Laden...
[Home] [Top] [Archives] [Mobile] [About] [Threads] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Sept 30, 2016
Presentation
A Timeline
Stephen Downes, Sept 27, 2016, Internal Presentation, Ottawa
This is a very brisk autobiography from my early childhood through to today.
Share | Online Classes Get a Missing Piece: Teamwork
Marguerite McNeal, EdSurge, 2016/09/30
Audrey Watters gasps, "Can you believe no one has ever thought about adding 'social' to online education until now?!" It boggles the mind, to be sure. But Carolyn Rosé's project is a bit more interesting than that. The EdSurge article discussing Bazaar misrepresents the real story. Of course, everyone would like to see more social interaction in online learning and people have been working on this for decades. What's unique here is that students can "enter an online chat group where they discuss and apply what they learned [and a] computer agent—a chatbot—prompts them to discuss amongst each other." The chatbot is the focus of the Bazaar project mentioned in the article. Here's the GitHub. It's related to their wider DANCE project - Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange, which is an effort to promote similar interactivity inside EdX.
The Open University of Brazil goes open
Tel Amiel, Universidade Aberta do Brasil, 2016/09/30
According to this article, the Open University of Brazil (UAB) "has just announced its open educational resources repository — eduCAPES, during the 9th meeting of UAB Coordinators in Brasília. The repository is part of a series of activities aimed at promoting OER within the UAB System."
Create a Professional Learning Community in 3 Easy Steps with Office 365
Andrew Robertson, Microsoft UK Schools Blog, 2016/09/30
What I want to flag here is the use of the term "professional learning community" by Microsoft. According to this article, " Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) provide the support educators need to continue to grow new teaching skills with their peers. Groups of educators can work and learn together to improve student achievement through book study, action research, or learning a new best practice through PLCs." The term has been around for a while. Here's a 2004 article describing PLCs: "People use this term to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education." In 2009 Edutopia wrote about how to create a PLC. The province of Ontatio used it as a model in 2007. This article from 2005 credits Coral Mitchell and Larry Sackney with a definition of the term. Reference go back to 1997 and earlier.
Introducing Google Cloud
Diane Greene, Google Cloud Official Blog, 2016/09/30
Google has rebranded and relaunched a number of services for enterprises, including education, under the heading of Google Cloud. "Google Cloud spans every layer of the business, including all of Google Cloud Platform; our user facing collaboration and productivity applications — now named G Suite; all of our machine learning tools and APIs, the enterprise maps APIs; and the Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud." G Suite mnight be a tough sell. "We believe that when organizations break down silos, connect people and empower them to work together, we get the speed, agility and impact needed to compete in today’s market... With G Suite, information can flow freely between devices, apps, people and teams." My experience has been that enterprise wants tgo lock down its information, not let it flow freely. I would like that to change, of course, but as I say: tough sell.
This is probably the last result to come from 'The Official Google Blog'. Google has a new blog, called The Keyword, which unites all other blogs. There is an RSS feed but you have to search for it, since they're not using RSS autodiscover. You'll find a four-paragraph article on 'helping prospective students make decisions about their future' in today's issue. Four pathetic paragraphs. :(
Markets and School Quality
Andrés Velasco, Project Syndicate, 2016/09/30
This article is much better in its articulation of the criticisms of private schools than it is in offering a resolution. Former Chilean presidential candidate Andrés Velasco explores three areas of criticism (quoted):
if everything – including education – is for sale, those who have more money will buy more of it. education markets perform poorly... markets run into trouble when what is bought and sold cannot be observed or measured. education can be degraded by being sold and bought... market incentives change behavior in socially damaging ways.These are all good points and I would contend that the private sector has not addressed any of them adequtely. But Velasco suggests "it makes sense to consider how to combine the virtues of both systems, instead of simply choosing between them." He cites a recent paper that argues "for-profits appear to be at their best with well-defined programs of short duration that prepare students for a specific occupation." How does this address these three points? We don't know.
PEARSONalized Learning
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/09/29
I want to cut this out and put it on the wall around here: "There is a recurring cultural fantasy that 'solving' the education 'problem' consists of creating a customized playlist of little content bits... Nobody who has taught believes that proper sequencing of content chunks is the hard part." Oh, but that's all so many people want to do. That's how 'learning analytics will solve education!' Argh! People (as Michael Feldstein vividly demonstrates (with examples)) should stop listening to ed tech vendor marketing when thinking about how to design and use educational technology.
Digital Readiness Gaps
John B. Horrigan, Pew Research Internet Project, 2016/09/29
How 'ready' are people to take online learning courses (especially those that, like MOOCs, require a fair degree of readiness)? According to this Pew report, which looks at Americans only, the degree of readiness varies across society. This really should be no surprise. The statistics range from 17% for 'fully prepared' (from higher income households and with more education) through to 33% who are 'reluctant' (tend to be men 50 and over with lower educational backgrounds and lower incomes) through to 14% who are 'unprepared' (who tend to be women and over with lower educational backgrounds and incomes). I would imagine you could find similar patterns in other countries, which skews toward more-or-less prepared depending on income. The interesting find would be the outliers - countries like Ecuador and Uruguay, maybe. But Pew doesn't look at that.
A Master List of 1,200 Free Courses From Top Universities: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2016/09/29
From Open Culture: "Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone." Free an d open online learning is coming of age.
Yes! #PhD written... looking for joyful bliss once more
Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, 2016/09/29
Inge de Waard has been working on this just about as long as I have known her. So it's nice to she she has shut down her word processor and shipped some product. "This research investigates the informal learning journeys of 56 experienced adult online learners engaging in individual and/or social self-directed learning using any device to follow a FutureLearn course." You can read it here.
Disciplining Education Technology
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/09/29
Audrey Watters is "perplexed by the recent call to create a new discipline for education technology" but I think she has it right when she suggests that the point of the initiative is "to determine the intellectual contours and to shore up the departmental boundaries – to decree an orthodoxy – for education technology?" And, as she suggests, "this feels like yet another rebranding, rehistoricizing of ed-tech by elite American universities."
US school's unmanned boat reaches Welsh coast
BBC News, 2016/09/28
A driverless boat (pilotless boat?) created by students from Kent School in Maryland was recovered in Wales. They launched The Osprey with a time capsule onboard off the New Jersey coast on 13 June and tracked it across the ocean. Projects like this are always great educational experiences. "Our excitement was at fever pitch. We're going to wait for our head teacher to make contact with the school in the US and then hopefully do a live weblink with them and open it up." With luck the boat can also be used to instruct the BBC on gender-neutral language.
Educational Software Patents: A Call to Vendors
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/09/28
As described here September 1, Elsevier won a patent for an online peer review system, something the open source Online Journal Systems has been doing for decades. This post continues the discussion from Miichael Feldstein, noted for his coverage of the Blackboard patent case. He called on "educational institutions to gather together and sign a pledge that they would not procure products from companies that assert education-related software patents," but in the face of utter indifference this seems unlikely to happen. So now he's calling on software companies to respond. "The right thing for vendors to do here is to create what’s known as a patent pool. Any patent owner who contributes to the pool pledges to only use that patent for defensive counter-suits."
C.R.E.A.M. (Class Rules Everything Around Me)
Kitteh, Metafilter, 2016/09/27
As I prepared my slides for today's short talk (we're doing a round of autobiographies in our group - a good idea) I thought a lot about where I stand vis-à-vis the rest of society. Not as 'respectable'. Not as "entitled to... education, social standing, pay and political power." I had to take each one of these, to wrest them from people of more deserving background. I had a lot of setbacks, a lot of battles. And you can never actually escape your origins, because to escape you must accept the values and assumptions of the ruling class, the core of which is that people from your class don't belong in the boardroom or with polite company. I would never do that. As this author writes, rising with your class is the only thing that makes sense.
Still Playing "No Man’s Sky"
Tom Bray, Ongoing, 2016/09/27
I spend more time over the weekend playing No Man's Sky, doing so apparently in defiance of the hate being expressed by so many critics and gamers. But look at the panels (like the one pictured; can you believe this?) - they come from one demographic, one point of view, and expect one set of things from a game. They want a storyline, an opponent, an outcome. Maybe there will be one one day but that's not what No Man's Sky is promising. What I like is that you can do things like walk completely around the planet. It takes weeks. As Tim Bray says, "this game is a huge platform with lots of room to drop in new content and game-play and surprises." Yes, in many ways it's not a finished product. I'm actually OK with that. Because I hate the games that are defined by an storyline, an opponent, and an outcome. My world (of gaming, and of learning) is much bigger than that.
Why we are weaning our students from electronic noise
Ryan Balot, Clifford Orwin, Globe, Mail, 2016/09/27
I wonder whether this is true: "thinking thrives on silence or on dialogue with other human voices, when electronic noise has faded." This is being used as justification for banning electronic devices from the classroom. But I have questions. When I'm doing mental work, I always have some background noise - music, CBC, Ed Radio, a baseball game, whatever. My head is full of distracting noises; silence makes my mind wander. I remember the classroom lecture before computers - every agonizing scrape of a chair, squeak of a door, cough, whisper. It was all I could do to keep from daydreaming and falling asleep. By contrast, some of my best thinking places are noisy environments - pubs, markets, busy streets. So I think it's a fallacy that thinking thrives on silence, and certainly don't support banning electronic devices based on an unproven, and probably false, hypothesis.
Ria #26: Nick Foreman On Archival Research
, Ecampus Research Unit | Oregon State University,
On this episode, Nick Foreman shares about archival research and the logistics of archival work.
Lights out for shomi symptomatic of streaming video’s larger profitability problem
Terry Dawes, CanTech Letter, 2016/09/27
Shomi foundered on the same shoal that afflicted Netflix - the demands for unsustainable revenues from content producers. There's no incentive for providers to offer Shomi a good rate when they'll ultimately roll out their own service and try to grab all the profits. Meanwhile, Netflix has responded by gutting its offering and producing many of its own shows. The market for streaming video accounts is limited, though, and people won't pay for all of them. Meanwhile, it's a bit ironic for me to be reading "the last jigsaw piece for streaming video to gain widespread acceptance will be live sports" while watching my Blue Jays game on MLB.tv (as I have for several years now). The content providers will never see their pot of gold. The same thing that happened to print media and music is happening to video and is happening to education. 'Live' is just a format now; you don't have to be there, and it doesn't have to be expensive.
Doctoral dissertation successfully defended
Hans Põldoja, hanspoldoja.net, 2016/09/27
Worth a look (212 page PDF). "The underlying concept of the study is the open education ecosystem....Firstly, to clarify the design challenges related to the open education ecosystem, this study summarizes a set of design challenges presented in design case studies. Secondly, it identifies and recommends a set of design patterns that address these design challenges. Finally, the study proposes the structure and components that are needed for the open education ecosystem." The dissertation is based on five publications and - what he doesn't tell us here - was the result of 13 years worth of work. Via Teemu Leinonen, who recommended it to me.
Watch Disco Demolition Night Turn Into a Disaster in Real Time With This Amazing Footage
Matthew Dessem, Browbeat, 2016/09/26
Back in the 1970s, when disco became popular, it was all you could listen to (except maybe for the occasional classical music station). That could never happen today. If you don't like what's on the radio, you go to the internet. “This garbage of demolishing a record has turned into a fiasco!” Piersall goes on to make the case that Steve Dahl is a symptom of national decline, telling Bill Gleason, “We have become followers. So many people, insecure, don’t know what to do with themselves and how to have a good time—they follow someone who’s a jerk!” There's also an entire baseball game on this video, so enjoy.
Determinants of Teachers' Attitudes Towards E-Learning in Tanzanian Higher Learning Institutions
Dalton H. Kisanga, The International Review of Research in Open, Distributed Learning, 2016/09/26
This is a good paper, crisply written (notice, for example, how the literature review is to the point, relevant to the topic, and supports the conceptual design of the study). It's a simple survey, but at least consisted of a random sample (within constraints) and we see the actual questions. Analysis looked at responses across clusters of questions, considering for example a person's attitude to e-learning, and mapped them to demographic and other factors. Positive attitudes toward e-learning are associated with exposure to e-learning (in line with the theory of the mere exposure effect) and "are also in line with the developed conceptual framework of this study adapted from the TAM theoretical model, which explains the relationship between an individual's perceived ease of use (EoU) and attitude (A) towards a stimulus." Meanwhile, "teachers' negative attitudes towards e-learning could be attributed to other external factors that can hinder e-learning adoption."
A Far Cry from School History: Massive Online Open Courses as a Generative Source for Historical Research
Silvia Gallagher, Ciaran Wallace, The International Review of Research in Open, Distributed Learning, 2016/09/26
Good article that takes advantage of the fact that in some MOOCs knowledge is created and not merely transmitted. "Learner participation in MOOCs is a two way process whereby learners are both consumers and producers of knowledge. In these connectivist environments, learners are not only being encouraged to interact with one another, but are also given the facility to share and create content." This paper is a detailed examination of how this can work and reports on a specific case; "The MOOC examined in this research focuses on the revolutionary period between 1912 and 1923 in Ireland, and was delivered over six weeks by Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and Futurelearn." Good paper in what is a pretty uneven issue of IRRODL.
New LinkedIn features emphasize learning as more workers face threat of automation
Nat Levy, GeekWire, 2016/09/26
This article is more about the e-learning feature in LinkedIn than it is about the dangers of automation. Right now the LinkedIn Learning services offers premiun subscribers a course-finding service, online learning support, and posting of newly acquired competencies on the personal profile, basically combining services offered by LinkedIn and Lynda.com. The next part of the system is obviously a job-matching feature that will recommend opportunities to users, and potential candidates to employers.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Education in the Age of the MOOC
Noam Ebner, Social Science Research Network, 2016/09/26
Good paper (47 page PDF) on the development and delivery of a MOOC on negotiation and conflict resolution. It's focused around four major issues:
Can we provide the same quality of negotiation education in a MOOC format Can the signature pedagogy of the negotiation field, the experiential learning model, be implemented in a MOOC? Can we provide students in a MOOC the same experience that has made negotiation courses successful? What implications might this have for negotiation and dispute resolution education?I really like the section on quality (it should be required reading). "Interestingly, the standards for assessing the quality of traditional negotiation courses have been somewhat vague both in terms of outcomes within the course," writes Noam Ebner.
What Do Forbes, NYT, And Sotheby’s Have In Common? They Make Online Courses
Anuar Lequerica, Class Central, 2016/09/26
There's virtually no content in this article (would it be too much to do an interview or get a point of view?) but the author points to an important trend. "The World Bank, PwC, and Fundação Lemann offer MOOCs on Coursera. Microsoft, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and the Inter-American Development Bank all offer MOOCs on edX. Google offers an Android Basics Nanodegree on Udacity."
The Open Research Agenda
OERhub, 2016/09/26
Passing this along: "The Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) is conducting a global survey of OER ahead of the 2nd World OER Congress....You can find out more and take the survey at http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html. If you’re feeling in a mood to contribute to a survey, please also consider sharing some thoughts on our open research consultation at http://tinyurl.com/2016ora."
Google’s creepy Allo assistant and our rocky relationship so far
Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog, 2016/09/26
I actually admire Google's efforts to make Allo work. Allo has a greater range than Siri, even if it does listen in to your conversations and act like a friend that's trying too hard to be liked. Eventually we'll all use an assistant like this, but they'll have to work out some of the glitches and get past the 'creepiness' factor. What concerns be about Allo and its ilk is that it's tied to the phone. The phone is our least secure device, is a consumption-only device, and is tied to things that matter, like our phone number (and hence, telcom account and billing). Here's a bit more about Allo.
This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.
Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.
Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Laden...
Laden...
