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by Stephen Downes
Oct 13, 2017
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#openedMOOC Week 2: Copyright, the Public Domain, and the Commons
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2017/10/13
This is week 2 of George Siemens and David Wiley's Open Education course and this week asks the question, "How did we get here?" Jenny Mackness offers a lucid discussion of the past and its issues as well as linking to some relevant posts by others. Richard Coyne captures the sharing dilemma: The darkest side of this sharing narrative is that consumers and the short-term contracted labour force are fed the idea that they are participating in a new democratised economic order. The sharing economy is just part of a sales pitch, and a way of dressing up inequities and dodgy business practices."
Ivanka’s Syllabus
Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/10/13
There's certainly room for criticism of the entire endeavouyr, as Audrey Watters makes clear in this post, and I prefer to steer well clear of the U.S. policy debate. Plenty of pundits (incluiding Watters) have made that their main focus. What interested me here was the list of "experts" assembled by Inside Higher Ed: consultant Bryan Alexander; Lindsey Downs, communication manager, WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET); Michael Horn, chief strategy officer, Entangled Ventures; co-founder, Clayton Christensen Institute;Adam Newman, managing partner, Tyton Partners; Jonathan Poritz,office in the American Association of University Professors; and James Wiley, principal technology analyst, Eduventures Research. They each offer their own equally idiosyncratic lists of readings, which if taken together create a bit of a Frankenstein model of the field.
CPT+10: A Bright Future for Open Education
Mark Surman, Philipp Schmidt, MIT Media Lab, 2017/10/13
This article is both a follow-up to the recent UNESCO Open Educational Reources Conference and the 10-year anniversary of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. It spotlights the ten follow-up actions emanating from the conference. But also like the recent discussions of open access, it sounds a sour note on progress to date. "We have not made anything near to the progress that we’d dreamed of. Not even close." For example, "Text books are still one of the most monopolized and impenetrable parts of the publishing world, second only to scientific journal publishing." And I found this interesting: "the biggest changes in how people learn seem to have happened elsewhere, outside formal education (and somewhat outside the open education movement even)." These are the people we should be supporting - not the institutions, not the publishers, but the people who are finding a way to support and use open education despite them.
Quantum Leaps We Can Expect in Teaching in the Digital Age - A Roadmap
Stephen Downes, TeachOnline.ca, 2017/10/12
I wrote this essay for the World Conference on Online Learning in Toronto next week. It's one of a series of articles commissioned for the conference. This essay is addressed to both the teachers of today and to the students of tomorrow. It is addressed to policy makers and pundits, to technology designers and developers, and to those who by virtue of office or inclination have the voice to speak to the future, to inform the weld of what we can do and what we want to do.
Universal Paperclips
Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2017/10/12
The idea of the 'meta-game' is that "you click a button to make money and use that money to buy upgrades which gives you more money per click," and so on. The reference here is to a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom reprinted in the Economist: "Imagine an artificial intelligence, he says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips.... This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches." What I take away from that story is that humans need not have human-like motives. The meta-game is also the game that defines our economy, and that yields outcomes like the bitcoin bubble. When you play the meta-game, you're playing a broken scale-free system.
What If Socially Useful Jobs Were Taxed Less Than Other Jobs?
Benjamin B. Lockwood, Charles G. Nathanson, E. Glen Weyl, Harvard Business Review, 2017/10/12
I read a little while ago an article describing the the 'rise of the useless class' of people who have no gainful employment in an automated world. This sort of thinking is offensive on several levels, but it's the sort of value set that underlies things like the current proposal wherein people would be induced to train for socially valuable jobs, like teaching, by the mechanism of tax incentives on employment. "Socially useful" in the current context is defined as the generation of "spillovers," for example, how "good teachers raise the eventual incomes of their students." Of course, we could simply tax high earners, like hedge fund managers, and use the money to pay more to teachers, but the whole purpose of this article (it seems to me) is to make sure we don't raise top tax rates or raise taxes on top earners. Hence the convoluted morality of an HBR article.
On Learning and Common Sense
Will Richardson, 2017/10/12
One thing a lifetime working as a philosopher has taught me is that advances in thinking are truly incrental. Even the greatest thinkers - Descartes, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein - advanced the state of the art only a few inches. So I'm not at all surprised to see so many of the 'new' ideas of today reflected in writers from the past. In the present case, as outlined by Will Richardson, it's Carl Rogers, who though "best known as a psychotherapist who championed 'client-centered therapy,' was also a vocal advocate for one of today’s most prevalent edu phrases, 'student-centered learning.'" Some of what he wrote would fit perfectly in a contemporary blog post. For example: "Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. When he chooses his own directions, helps to discover his own learning resources, formulates his own problems, decides his own course of action, lives with the consequences of these choices, then significant learning is maximized."
What to Expect from the Next Generation Learning Platform
Britt Peckham, Web Courseworks, 2017/10/12
A lot of this looks familiar to me. "Becky (Willis) explains that the next generation learning platform aggregates internal, external, informal, and formal, peer to peer content. It helps to curate it with AI and uses machine languages to personalize what the employees see." The diagram of the platform is from a slide show by Josh Bersin. The article is mostly a series of audio clips. While I love audio I really think something like this needs transcripts as well. It serves mostly as advertorial content for EdCast (which explains the audio, I guess). I'm linking mostly for the Bersin diagram.
TrustBase: an architecture to repair and strengthen certificate-based authentication
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2017/10/12
Interesting post about an interesting paper (17 page PDF) on something called TrustBase, a proposal to repair the existing flawed mechanism for internet security. "TrustBase aims to fix these problems by moving authentication from an application responsibility to an operating system responsibility, where an administrator can define policies." I think it's an interesting idea, and there are prototype implementations for various languages.
The Century collegiate handbook
Garland Greever, Internet Archive, 2017/10/11
This is one of the many books from 'freed' by the Internet Archive under a rule "which allows for non-profit libraries and archives to reproduce, distribute, display and publicly perform a work if it meets the criteria of: a published work in the last twenty years of copyright, and after conducting a reasonable investigation, no commercial exploitation or copy at a reasonable price could be found." This particular volume dates from 1939 and is basically a guide to clear writing. Students today could do worse. The collection as a whole contains a number of gems (eating up far too much of my afternoon) including A Dictionary of American Slang (including a separate section for baseball slang), Beyond the Solar System (asks the question: are there other solar systems?), Diplomatically Speaking (the autobiography of a young American diplomat up to and through WW1) and, well, so much more. The collection as a whole is called The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. Via DigitalKoans.
Confessions of an Open Access Advocate
Becky Hillyer, Leslie Chan, OCSD Net, 2017/10/11
Two years after the first issue of IRRODL the Budapest Open Access Initiative coing the term (we are told) open access. You have to dig through the archives but I covered it here in OLDaily, and since then have had more than 500 posts dedicated to the topic. So how have things gone since then? In this blunt interview BOAI signatory Leslie Chan suggests that they were too focused on access, and far less focused on production, and especially with respect to whose voices are heard. I found this via Richard Poynder, who adds in his own article that "fifteen years after BOAI, legacy publishers are successfully co-opting both forms of OA outlined at the 2002 meeting... It also now seems likely that they will co-opt the reinvigorated preprint movement, and eventually colonise the entire research workflow... The crucial point here is that legacy publishers remain firmly in control of scholarly communication. Amongst other things, this means they can be expected to continue to plunder the public purse." So, yeah, a rethink (and a reset) is required.
Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology
Jeremy Roschelle, Wendy Martin, June Ahn, Patricia Schank, The Center for Innovative Research in Cyber Learning, 2017/10/10
I found myself nodding along as I read the introduction to this report (86 page PDF) describing cyberlearning research. It says, for example, "Researchers have found that the best way to investigate potential advances is to design learning experiences and study them." Additionally, "Demonstrating impacts on conventional education measures is rarely the primary intent in cyberlearning research, especially because today’s standardized tests are often ill suited to assessing what learners are achieving in these new environments." Yes, yes. The five points listed that make cyberlearning research distinctive also characterize my own research: oriented to a future horizon, focused on equity, learning across multiple contexts (and not just in classrooms), research through design, expression through making and sharing, and convergence of methods from across different disciplines. There's a lot more in this report, which though focused exclusively on the U.S. context is nonetheless well worth reading. It describes six reserach contexts from among the 279 research grant awards, three research methods, and supporting data on roadmap and scalability. See more from the CIRCL Center here and read the blog here.
OpenEd MOOC Archive
Matt Crosslin, LINK Lab, 2017/10/10
Georghe Siemens and David Wiley are offering an open online course on open education. This page is a compendium of all the resources in the course - the videos from the course authors, guest contributions (including my own), and additional content and articles. It's all freely accessible - you don't need to log in to anything or pay a fee. The videos have transcriptions (yay!) . There's also a separate page with learner activity, linking to participant blog posts. And of course the Twitter discussion is ongoing. There are also email updates. This is what open education looks like.
A Big Publisher Embraces OER
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/10/10
Just to be clear, by "embraces OER", what the author means is "charges $25 per student per course." Of course, the putative charge here is for the platform, not for the content contained in the platform. To get at the OERs, you need to go through the platform. This article quotes gushibg support from all the usual suspects, with only SPARC's Nicole Allen sounding a note of caution. I'm openly sceptical. While they are locked in Cengage's platform, I can't access these resources, I can't link to these resources, I can't even know what they are. In theory someone could extract them from the platform and make them available, but I would wager that they can't do this in any automated and cost-effective way.
Are We on the Verge of a New Golden Age?
Carlota Perez, Leo Johnson, Art Kleiner, Strategy+Business, 2017/10/10
I would like to believe that the answer to the question in the headline is 'yes', but I have far less faith in cycles than economists and astrologers. In any case, that's the logic being applied here, as it traces through five technological waves (industry, steam, electricity, oil, and information) and observes a cycle of distruption, crisis and prosperity. What the author doesn't menton is that each of these waves (except ours, so far) is punctuated with a major war: Napoleonic, Civil, WWI, WWII. So let's maybe hope that we break out of the cycle this time. Having said that, and having expressed a proper scepticism, it does remain true that each wave (including ours) has resulted in a wave of increased prosperity and well-being world-wide.
Google created a fun way to learn about simple AI
Devindra Hardawar, Engadget, 2017/10/10
Google's Teachable Machine is a fun little tool from Google that uses artificial intelligence to let you train it on a few simple gesture-based commands. The appeal is the simplicity of the interface, but the potential for a new range of alternative interfaces is huge. "Teachable Machine conveys just how important pattern recognition is becoming in the technology world. It's used in photo apps to recognize faces and objects, but it also powers supercomputers like IBM's Watson."
The “P” in PLN
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, 2017/10/09
Doug Peterson sees the essence of personal learning: "In so many ways, learning with online folks is the antithesis of the traditional professional learning model. Here, you determine the time you want to engage. You determine the topics you wish to explore. You decide when to turn off the noise. You determine which links, videos, or blog posts shared are of interest. You decide where you need to grown and learn. You decide just how deeply you need to dive to fully understand. You decide who your presenter or folks for a group discussion will be. You decide when someone is just a puppet for edu-babble and ignore them. You decide when to turn the computer off." This is the fract of online learning. It's also how people online learn.
This Is How the World Will Shop by 2025
Juan Martinez, PC Magazine, 2017/10/09
2025 is only eight years away, and it's not clear that large parts of the world (including possibly Puerto Rico) will even have reliable power and water by then, so the definition of "world" in this article is very narrow (and probably a 25-block radius around the author's house). The shopping scenario isn't realistic either: your house detects when you've run out of something and automatically orders a replacement. Now tell me that wouldn't be abused by marketers and advertisers! For example: "Your connected razor will know when its blades have gone rusty." No. It will tell you your blades are rusty. But it will be lying! All these things that work automatically (including educational technology) will not be working for our benefit. They will be selling - hard selling - to us.
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
Paul Lewis, The Guardian, 2017/10/09
I remember having a conversation once with a friend who was having an existential crisis because she wasn't sure whether any of her thoughts were her own. She had realized (as do I) the extent to which her ideas, beliefs and habits were influenced, even controlled, by external influences. This was before the days of Facebook addition, but all the means were still present: online and mass media, social pressures, the news hype cycle, expectations at home or in the office. So while this article describes the phenomenon on social media addition, my perspective is that it's the same story in new clothing. Since when has social approval not been addictive? Since when has this not been leveraged by advertisers, educators and propagandists to entice people into working against their own best interests? I think of the Civitus Vetus of Rome, the playing grounds of Eton, and the halls of West Point all in the same breath. The only thing that changes is who is in charge.
Invisible skills
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2017/10/09
Summry and a bit of commentary on the Skills, Competencies and Credentials report from Alan Harrison (Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario) referenced here last week. The key bit is this: "Universities must come to terms with two facts: their undergraduate programs are where general skills are developed and second, it is these skills that make the graduates of these programs employable." Universities test for the content of these courses, but it isn't the content thata makes them employable, it's the skills. What sort of skills? Well, that's where everybody gets really vague: they include things like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, resreach and learning how to learn, and the like. But instead of enumerating the skills, both Harrison and Creelman focus on assessing them. "The answer lies probably in providing more comprehensive credentials that describe both the knowledge and skills acquired."
The Open Home Lab Stack
Mighty Womble, HackerNoon, 2017/10/09
Eventually all of this will be a black box, and we'll work with features and services rujnning on top of it, but it's useful to look at the details now, so we can understand the capacities that will be avaiklable in the future. What Mighty Womble describes is essentially a hub for virtualized services; these services will be available to any device or appliance in your home or on your network, and they will support your interactions with the rest of the world. There are too many layers to list, but important ones include the virtual servers, storage and directories, firewalls, routers, VPNs, security, and authentication. These are the things that today an enterprise infrastructure contains, but what's described here is almost all open source, which means it is affordable for individual users, and eventually will be paxkaged for them.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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