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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Apr 01, 2016
Types And Tokens
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Mar 27, 2016
Naming things, counting things, generalizing over things -
these are really useful tools we have created for ourselves
in language and in thought to make the world easier to
navigate (and, sometimes, to rationalize after the fact why
we navigated on one way rather than another).
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Teens vastly prefer YouTube and Netflix to TV, don't mind
ads, report finds
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I always take it with a grain of salt when a report says
people don't mind ads. People always mind ads. But the rest
of this wouldn't surprise me: "Those surveyed said digital
video serves as a mood lifter (57%) and stress
reliever (61%), as well as a way to stay up to date on
what’s trending or new (60%), to learn how to do
something (47%) or to lull oneself to sleep (44%)."
Remember that the survey samples an affluent North American
population with good internet bandwidth.
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Self-presentation in scholarly profiles: Characteristics of
images and perceptions of professionalism and
attractiveness on academic social networking sites
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An actual study in a real journal - no fools! "This study
used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to code 10,500
profile pictures used by scholars on three platforms
— Mendeley, Microsoft Academic Search, and Google
Scholar — in order to determine how academics are
presenting themselves to their colleagues and to the public
at large and how they are perceived — particularly in
relation to professionalism and attractiveness."
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Vacancy DOAJ Ambassadors
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This is a nice opportunity for 8 to 10 individuals living
in developing nations to work as open publishing advocates
on behalf of DOAJ in a project funded by Canada's
International Development Research Centre (IDRC
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requires knowledge of academic publishing, in particular
online journals, editorial processes, best practices and
publishing technology standards."
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An Animated Carl Sagan Talks with Studs Terkel About
Finding Extraterrestrial Life (1985)
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Carl Sagan is one of my heroes, extraterrestrial life would
be really cool to find, so of course this item interests
me. Not so much you? Oh well. "The conversation touched on
some the big questions you might expect: the compatibility
between science and religion; the probability we’ll
encounter extraterrestrials if given enough time; and
more."
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6 Reasons Platforms Fail
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These are some good lessons; here they are, with some
comments from me:
"Failure to optimize openness" - I see this a lot; the
platform is 'sort of' open, but the developers hang on to
key components of it (eg., 'we will only allow pre-approved
content') which stifle the value.
"Failure to engage developers" - I always think of that
famous Steve Ballmer video
LinkYou have to
engage the broader developer community to invest in it,
otherwise it's a flop.
"Failure to share the surplus" - everybody engaged in the
platform has to win. If you favour one side over another in
a buyer-seller marketplace, your platform will fail.
"Failure to launch on the right side" - I'm not sure I'd
say this the same way the article does. The problem is, if
you have a pre-existing content monopoly, you have to find
a way to break that monopoly, either by enticing existing
producers into the platform (as Netflix did) or by
providing viable alternatives.
"Failure to put critical mass ahead of money" - I keep
repeating the mantra here - companies don't acquire
technologies nearly so much as they acquire audiences. If
you're trying to sell a platform with no users, you have a
real uphill battle.
"Failure of imagination" - pretty much everyone I talk to
is engaged in the existing platforms, and therefore see
innovation in terms of those platforms, and as the article
notes, fail to see the platform play at all.
Good article, worth the read.
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Microlearning, millennials and successful companies
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People are talking about 'microlearning' again. Today's
learners, writes , "are equipped to research what they need
to know and learn about it from various sources such as
blogs, online courses, websites or YouTube videos." This,
mocrolearning. "Microlearning is a method to teach and
deliver educational content through short and concise
segments that cover focused topics while fulfilling
specific objectives." Try to ignore the hype and
sensationalism (like, for example, "...has caused the
attention span to fall to eight seconds
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or the broad over-generalizations about "millennials"). The
main thing is to take the concept seriously, and maybe
follow some of the links for more detail.
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Stacking vs. Replacing LMS; Learner as Content Producer
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Some tereminology from Elliott Masie: "we are seeing more
'Stacking', which means accepting the role of the existing
LMS as the base system for the organization and then adding
Stacks or Layers on top that will create added and more
targeted functionality... In other words, some
organizations are shifting from replacing their LMS to
adding these technologies on top of the LMS. Some may be
limited to a specific line of business or segment of
learners. Others are layered in almost as extensions
of the LMS." No links, and not much content beyond this
(because it's Masie) but I wanted to make sure I shared at
least this.
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'Passing on the Right'
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I think the difference between me and them is this: I am an
educator and philosopher, who happens to be a socialist. My
politics are derived from my science. He, on the other
hand, is a conservative, who happens to be a professor. His
science is derived from his politics. I'm aware that this
is a bit of a caricature, but it seems in the main to be an
accurate representation. I have no particular objection to
his being a conservative, but I would have an objection
were he unwilling to accept the primacy of reason and
evidence.
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Deep Learning with the Analytical Engine
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Cool but challenging. "This repository contains an
implementation of a convolutional neural network as a
program for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, capable of
recognising handwritten digits to a high degree of accuracy
(98.5% if provided with a sufficient amount of training
data and left running sufficiently long)." See
also Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Link" a free online
book by Michael Nielsen, which is almost certainly the best
hands-on introduction to the subject of neural networks and
deep learning. It gives a detailed and accessible
introduction to how neural networks are structured, the
details of stochastic gradient descent and backpropagation,
and a brief introduction to convolutional neural networks."
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Zuckerberg Education Ventures backs learning assistant
camera app Volley
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This is a lovely idea. "Students point their phone’s
camera at a textbook page or piece of homework, and
instantly see resources about key facts and tricky parts,
prerequisites, and links to snippets of online classes or
study guides that could help." The application is
called Volley
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and it earned 3.2 million in seed money
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to develop and commercialize the app (it doesn't appear to
actually exist yet; it "is now in private alpha that you
can sign up for here http://www.volley.com/"
target="_blank. But it’s planning more tools to aid
students, teachers, and school systems." ).
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Whisper's Master Of Content Moderation Is A Machine
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What if one of the most onerous online learning tasks -
content moderation in online forums - could be farmed out
to a machine? According to this article, that's exactly
what Whisper has done. Whisper Link-
an app that allows people to share secrets anonymously - is
particularly vulnerable to abuse. "But the company has a
secret weapon: The Arbiter, a piece of software that uses
the artificial intelligence techniques known as deep
learning to moderate content in the same way a human would,
only faster and at far greater scale." The Whisper
philosophy - "don't be mean, don't be gross, and don't use
Whisper to break the law" - can't be enfoced simply by
banning a few words. It takes a neural network intelligence
to recognize inappropriate messages.
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AppSmash these 2 apps to create endless multimedia
possibilities
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AppSmash is a pretty neat idea for tablets, "the process of
combining multiple apps to create new multimedia content."
One of the greatest weaknesses of traditional tablets (a la
the iPad) is that you can only view one app at a time. This
makes them more like portable TVs or game consoles, and
less like computers. AppSmash doesn't exactly address this,
but in joining separate applications it does do something
unique. For example, "with Book Creator, students can
record their voice directly into a page and, for instance,
comment on the images, shapes, audio, or video on that
particular page." Consuming content and creating it.
Imagine!
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Instagram changes cause growing backlash among posters
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There's an interesting lesson to be found in the backlash
to changes being implemented by Instagram. The photo
sharing site has traditionally employed a
reverse-chronological listing of recent photos. This way,
users could see everything. The change employs an algorithm
to select the photos deems 'most interesting' to the user,
and displays those. Gone is the serendipity of seeing,
well, whatever. Users were outraged. Now celebrities and
people who use Instagram are urging users to 'turn on
notifications' to ensure they don't miss a photo. But
user's don't want that either. "I'm tired of everyone
telling me what to do on Instagram today," tweeted one
US-based user. Choice, autonomy, diversity... who knew this
would be what people want in a social network?
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4 Ed-Tech Ideas Face The Chronicle’s Version of ‘Shark
Tank’
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The four pitches are, well, exactly what you would expect
the Chronicle to be interested in:
location-tracking technology that makes students a part of
in-person educational simulations
an online tool to help colleges find, screen and hire
adjuncts
education guides to help students choose between different
colleges
face-to-face counseling and support for working adult
students
It's the sort of perspective that cannot imagine a future
without a fairly traditional picture of universities (up to
and including low-paid adjunct labour). But the main
problem with these ideas is that they've all been invented.
These pitches all take existing ideas and add "... for
colleges" to the end of them. It makes me wish I was on the
panel. Every jury needs a Simon.
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What’s the Difference Between a VPN and a Proxy?
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Useful and clearly explained description of how VPNs and
proxies differ, and what they're best used for. With a
proxy, you simply route your internet traffic through
another server; there is no encryption, but it hides where
your original request is coming from. A VPN, on the other
hand, will encrypt the traffic between you and that second
server. "In summary, proxies are great for hiding your
identity during trivial tasks (like “sneaking”
into another country to watch a sports match) but when it
comes to more series tasks (like protecting yourself from
snooping) you need a VPN."
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Hyper Island Toolbox
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I'm always on the lookoput for collections of things that
would be useful (if unexpected) things to import into a
personal learning environment. This, I think, qualifies.
How would these work? I'm not sure. But a meeting or event
planner should certainly be part of a PLE, and these are
the sort of resources I would want to have available when
undertaking such a task. I think I'd put them under the
heading of 'scaffolds', though I'd want to make them more
interactive in order to fit with a proper event planning
tool. Ah, the possibilities. Via Doug Belshaw.
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Here are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring
the Best People
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If this article is accurate (and there's no real reason to
think it isn't) then it speaks against the idea of career
preparation based simply on competencies. The things these
interview tactics are testing for won't be developed or
evaluated in competency-based training - they're trying to
see whether people are ready foir the job at any moment,
whether they can cope with distractions or with conflict,
whether they can manage conflicting priorities, and similar
'soft' (very soft) skills. Via Doug Belshaw.
Update. Doug Belshaw reports that this post was satire. So
I should have listened to the original doubt I felt when I
wrote "If this article is accurate (and there's no real
reason to think it isn't)...." Sadly, I didn't, and as a
result, passed satire along as fact.
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How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny
piece of code
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The headline overstates the damage and blames the
programmer. But the internet itself was never in jeopardy,
just a bunch of sites that run on Javascript. And the cause
of the disruption was not the programmer, but rather a
company that took some open source the programmer
contributed and transferred ownership to a Canadian instant
messaging company. Azer Koçulu wrote a piece of code
called kik and hosted it at a package managing company
called NPM LinkA lawyer for the company
called Kik Linkcontacted
Koçulu and said "our trademark lawyers are going to
be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and
stuff like that." NPM responded by transferring ownership
of the piece of code called kik to the company called Kik.
Koçulu responded by removing the rest of his code
from NPM. One piece of that code turned out to be vital to
a number of Javascript libraries. From where I sit both Kik
and NPM have a lot of answering to do. And I ask - again! -
why it is that commercial enterprises seem to corrupt and
ruin everything they touch?
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How Pearson plans to force student participation and hurt
creativity
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I do the New York Times crossword on a regular basis. Just
as in the Poincare example described by Stephen Krashen in
this article, I've found that if I'm stuck on a clue, or on
a section, if I turn away from it for a bit - sometimes
just a few moments - and come back later, the answer is
right there. Why is this more than just a curiosity? The
Pearson software under discussion here prevents students
from turning away and focusing on something else for a few
moments. Krashen explains, "This strengthens an error
nearly all schooling makes and makes true creative thinking
and learning impossible." It's an interesting point, and it
sounds right to me. This is one of several few posts on the
new Pearson software; see also The Most Intrusive Software
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of All Time, and Pearson's Plan
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to Close the Achievement Gap. Image: Testing for
Kindergarten
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Classic 1939 book on graphs in its entirety
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Flowing Data writes, "Willard Cope Brinton is credited as
one of the pioneers of information visualization, and I
just found out his 1939 book Graphic Presentation is
available in its entirety at the Internet Archive
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can download it in various formats. The book was an update
to his previous book from 25 years prior, Graphic Methods
for Presenting Facts. It’s also at the Archive
https://archive.org/details/graphicmethodsfo00brinrich."
It's also interesting to note that not long after these
dates we say the first graphical fallacies, detailed with
care by Darrell Huff (73 page PDF
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I cut my teeth on this work back in the 1980s.
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What is 'Digital Wellbeing'?
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"My work on the experiences of digital students
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had already led me to question what it means to thrive in a
learning environment that is saturated with digital
technologies," writes Helen Beetham. And I think the
exploration of digital well-being is a good idea. But as is
so often the case with educational researchers (maybe
social science in general) the primary output is a
hierarchy and a taxonomy. This is similar to what we've
seen in digital literacy, and it's about as useful. We need
to dig deeper. Is there anything about the use of digital
technology itself that influences well-being? What are thee
linkages? We won't get to it simply by replicating Maslow's
hierarchy for the digital space. It's a serious question;
let's begin by taking it seriously.
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Copyright 2008 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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