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by Stephen Downes
Apr 21, 2017
MOOCs Started Out Completely Free. Where Are They Now?
Dhawal Shah, EdSurge, 2017/04/21
It really is a sad story. "The fact that MOOCs were free sparked widespread interest in them... But once the hype died down and MOOC providers tried to monetize, they found it difficult to do so without charging for content... Every MOOC provider has expanded their product lines to target multiple price points from tens of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars." That's why I become unhappy when the venture capitalists get involved and when a provider of 'free' learning starts to hive off bits and pieces of 'premium' services.
Maplesoft Releases Online Courseware Environment for STEM
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2017/04/20
Acxcording to this report, "Maplesoft today released Möbius, a hands-on learning tool focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education." Yes, it's Canadian, sort of (subsidiary of a Japanese company). Instructors using Möbius can create lessons that incorporate "interactive explorations, illuminating visualizations, meaningful assessment questions, and guided active slideshows, which incorporate narration, exploration and self-assessment elements," according to a press release.
What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them
Brian Epstein, Synthese, 2017/04/20
At a webinar yesterday we had some fun with different terms for groups of people (herds, swarms, flocks...) and this let to a but of a discussion of the considerations behind the naming of different types of groups (and objects). Here's a longish paper (49 page PDF) that thoroughly explores this sort of question. Worth noting: "Ritchie proposes... organized groups must have collective intentionality.... But according to most prevailing theories, many organized groups do not have them." Indeed, in my own 'groups versus networks' work the former has collective intentionality while the latter does not. The result of the paper is a four-element typology based on construction, anchor, extra essentials, and accidentals profile (see p. 41).
An Open Textbook for Introduction to Philosophy
Christina Hendricks, Daily Nous, 2017/04/20
Though I'm not sure open philosophy needs a 'textbook' per se I still think this is a useful initiative that may grow. Christina Hendricks notes that "We are working with an organization called The Rebus Foundation, a Canadian non-profit that is made up of wonderful people who are doing great things with digital publishing and open textbooks." I've signed up to the Rebus Community and have looked into the philosophy textbook. Note this: "it is free of cost to students. There is no price tag." That is what I call open content. Here's more information on the Rebus textbooks project.
Facebookâs algorithm isnât surfacing one-third of our posts. And itâs getting worse
Kurt Gessler, Medium, 2017/04/20
I left Facebook at the end of last August for several reasons. The final straw was advertising designed to defeat ad blocking tools in my browser. But this was on top of increasingly irrelevant content. And it was because my own posts - both personal, and also those from OLDaily - simply weren't being delivered to followers. Remember, followers were people who specifically wanted my posts, but Facebook decided to sent them garbage from content mills instead. I was not alone, obviously, and the Chicago Tribune has been tracking similar results. Imagine a telephone system designed this way. You hear Alex Jones shouting in your ear instead of the person who actually called you.
Analyze your videos in a few lines of code
Sara Robinson, HackerNoon, 2017/04/20
More analytics for the masses. This application takes video that you upload and extracts content, then presents the content for different segments in a plain-text JSON file. So, for example, if there is a dog in your video, there will be an entry 'dog' in the JSON file with start and end times from the video. This makes video libraries searchable for some very specific content. The main point here isn't simply that software can do this, it's rather that this functionality is offered as a service by google so now anyone can do this inside their own software.
The Can-Doâs of CodePen Projects
Chris Coyier, CSS Tricks, 2017/04/19
Why doesn't educational technology have something like CodePen? Our field seems to be obsessed with the consumption of content. What we need is a great open application like this that lets people find and work with learning content. "Here's an incomplete list of things I didn't get a chance to tell you about: searching for external assets, tidying your code, analyzing your code, exporting, sharing (gasps for air), global assets, keyboard shortcuts, or all the different views!" Gasps for air indeed!
Are âmachine valuesâ replacing our principles?
Angie Hunt, Futurity, 2017/04/19
This is an interesting way of phrasing the dilemma we seem to be in today: “We are losing empathy, compassion, truth-telling, fairness, and responsibility and replacing them with all these machine values,” Bugeja says. “If we embed ourselves in technology, what happens to those universal principles that have stopped wars and elevated human consciousness and conscience above more primitive times in history?” Now, for the record, I can't recall any time we managed to stop wars, but there is nonetheless a shift to what I guess can be called "machine values". But it's not just 'machine': it's an ethos that favours counting over context, that favours competitive edge over compassion. Despite what the author asserts, 'machine values' are not created by machines. They are created by humans behaving like machines.
High Quality Education for All
Christian M. Stracke, SlideShare, 2017/04/19
This is a set of slides delivered by Christian M. Stracke (newly appointed ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER)) at the International Lensky Education Forum in Yakutsk. It offers a look at open learning that extends beyond a narrow definition based on the licensing of resources, and considers such things as open pedagogy, open schools and open environments. It also links openness directly with quality. It's a longish presentation and you might just want to download the slides (SlideShare has become really quirky and slow ever since being acquired by LinkedIn).
Lumen and Follett: Canary in the Curricular Materials Coal Mine?
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/04/19
Michael Feldstein offers a slanted perspective on the discussion around Lumen Learning. "If the goal is to increase student access through lower and more transparent pricing, then this deal could help," he writes, "If, on the other hand, the goal is to drive all large commercial interests out of education, then this deal will not be helpful." This is a misrepresentation. It's just red-baiting. The objective is to provide students with free access to education. If a government contracted a corporation to do that, I'd be pretty happy. But I'd be a lot less happy if the corporation then turned around and started charging students mandatory fees for access to this 'free' education. And that's what's happening here.
For-Profit Involvement in OER - Part 6
Dan McGuire, 2017/04/19
More on Lumen Learning. "The $10-$25 per course that Lumen-Follett is collecting to provide the 'packaging' for free OER courses is a steep price," writes Dan McGuire. "The 'packaging' is essential to good open educational practice and not really 'packaging' or 'added value;' it's essential value."
Of Progress, Problems, and Partnerships
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2017/04/18
So we know now why students will have to pay for Lumen learning's new 'open' educational resources. "The partnership also adds, for the first time, the option for students to pay Lumen’s course support fee rather than the institution. (Previously our model only allowed institutions to pay these fees, and that has made it difficult for some schools to work with us.)" Note the use of the passive voice ("the option to pay...") which suggests that this is something students would voluntarily choose. I'm glad David Wiley is excited, because I'm not. Will the students who opt not to pay still have access to the materials? Or is Lumen now just the Wal-Mart of learning?
In another post, Wiley answers the questions pose directly: "No one is ever denied access to the OER in Lumen courses for any reason.... If you don’t pay, what you won’t have access to are personalization features, assessments, teacher analytic and communications tools, LMS integration, gradebook write back, and things like that." That's very nice, but: in the case where institutions have chosen to have students given 'the option' can they just get their $25 back? No, clearly not. There isn't any option except to pay the cost (though the cost is now putatively for personalization, etc).
Phil Hill also has an extended post on the story, but given the close relationship between MindWires and the companies involved I'm not going to consider it arm's length coverage.
University of California researchers make lithium ion batteries last five to ten times longer
Jayson MacLean, CanTech Letter, 2017/04/18
Because of concerns about the availability of lithium I am not sanguine about this technology in general for the long term. I expect carbon (and more specifically, graphene) to offer a long-term solution. But meanwhile this looks like a nice advance in battery technology. "The new approach came about when researchers coated their lithium ion battery with an organic compound called methyl viologen which form a stable coating on the metal electrode and can eliminate dendrite growth, substantially increasing the battery’s life and stabilizing its performance." As this article makes clear, though, there are grounds for scepticism. It’s kind of like cold fusion. Here is an experiment that is unbelievable,” said Dahn, to Quartz Media. “There could be a small possibility that it is right.”
Putting data in the hands of students
Timothy Harfield, Blackboard Blog, 2017/04/18
This is a key point: "Largely absent from mainstream conversations about educational data and student success is a consideration of the role of the student as a learner." It's not surprising to research underline the importance of this. "Providing learners with relevant analytics can increase their performance by fostering self-regulated learning, particularly among otherwise low-performing students." This is the thinking behind 'quantified self' and self-help applications such as fitness monitors. So it's no surprise to this eventually reaching the LMS.
University to monitor student social media to gauge well-being
Richard Vaughan, iNews, 2017/04/18
This is a couple of weeks old but I don't want to let it pass without comment. The interesting thing here isn't that the school is using analytics to help students succeed - this is becoming common - but rather that they are drawing content not only from the LMS but also from social networks. "The move is being considered as part of the private university’s plans to become a 'positive' place of learning, which will teach students modules in mindfulness and positive psychology." The contribution of social media data is, of course, optional. For now.
Hills Like White Elephants
Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Downes, 2017/04/18
Audio recording. I read Ernest Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants'. Just for you. :)
Open WordâThe Podcasting Story
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2017/04/17
Doc Searls offers a slightly revisionist history of podcasting, giving us the background but omitting any mention of Adam Curry. A podcast, properly so-called, is an MP3 file the URL of which is distributed through an RSS feed. Curry's first podcast (I think it's this in 2004 but it might be earlier) software used the enclosure tag, first documented by Dave Winer in 2001. My own Ed Radio instead scraped the RSS feed for any reference to an MP3, which it then rendered in a playable SMIL file. I don't remember Christopher Lydon being involved in the invention of podcasting at all, and his Radio Open Source doesn't launch until 2005, though I guess Searls, Winer and David Weinberger knew him. Today, it is true, there is no single 'podcast' application, which is great. On the other hand, people have taken to calling any audio file a 'podcast', which is less great. It's a podcast only if it is syndicated; otherwise, it's just an audio file. See also iPodder, from 2005. The modern version of Ed Radio still runs to this day.
The Rise of Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomenon
D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Com, 2017/04/17
D'Arcy Norman summarizes and reviews The Rise of Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomeno by George Veletsianos and Rolin Moe in EDUCAUSE, an article worth reading in its own right. The EDUCAUSE article makes three major assertions:
The edtech phenomenon is a response to the increasing price of higher education (aka 'market-driven') The edtech phenomenon reflects a shift in political thought from government to free-market oversight of education (aka 'privatized') The edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of a view of education as a product to be packaged, automated, and delivered (aka 'commodified').Now as I read this article I became increasingly agitated. This is because I have been involved in educational technology my entire life and yet none of these statements is true regarding my own method and motivation. As Norman says, "it’s important to make a distinction between 'online courses and commercial MOOCs' and 'educational technology'." People who identify educational technology with privatized commodified market-driven education, as Veletsianos and Moe do, are part of the problem, as they lead people to believe there can be no benign educational technology, which is a pernicious message to spread.
Follett and Lumen Learning to Expand Adoption of OER Courseware
Lumen Learning, 2017/04/17
I received email from David Wiley today announcing this partnership with Follett, a company that manages college bookstores. The crux of the announcement is here: "Follett will make Lumen Learning’s OER courseware available to institutions... students pay low-cost Lumen course support fees ranging from $10 to $25, far less than the average cost of a commercial textbook." I ask: what if students don't want to pay money for these 'open' educational resources? Are they denied access? Isn't this exactly one of those closed marketplaces people said would never happen? This is why I defend the use of the non-commercial clause in open educational resources. Image: Tahleasin Skye
Can There Be a Microscope of the Mind?
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2017/04/17
This is a valuable post because it brings together and explains a number of elements of what we might call a cognitivist theory of mind. From where I sit, though, it brings together a lot of nonsense, and the overall theory of mind proposed here is seriously flawed.
Here's the theory, in a nutshell: cognitive processes (like encoding, planning, solving) are mirrored by brain processes (or, reductively, cognitive processes are brain processes). These processes can be observed using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). fMRI is limited, but various types of machine learning (ML) are used to analyze the images "to create a fingerprint of brain activity that is distinctively correlated with a particular mental state." Knowing that these are cognitive processes, we can now fill in the gaps in a sequence of images using prior probability.
So, why do I say this is nonsense? There is no good reason to suppose cognitive processes are mirrored by brain processes. What Feldstein describes here is equivalent to using heat maps of hard drives to understand the narrative structure of Moby-Dick. Nothing in the former bears any resemblance to the latter. This is because 'narrative structure' is an interpretation of the data, and not inherent in the data. It seems to us that Ahab is obsessed with the great whale, but no study of the hard drive will ever uncover that obsession.
And the key to why this is nonsense is actually found in the statement of the theory. When we process fMRI images, why don't we use a sequence of 'encoding, planning, solving...'? There's no way to actually do that; the data underdetermines our choice of cognitive structure. That's why we use machine learning. But suppose humans use machine learning? After all, machine learning is based on neural networks! But if humans use machine learning, then the cognitive processes the fMRI analysis supposedly reveals don't actually exist. It's like we're studying clouds, and asking our software to find images of bunnies in the cloud, and then concluding "we have discovered that clouds contain bunnies."
The Cuomo College Fiasco
David Brooks, New York Times, 2017/04/17
David Brooks hauls out all the old chestnuts in this criticism of New York's free tuition plans. Let's review:
It doesn't do enough for poor people (they already get free tuition, it doesn't cover part time students, etc) It harms for-profit colleges it demotivates students, because people value only what they pay forNow of course it is a matter of logic that these three can't all be true at once. If it's a problem that it doesn't help poor students, for example, then it is not demotivating them. They can all be false at the same time, but in fact, they are not all false. Free tuition will hurt private fee-charging colleges. But if it comes to a choice between helping the poor and supporting private colleges, I choose the former.
There Are No New Social Networks
Molly McHugh, The Ringer, 2017/04/17
The answer to the question in the title is succinctly given by Niv Dror: “Once an app becomes significant enough to pose a threat to the big players, they either get acquired or significantly handicapped by a competitive feature or restricted access.” This we might call 'normal ecosystem' (styled after Kuhn's 'normal science'). Eventually there will be sufficient dissonance in the normal to generate what we might call an 'ecosystem revolution'. But what's key is that the new ecosystem will be incommensurate with the existing ecosystem. Instead of depending on Facebook and Twitter and the rest it will replace them.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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