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by Stephen Downes
Oct 28, 2016
Learning Objects Debuts Competency-Based Education Platform
Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology, 2016/10/28
The website doesn't have many words, only the bare minimum to get the idea across. Campus Technology explains: "Learning Objects, a company owned by Cengage Learning, is out with a new platform that streamlines competency-based education (CBE) programs at colleges and universities." It's one of now many entrants in the field. The platform "is designed to support programs built around learning goals that map to assessments and learning activities." Actually, the Campus Technology article doesn't have many words either.
Choosito & Quick Key Partner to Provide Resource Suggestions Based on Assessment Results
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2016/10/28
Richard Byrne summarizes: "Choosito is a neat search engine for students and teachers to use to find websites based on reading level.... Quick Key is a popular app that lets teachers quickly score formative assessments." We can see how the two would go together quite well. See also this article from ed Circuit.
Virtual Courses Are Now Second Nature
Toni Davis, Cisco, 2016/10/28
Post about Cisco's announcement about the launch of a new Digital Education Platform from the show floor in Anaheim. According to the release, the product "integrates Cisco WebEx and Spark into existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs)." The illustration is the most interesting part of the announcement and speaks to Cisco's growing incursion into the traditional learning technology marketplace.
100 Stories: The Impact of Open Access
Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Promita Chatterji., Bepress, 2016/10/28
From the abstract: "This report is a pre-print that has been submitted for publication with UNESCO. It looks to answer the question: "why does open access matter?" We examined 100 stories of impact to produce a framework for describing the concrete benefits of open access for readers, authors and institutions. We aspire to move the open access conversation forward by making the case, backed by data, that the benefits of open access are real, widespread and significant." 27 page PDF. The article is mostly an overview, with each of the stories taking up about one paragraph.
To promote growth, Canada needs to fixate on data before credentials
Nobina Robinson, Globe, Mail, 2016/10/28
The proposition is this: "If innovation is going to be the means through which we achieve growth and talent is the driving force behind innovation, let’s start by measuring this key input to growth correctly." For example, writes Nobina Robinson, "Canadian firms use individuals holding technologist designations, BAs, and Master’s degrees more than they use PhDs for R&D." So are we overproducing PhDs? The data don't tell us. What's key in drawing this sort of assessment is the explanation for what we are seeing. Maybe, for example, Canadian firms don't use PhDs for research because PhDs aren't available, or are too expensive. And over-reliance on data is a but like using stock market data the day before a market crash. In many models, what is happening now is far less important than our assessment of what is going to happen.
Wednesday at Educause 2016: Power of introverts, top IT issues
Roger Riddell, Education Dive, 2016/10/27
So if there's no such thing as learning styles, why is a talk about introverts an EDUCAUSE keynote? "Susan Cain's keynote on the often-untapped potential of introverts was particularly relevant to an IT crowd that, when asked to raise hands, was roughly split 70/30 on introverts and extroverts." Interestingly, a survey of teachers will give almost the opposite result. It turns out there are differences between people, and some of them can classify us in some interesting, albeit superficial, ways.
Twitter is killing off Vine
Casey Newton, The Verge, 2016/10/27
The news today spread faster than any Vine video (it came and was over while I was watching a single Bill Mahar video). Twitter "said it would not delete any Vines that have been posted — for now, anyway. 'We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,' the company said in a Medium post. 'You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made.'" Translation: download your videos now and put them in your own archive, before they disappear forever the way your Google Video, Blip and Ustream videos did. Interestingly, you can read the announcement on Medium but not on the Vine website.
Patterns in Course Design: How instructors ACTUALLY use the LMS
John Whitmer, Blackboard Blog, 2016/10/27
I'll save you the suspense: they mostly use it to distribute course content and announcements. They also use it as a gradebook. Even in the 11% use of the 'social' course archetype, more than half the use is content distribution. John Whitmer writes, "in initial exploration we have found a similar distribution in final grades in courses across all categories, and uneven results across tool use by course category. This suggests, counter-intuitively, that grade may be independent of course category." It's not that counter-intuitive. The majority of courses are based largely on the transfer of content from instructor to student. Grades reflect suvvess using that methodology, and are not some sort of independent arbiter between methodologies.
Prosthetic hands link to nerves to make touch feel real
Matt Wood, Futurity, 2016/10/27
The leading edge and obviously best use for this technology is of course to help amputees gain feeling in their artificial hands. But there is no reason why the technology developed would stop with amputees, especially if the interface between mind and machine were not excessively invasive. The applications could literally redefine what we mean by "hands on" training and development. Imagine working with a simulation that could respond to your touch exactly the way the real environment would. The work was published in Science Translational Medicine by Emily L. Graczyk, et.al.
Against Assessment: You Can't Measure The Unmeasurable
John Warner, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/10/27
"Looking at student work completed as part of course sounds much better than trying to create standardized assessments," writes John Warner. But "the massification and standardization of this kind of assessment seems likely to hold many potentially bad unintended, but entirely foreseeable consequences." This sort of focus would shape teaching into certain types of 'best practice', which is the opposite of what classes should be like. "We should be keeping it as diverse and exploratory as possible," he says. For example, students must find meaning in assignments, and this depends on their individual preferences and needs.
Chatbots with Social Skills Will Convince You to Buy Something
Will Knight, MIT Technology review, 2016/10/26
What happens when the chatbot we think is there to help us is actually a skilled sales agent? This adds a different flavour to the use of such applications to, say, support students or provide advice. We might think that's what they're doing, but in fact they may be more interested in persuading us to buy some software or to sign up for the advanced tutorial. Or they may be programmed by some company to recommend their staff and affiliates as experts within a domian. If there's no truth in advertising, what will we then say about adbots? This article discusses Sara, an unreasonably persuasive chatbot was developed by Justine Cassell at Carnegie Mellon University.
Responsive Design and Vertical Video Add Up to Engaging eLearning
Pamela Hogle, Learning Solutions Magazine, 2016/10/26
Most readers will be familiar with responsive design - web pages and services that adapt to different device sizes and capabilities. But vertical video? These are the videos shot in vertical mode (like 'portrait mode', they're taller than they are wide), like the screen of a mobile phone. They are typically seen as "as amateurish and was resoundingly ridiculed." But "that's changing," according to Pamela Hogle. "Pairing responsive design with innovative use of vertical video, eLearning designers can create content that is appealing, usable, and attractive on phones, tablets, and laptops." Quite so - but it typically also means shooting two videos, one in each mode.
The myth of the sophisticated hack
Andrew Peterson, Desmos, 2016/10/26
Good article about hacking. It relevant as there has been a spike in recent activity, probably timed to coincide with the election (I'm hoping so; my own website is being caught in the crossfire). It's important to note, though, as this article makes clear, the majority of hacks are really very simply technologically. Hackers often go after the must vulnerable component: the user. Whether trying commonly used passwords, or tricking people into giving up personal information, these attacks rely not on technology but on social engineering. The article also looks at other attack types, such as the 'man in the middle', SQL injection, and endpoint attacks using USBs or mobile devices. If you're not familiar with these terms, read this article. I would have includes 'denial of service' (DOS, or DDOS) attacks, not because they're hacks (technically they're not) but because they're behind so much recent disruption.
Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems
Terry Anderson, Contact North, 2016/10/26
I'm looking forward more to the latter two parts of this three-part series in which Terry Anderson "explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning" but as only the first part is available today we'll have to settle for that. Anderson offers a brisk overview of the LMS and then examines the challenges: "as the number of features increases, so does the complexity and challenges of easy adoption," he writes, while " perhaps the greatest challenge is the inherent 'school focus' of the LMS." We don't really get to the promise of this article - how to get the most out of an LMS - but perhaps what that means is using social media or personal learning environments instead.
'Star Trek: Bridge Crew' finds a new frontier in VR co-op gaming
Daniel Cooper, Engadget, 2016/10/26
I spent the summer of 1981 in a basement programming every bit of a TI-99 computer in order to build a Star Trek game. It wasn't much (but for the time it was great, with a strategy view and a viewscreen view and enemies that avoided being shot). You couldn't do a lot with a computer in those days, but this was always my objective: a fully immersive Enterprise bridge crew simulation. So, some 35 years later, for me, the future has arrived. Or will arrive, when I get to play this puppy.
The NYT buying Wirecutter and Sweethome is so much more amazing than you think
Matt Haughey, 15 minutes in the morning, 2016/10/26
You can just imagine the sceptics, says this article: "You can’t build a tech site that doesn’t publish 20 times a day. You can’t build a content site that isn’t covered with advertising. You can’t build an entire business on Amazon affiliate revenue. You can’t take on Consumer Reports and expect to get any traction. You can’t pay for this level of in-depth reporting. Ok, great, you built this, but why would anyone ever come back?" If I wanted to monetize OLDaily, this would probably be the route I would take.
Deep-Learning-Papers-Reading-Roadmap
Songrotek, GitHub, 2016/10/26
This is an unfinished work, but it illustrates nicely the use of academic papers as open educational resources by sequencing useful and important resources in such a way as to guide the reader through the essentials of a discipline. "The roadmap is constructed in accordance with the following four guidelines: from outline to detail; from old to state-of-the-art; from generic to specific areas (and) focus on state-of-the-art." It's best to think of this as a proto-MOOC. People can (and should) add resources (not just papers and books), and these can create branches and sub-branches. The resources themselves are all openly accessible. GitHub does provide limited social interaction, but you would expect a social network or community to grow around this collection. Actual MOOC classes would involve a self-managing cohort moving through the material together. Yes, it takes commitment and effort to learn a subject this way, and a lot of people don't have the skills. That's where educational institutions and student support should come in.
What is the difference between CSS variables and preprocessor variables?
Chris Coyier, CSS Tricks, 2016/10/26
The world of web page style has become complicated and complex, partially because of the need to support numerous browsers (both PC based and mobile) and partially because large-scale projects require variables and functions to facilitate management. This article looks at one aspect of that, CSS variables. Of particular value is the discussion of the role of CSS preprocessors like Stylus, Less, and PostCSS. These take youir default values for things like colours and text styles and turn them into standards-compliant CSS code. Of course, you could just use CSS variables to accomplish the same thing without so much work. And you can use Javascript to manipulate these directly. But you begin to run into cross-browser implementation issues.
Reaching the Tipping Point: Insights on Advancing Competency Education in New England
Chris Sturgis, CompetencyWorks, 2016/10/25
This report (89 page PDF) provides an overview of competency-based education (CBE) and then drills down to look at some lessons learned in New England. CBE is motivated by three major strands of thought, according to the report: first, the current system is focused on delivery, not results, with the result that students have gaps in their learning; second, CBE ensures that students move on to the next grade level only after they have acquired the required competencies; and third, a system defined by CBE is rooted in equity and transparent process. "Rather than expecting compliance from students, competency-based schools seek to ensure students feel safe, respected, valued and empowered." You have to more than just provide opportunity; steps need to be taken to support and engage students. The report discusses the challenges of implementing a paradigm-changing program, and stresses providing support and a focus on results. The assessment of the New England experience is generally rosy.
The Great Unbundling of Textbook Publishers
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/10/25
Th unbundling of the university is more story than fact, writes Michael Feldstein, but the unbundling of publishing is imminent. This tipping point may be open educational resources (OER), which are making textbook publishing unprofitable. He writes, "The real money will be in a few areas:
High-end digital products that directly or indirectly improve student outcomes Related services that help colleges improve student outcomes Services that help colleges improve the unsexy but critical aspects staying viable, from marketing to administration Loans to schools looking to make changes that will (theoretically) make them more sustainable in the long run but require significant up-front investment—preferably in the products and services of the company offering the loan."Will these separate services be offered under a single brand, or are we seeing the beginning of a marketplace with multiple players? As usual, the answer is "yes".
Open Educational Resources
Michael Q. McShane, Education Next, 2016/10/25
This article opens as an account of the nature and history of open educational resources. But then it turns sceptical. Michael Q. McShane writes, "open resources are offered free to users, but they are not necessarily free to produce... the people who create them want to be paid for doing so." Fair enough, and for the most part creators are paid by their school, company, university or government department. The article then turns to a criticism of a (U.S.) federal government program. "It is important to examine what productive role, if any, the federal government can play in the evolution of OER... the federal government is putting its thumb on the scale for one particular type of content-creation mechanism, and that could disrupt the marketplace." This presumption that there is some 'natural' state of the marketplace that is 'distorted' by government intervention is of course a fallacy, as is the presumption that the government has no business being involved in the education of its citizens.
Can Your Productivity Be Measured?
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/10/25
I think we all knew this, but in this review of Yves Gingras's Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: Uses and Abuses we read of a detailed examination of the topic. "While study of publication and citation patterns, “on the proper scale, provides a unique tool for analyzing global dynamics of science over time,” the book says, the 'entrenchment' of increasingly (and often ill-defined) quantitative indicators in the formal evaluation of institutions and researchers gives way to their abuses."
Building A Higher Ed Social Media Budget
Liz Gross, Gross, Point-Blank, 2016/10/25
I haven't seen this topic covered elsewhere, which is by itself something to recommend it. "Paying to promote posts—either to the organic audience or to a target audience.... is becoming the norm in higher ed. Of the 1,100 respondents to the 2016 CASE Social Media in Advancement Survey, 59% said they paid to promote posts on Facebook, and 18% paid for Twitter promotion." In addition to paying social media companies, institutions will also need to budget for staff. "Engagement assistants are given 'the keys' to social media accounts to publish content and respond to inquiries." And of course there are software costs for tracking and monitoring response. "Don’t start by contacting vendors. First, know what data you need. Then, find a tool (paid or free) that provides you with that data."
A Devil’s Dictionary of Educational Technology
Bryan Alexander, 2016/10/25
Bryan Alexander hits the mark again and again with this lighthearted look at terminology in our field. Also published in Medium.
Ria #30: Dr. Sean Zdenek On Rhetorical Analysis
, Ecampus Research Unit | Oregon State University,
On this episode, Dr. Sean Zdenek discusses his book Reading Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which focuses on rhetorical analyses of closed captions.
Internet of Broken Things
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/10/24
As is always the case, technology as planned works very differently from technology when mixed with humans. Witness the Internet of Things (IoT), the nascent linking of phones, printers, cameras, and a host of other dumb smart devices. They have now become the prime vector internet attacks. As Michael Caulfield says, " I worry that it’s not just an internet of things, but a proprietary mess of interdependent services built on the shifting sands of unstable business models. Unless we develop standards and protocols that reduce that proprietary interdependency we’re eventually going to have a lot bigger problem on our hands than Twitter outages." True. But what are the odds that the corporate community will get this right?
Geishas, headdresses out as Canadian universities stave off offensive Halloween costumes
Michelle McQuigge, Toronto Star, 2016/10/24
In Canada we have a tradition of dressing in costume on or around Halloween (October 31). Traditionally these costumes were of scary things (such as skeletons, ghosts or monsters) but it has since branched out to include most anything (I once went out as the Empire State Building). We are now beginning to see the limits of 'most anything', and in one noted case, Brock University's student union has prohibited "any form of headdress, costumes that mock suicide or rape, those depicting transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner, or outfits featuring a culture’s traditional attire" at its pubs and events." So of course some people are crying "censorship", as though mocking someone's culture or personal life is somehow a form of free speech. I think the student union's message is clear and reasonable: if you're going to be racist or offensive, don't do it here.
Has AI (Finally) Reached a Tipping Point?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2016/10/24
Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers a useful overview of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) from a non-technical perspective referencing Stanford University's One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100, 52 page PDF) including the list of 'hot' areas of current study (quoted, p.9):
Large-scale machine learning - algorithms to work with extremely large data sets. Deep learning - has facilitated object recognition in images, video labeling, and activity recognition Reinforcement learning - experience-driven sequential decision-making Robotics - train a robot to interact with the world around it Computer vision - form of machine perception; automatic image and video captioning. Natural Language Processing - systems that are able to interact with people through dialog; machine translation Collaborative systems - autonomous systems that can work collaboratively with other systems and with humans Crowdsourcing and human computation - make automated calls to human expertise Algorithmic game theory and computational social choice draw - handle potentially misaligned incentives Internet of Things (IoT) - devices interconnected to collect and share their abundant sensory information Neuromorphic - mimic biological neural networksThe report notes, "Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind. No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely to be developed in the near future."
Quality Standards for Competency-Based Educational Programs
Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), 2016/10/24
You have until December 1 to provide comments to the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) on this draft set of guidelines for quality in competency-based education. The ideas is that "Competency-based education uses an intentional and transparent approach to curricular design that provides a learner with a clear pathway to completion based on an academic model that builds a unified body of knowledge leveraging frameworks, disciplines, standards, workforce needs, and national norms... Each competency is explicitly stated and unambiguously provides descriptions of what a learner must master before program completion... The assessment strategy provides multiple modalities of assessment intentionally aligned to learning outcomes and uses a range of assessment types to measure learning and the transfer of learning into novel contexts."
The eight elements, with expanded principles and related standards, include (quoted from the press release):
Coherent, competency-driven program and curriculum design Clear, measurable, meaningful and complete competencies Credential-level assessment strategy with robust implementation Intentionally designed and engaged student experience Collaborative engagement with external partners Transparency of student learning Evidence-driven continuous improvement processes Demonstrated institutional commitment to capacity for CBE innovationI couldn't find the actual quality standards anywhere on the C-BEN website (you have to sign up for the survey to view them), but can access this copy (11 page PDF) at Inside Higher Ed.
H5P Examples and Downloads
H5P, 2016/10/24
This site came up in one of the online discussions I follow. From the website: "H5P makes it easy to create interactive content by providing a range of content types for various needs. Preview and explore these content types below. You can create interactive content by adding the H5P plugin to your WordPress, Moodle or Drupal site, or you can create content directly on H5P.org and embed it on your website."
Attending to the Digital
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/10/24
Interesting article from Audrey Watters, as is so often the case, and I like the focus on the origins of the meaning of the word 'attention' and the oft-cited concern that the digital is creating an attention deficit. "You can see that the noun is accompanied by all sorts of verbs. We pay attention. We give attention. Attract attention. Draw attention. Call attention. Fix attention. At which noun-verb combination are we failing?" Fair enough. And the idea of the 'attention economy', with its values firmly planted in the capitalist ethos, is surely typical of western culture. But I was surprised to see her overlook the sense of 'attend' meaning 'to wait'. That's what the french verb attendre actually means. To wait, and to wait on, to attend. This sense changes the meaning of such phrases as "the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony." In the words of Arcade Fire: We used to wait. Not any more.
The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2016/10/24
Some good points here following Google's quiet change of policy to allow personally identifiable web tracking. "Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct," says Julia Angwin. "Tracking is no less an invasion of privacy in apps and browsers than it is in homes, cars, purses, pants and wallets," says Doc Searls. "Our apps and browsers are personal and private. So are the devices on which we use them...Tracking people without their clear and conscious permission is wrong... Claiming that advertising funds the “free” Internet is wrong." True. But tracking isn't the only problem with advertising. I tried looking at the new map of the Galaxy today and even with ad-blockers turned on couldn't see it behind the barrage of popups and auto-play videos running on news sites.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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