as part of the Anaconda Python distribution, though there are other ways of getting it as well. You can also create Notebooks in other languages, including Perl and Ruby. The examples here show running code for everything from data analytics to neural networks.
EdTechFrance: The New Face of French EdTech
Céline Authemayou, Nina Fink , EducPros.fr, 2017/11/24
According to this article, "The newly founded EdTechFrance is the latest illustration of industry organizations' desire to collectively bolster their visibility and legitimacy. On November 17, the group published a manifesto stating its intention to turn France's focus to EdTech." You can read the manifesto (in French) on their home page. I've translated it, and you can see the English version on my Google+ page. "The manifesto's 140 signatories include educational institutions, numerous startups, among which Domoscio, AppScho and Beneylu, and more established companies like Qwant and Unow."
How To Teach Students to Cover Elections in Real Time
Jason Kokot, J-Source, 2017/11/24
Personally I think that every event should be covered in real time by students in the field. Of the hundreds of education conferences I've attended, I can count on one hand the number that have engaged students in this way. That doesn't mean every student should do this. But for those who are so inclined, reporting on an event is an unparalleled way of engaging with the event, particularly when you won't be speaking and your alternative is to be a member of the audience. The current post from J-Source involves student journalists, but there's no reason why students from all disciplines couldn't be included (the same could be said of professional media).
Developing a European Maturity Model for Blended Education
National Institute for Digital Learning, 2017/11/24
I've never been that interested in blended learning but I do want to flag the launch of this project, the new European-funded European Maturity Model for Blended Education (EMBED) Project. "The project adopts a multi-level conception of blended education, including micro-level teaching and learning processes, meso-level institutional innovation and enabling strategies, and macro-level governmental policy and support structures." The article gets interesting about half way through when it asks "what is unique about the EMBED Project?" The answer is that "it should challenge us to do things differently and serve as a catalyst for helping educators to reimagine the nature of teaching and learning in the digital-era."
Blockchain in Education
Alexander Grech, Anthony F. Camilleri, Joint Research Centre, 2017/11/23
This is a long (136 page PDF) and detailed report on blockchains in education. The authors work slowly and deliberately in their pursuit of accuracy and clarity, which results in a presentation that will be easily understood by most readers. There is a wealth of examples in the document describing use cases, scenarious and pilot projects, and companies involved in the space. The study is a result of a literature serach, desk reserach and interviews. The recommendations display a knowledge of both education policy and blockchain technology. I have no objections to any of the conclusions and recommendations, and would indeed underline some, for example, this: "Only ‘fully-open’ blockchain implementations can reach the real goals and promise of blockchain in education. By this, we mean solutions whose fundamental components include: a) recipient ownership; b) vendor independence and c) decentralised verification." It's still early days; there's a call to bring experts in the space together to create the necessary agreements, and this should probably happen sooner rather than later. The publication is a Science for Policy report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service.
Net Neutrality and Education
Jim Reams, edCircuit, 2017/11/23
In the United States the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced the end of 'net neutrality' policies. This will allow internet service providers to charge different rates to different content providers, to favour certain providers with faster speeds, and in a worst case scenario, could result in some content providers (eg., Netflix, Major League Baseball) to disappear entirely from certain provider networks. This article briefly describes the potential impact to education. Some more education-related coverage: Brookings ("a shameful scam that sells out consumers"), Education Dive ("larger companies will pay for faster delivery of their content"), Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) ("Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces"), Ian Bogost ("internet providers will abuse their power absent net-neutrality oversight"), TechCrunch ("no mention of the 22 million comments filed"). It's worth noting that Canada has taken a very different path and "emerged as a world leader in supporting net neutrality."
Educators on Artificial Intelligence: Here's the One Thing It Can't Do Well
Mary Jo Madda, EdSurge, 2017/11/23
You have to read through to the last section to get to the "one thing computers can't do", and it's this: "“building and foster[ing] meaningful relationships with students.” Which, frankly, is silly. Not that we don 't need relationships; we do. But almost every person on earth is capable of providing them. My cats can provide them. And yes, computers will provide them. But even if they couldn't, this hardly seems to me to be the thing teachers should define as essential to the profession. It results in a picture where we're spending a lot of money to give a student a friend, money we could save by having student find their own friends.
Distilling Canvas LMS Accusations Of ‘Openwashing’
Moodle News, 2017/11/23
This unattributed post on Moodle News largely clears Canvas of 'openwashing'. It points out that the software is released under a good open soure license, and moreover, that its APis are open. Some cracks around the foundation: a Canvas host could charge for API access, and Instructure (Canvas parent company) might not "protect the values and principles that have maintained the open source community alive and thriving" in the future. I haven't actually run an instance of Canvas (maybe I should one of these days) so I'm not sure whether there are any practical barriers. But this article makes it sound like I'd be fine.
Fear and Loathing in the Moodle Community
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/11/23
This is a long post from Michael Feldstein on the opposition to e-Literate's recent data regarding new Moodle installations. A lot of it is irrelevant (though I did learn some things about the now-abandoned dotLRN project). There are two threads to the argument. The second is that the e-Literate analysis is based on good data. The first is that exceptions to that data (of the form, say, "but it's big in Spain") are irrelevant. Feldstein also suggests that readers misunderstood some of the finer points of the analysis. I have no reason to doubt the second (though the account of 'primary LMS' is a bit sketchy). But the first leaves me wanting; I think the international market is more important than Feldstein is willing to credit, especially today, especially to non-American companies, and especially with respect to open source software.
Peppa Pig's tale of torture? Why parents can't rely on platforms like YouTube Kids for child-friendly fare
Ramona Pringle, CBC News, 2017/11/22
A full mont after reports surfaced on Mashable, via a James Briddle column, BBC News report, and a NY Times paywalled article, the story of the dangerously inappropriate YouTube videos being marketed to kids has surfaced on CBC News. This is a sad reflection on the national broadcaster, which has all but abandoned coverage of science, technology and education. We are told "when it comes to protecting children from content, we can never rely solely on algorithms," but this is the same old 'algorithm as black box' treatment. Algorithms could perform the task perfectly well (in this case all they have to do is scan for guns and fangs!) but we have to be ready to hold companies accoubtable for what their algorithms produce (and what their 'kid friendly' sites contain).
A.I. Will Serve Humans - But Only About 1% of Them
Robby Berman, 2017/11/22
This is another post about the limitations of AI, both in terms of their effectiveness and in terms of their explainability. In terms of effectiveness, they depend on the data they're given (which explains racist AIs) and on the uses to which they're put (which explains selective blindness in AIs). We are also told “We can’t look inside the black box that makes the decisions.” But we can know a lot about it - its data sources, its algorithms, its deployment. These are covered in Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). What about explainability? Because there are so many input variables, we cannot understand AI in terms of simple rules. But we can understand the range of possible outcomes, whichc allows us to create a portrait of how a given AI operates.
The rise of the campus meme
Sahil Chinoy, Ella Jensen, The Daily Californian, 2017/11/21
If there's one thing people at elite colleges know how to do really well, it's how to create an in-group. Thus so with memes. The typical meme has been around for ages; I wrote about them in 1999, before the first image meme. These appeared as "I can has cheezburger" in 2007. Since then the format has thrived; sites like Imgur keep the tradition alive. And, of course, so do blogging sites like Tumblr and social media, like Facebook, which of course had its own history as an elite thing. This article is about the latest in-group thing, the campus meme. The idea is that the memes are so obscure you'd have to be a student of the campus in order to get them. But they also become a way for outsiders to look in. "Meme groups have become a mainstay of the United States’ elite universities, and at many schools, there are far more members than students." The meme groups are all in Facbook (natch) and though you have to be logged in to Facebook to view the group home page, you can jump directly to specific images from the listings at the bottom of the article (someone did a lot of work collecting and collating them).
Consciousness
Matthias Melcher, x21s New Blog, 2017/11/21
Matthias Melcher diagrams my post on Consciousness and extracts some of the essential elements in an easy-to-follow list of key concepts and ideas. "The greatest takeaway so far," he writes, "was the explanation of the mysterious ‘suddenness’ through recognition, see the last entry of my list."
METRICS: a pattern language of scholarship in medical education
Rachel Ellaway, David Topps, MedEdPublish, 2017/11/21
What is scholarship in colleges and universities? Maybe the best part of this post is the background reading you'll have to do to put it into context. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed Ernest Boyer's long paper (160 page PDF) on Scholarship Reconsidered even though it dates from 1980 describing three major phases of evolution in the U.S. university system (noting, in particular, their original focus on teaching, and the relatively recent focus on research). Boyer's much shorter (12 page PDF) paper of the same name is an outline of the model (discovery, integration, application, teaching). Glassick, Huber and Maeroff's 1997 Scholarship Assessed model (goals, preparation, methods, results, presentation, critique) is also not to be missed (16 page PDF). Felder (2000) offers a nice summary (4 page PDF). The proposal in the METRICS paper is a seven-part model (meta, evaluation, translation, research, innovation, conceptual, synthesis). It seems to me that the elements of service and social change discussed in the longer Boyer paper have all but disappeared from all three accounts (though maybe they're part of translation and innovation). The need for excellence in teaching seems also to be receding as a goal.
No, you’re not being paranoid. Sites really are watching your every move
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 2017/11/21
Just for the record, my website does not track you when you visit. Even if you sign up for a newsletter, it barely acknowledges that you exist. I like it that way, because there's no data to lose. But my website appears to be the exception. "A new study finds hundreds of sites—including microsoft.com, adobe.com, and godaddy.com—employ scripts that record visitors' keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior in real time, even before the input is submitted or is later deleted." As Steven Englehardt reports in the study, "This data can’t reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous. In fact, some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a user’s real identity." Via Lindsay Muscato.
Where is Technology Taking the Economy
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2017/11/20
Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers projections about the new technological environment. "Machines have started to exhibit associative intelligence," he writes, "Associative intelligence is no longer just housed in the brains of human workers, but emerges from the constant interactions among machines, software and processes." It made me think of e-Trucks interacting with each other to form convoys, for example. Then I began to imagine road construction priorities being automatically determined by automated vehicles reporting bottlenecks and slowdowns. Anyhow, Wladawsky-Berger identifies several key changes in our political economy that result from this trend (quoted):
The criteria for assessing policies will change from 'growth' to 'job creation' (or maybe simply access to goods and services) The criteria for measuring the economy will change, as virtual goods "generate unmeasured benefits for the user, cost next to nothing, and are unpriced" Free market economies will be regulated. “In the distributive era free-market efficiency will no longer be justifiable if it creates whole classes of people who lose.” "The next era will not be an economic one, but a political one... until we’ve resolved access we’re in for a lengthy period of experimentation"I think these changes mught be even more significant than depicted here. If we're looking decades ahead, as Wladawsky-Berger, we may be looking at the replacement of money as a mechanism for exchange, as the assumulation of trillions of unused dollars in secret accounts has undermined its effectiveness for the purpose of regulating commerce.
Pearson, WTF? Badges, patents, and the world’s ‘least popular’ education company
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/11/20
Doug Belshaw has two bits of news about Pearson in this article. First, he reports on Pearson's new application to patent digital credentials (you know, like badges). It's only something Belshaw and others have been working on for years now. "he ‘background’ section uses language very similar to the Open Badges for Lifelong Learning working paper published in 2012 by Mozilla." Additionally, he notes that " they have closed their DRM-Free ebook store, and will now proceed to delete all ebooks from their customers’ accounts." Well, I'm glad I didn't buy any eBooks from Pearson! "Perhaps I should have been more cynical, as they obviously are," writes Belshaw. "I note, for example, that Pearson waited until Mozilla handed over stewardship of Open Badges to IMS Global Learning Consortium (who have said they will not contest the patent) before filing." Will not contest? Seriously, IMS?
Innovation Culture
Rideau Hall Foundation, 2017/11/20
This website, and the associated project around it, are an outcome of the previous Governor-General of Canada, David Johnston, working with Tom Jenkins (of the Jenkins report on science and technology in Canada). The site says "Innovation is the creative combination of anything that, once done, makes something better." I have mixed views. The Canadian Museum of Science and Technology, now part of co-sponsor Ingenium, was one of my favourite childhood destinations. It just reopened (yay!). I should visit. And you can submit Canadian Innovation Stories (note that the site is slow). But innovation seems to me to be more than just 'combining' things, and more than just 'making something better'. The Governor-General's Innovation Awards, associated with the site, are almost exclusively for medical innovations and/or businesses. There are education resources, including a children's resource, that defines innovation as "creating or improving a thing (product) or action (process) to make a difference (impact)." This seems even narrower to me. It's not all about business. Disclosure: I was peripherally involved with the education resources and my name appears in the acknowledgements.
Open In Order To...
OpenCon2017, 2017/11/20
These are all papers submitted to OpenCon2017 in response to an essay competition that closed today. The conference is tomorrow. You might be able to vote but I encourage reading rather than voting. The papers run in the 500-1000 work range.
Daniel Machado, “Open in order to [promote cooperation over competition]” Paula, “Imposed embargo” Imogen, “Open in order to…level the playing field” Andrea Bertino, "Open in order to [create a new balance between innovators and the rest of humanity]" Jerome Samson, “Open in order to [mess with a winning formula?]” Peifeng Wang, "Open access to foster universal value" sarah, "Optimize Scientific Research Process" Devin Berg, "Open in order to open engineering" Fulco Scherjon, "Open in order to reproduce" Asura Enkhbayar, "Open in order to ... have a plan B" Sara Bosshart, "On Open Access, Dandelions and “Open in Order to Grow”" Edit Gorogh, "Open in order to expand horizons" Marina Lubenow & Jens Crueger, "Open in order to think multidisciplinary!" Peter Murray-Rust, "Open Notebook Science Means Better Science" Leo Mack, "Open Science is Science at Web-scale" Isabel Jordan, "Open Access for Quality of Life and Partnership in Care" Dasapta Erwin Irawan, "Openness for the inferior: a view from Indonesian Scientist"The conference is subtitled 'Empowering the next generation to advance open access, open education and open data'. I like how the essays represent a variety of different agendas and benefits all revolving around the idea of open access.
Learning Experience Platform – WRONG
Craig Weiss, The Craig Weiss Group, 2017/11/20
The 'wrong' in this article refers to the term 'experience'. Craig Weiss argues that the term houl be 'engagement' instead. Beyond that first argument he offers a pretty good overview of the platform, what is is, what it contains, and what it's supposed to do. He names a number of them at the end of the article: Learn Amp, Degreed, Grovo, Pathgather and Linkedin Learning. Based on both the description and the examples, my inclination would be to call them Learning Resource Platforms, because they are for the most part providing or selling access to learning content and resources.
Creating a Safety Net — Why Double-Dipping Is the Wrong Term and the Right Approach
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/11/20
Kent Anderson launches a spirited defense of "double dipping" - this is the practice of charging publication fees on articles published in journals where there are also subscription fees. His argument, based on the collapse of advertising revenue for digital publications, is that companies need to support diverse income streams. No doubt this is true, however, charging different people for the same thing is something else. It's like when you pay the full cost of your internet bandwidth, and then your ISP charges someone else extra for permission to send data to you. It's the sort of price-gouging that would not be possible without people being locked into your service. Related: There's a Digital Media Crash, Talking Points Memo.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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