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by Stephen Downes


Feb 03, 2017


Call for Diversity in Ed Tech Design
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Part of the problem with e-learning technology is that it
is designed with the wrong consumer in mind. Designers
picture the typical online student as a stereotypical
college student with deep pockets attending a traditional
midwestern university studying the liberal arts. Real
students, though, aren't like that - especially those
served by e-learning. They're not studying full time, they
don't live on campus, they have jobs and expenses, and they
have a pretty good idea why they're taking classes and what
they want to do.
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HEBOCON World Championship 2016
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As usual, the essence of understanding technology can be
found in understanding what makes for bad technology.
"Hebocon is a robot contest for the technically ungifted.
Link"The word Heboi
in Japanese means 'crappy,' 'unperfected,' 'poor in
quality,' or 'poor in ability.' 'Hebocon, the robot contest
for dummies,' is a robot battle contest for Heboi robots
made by Heboi people. All the entrants are people who
neither have the technical expertise, determination, nor
the focus it takes to build an actual robot. " "Entrants
will need compromise and surrender, instead of ideas and
technical skill. Robots are penalized for having high-tech
features." (Metafilter
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2014) The first Hebocon
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IEEE Spectrum
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I thin k technology conferences should have mandatory
contests to design the worst possible actually functioning
technology. And the winner should have to apologize.
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Is It OK to Punch Nazis? Here’s What Philosophers
(Including Slavoj Žižek) and Ethicists Have to Say
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I'm happy to say that the philosophers are lining up on the
correct side of this discussion. "No, you do not get to
punch people even though they’re ideologically
despicable." Let's remember that. For more on ethics, you
might want to read my recent post, An Ethics Primer
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Graham Brown-Martin
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I'm generally sympathetic with the aims of this post but I
can't get past his use of corporate logos and branding
(specifically, the whole Star Wars motif) to animate his
call. I come from the same place he does, in 1985, "the
future of learning was bright and educational technology
would play a central role in its transformation by removing
the curriculum, the artificial subject silos and the
streaming of kids by age, so that learning could be
experienced and lived." I didn't need Seymour Papert to
come up with these ideas for me, I might note: a lot of
people figured this all out independently. I too regret
that "technology was co-opted not to liberate but to
reinforce standardisation and automation of schools ways."
But no I won't join an “EdTech Rebel Alliance”
- I will continue to work with my own identity and my own
brand, even if not stamped with corporate imprimatur, as I
have always done.
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The woes of Windows 10
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We still use Windows 7 at the office. Our version of
Exchange, meanwhile, is so old it is actually incompatible
with newer versions of Outlook, with the result that my
Windows 10 laptop and desktop at home have to use
Thunderbird to access email. It's a common scenario. 
The article blames the complexity of Windows 10 and privacy
concerns. I disagree. First, I think that the
software-by-subscription model is seriously flawed; you no
longer own software, so signing over to Windows 10 means
permanent annual expenses. Second, I think the Microsoft
apps that come built-in with Windows 10 (Mail, Calendar,
Maps, Groove, Messaging, even Edge) are terrible; features
I'd come to count on have vanished. Windows 7 with the 2010
versions of Word, PowerPoint, etc., is a stable long-term
solution. The software won't disappear on you, features
won't disappear on you, not even if you stop paying
Microsoft. And that's why companies and individuals are
sticking with it.
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Cameroon's Anglophone Regions Suffer Under Internet Ban
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The Cameroon government has shut down internet access in
English-speaking regions of the predominately
French-seaking country in response to unrest in the
minority population. The outage, which has lasted two
weeks, is having a significant effect on the region's
nascent internet industry. Edward Snowden notes
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"This is the future of repression." I'm sympathetic with
all sides in the dispute, and hope they are able to
de-escalate. meanwhile, the event makes it clear that
organizations need to develop diginal communications that
do not depend on the internet, a 21st century wireless
Fidonet Linkif
you will. Image: Steve Tchoumba
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Knowledge Science: The Great Big Beautiful Puzzle
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This is a view of knowledge and learning that I think is
wrong (and would argue has been disproven in application)
but which is nonetheless believed - either implicitly or
explicitly - by many. The idea is that all knowledge can be
understood conceptually a nd semantically, and that it all
fits a giant puzzle explaining the universe, which can be
understood using "time-tested a priori knowledge."
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Transversal Competencies and their Assessment: Perspectives
from the Asia-Pacific
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'Transversal skills' is the term adopted by UNESCO to refer
to things like 21st century skills, critical thinking,
persitence, and related skills. This article observes that
they are being more widely valued world-wide. But the
question remains: how are they being evaluated? It is in
this context that UNESCO Bangkok published Assessment of
Transversal Competencies: Policy and Practice in the
Asia-Pacific Region
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(62 page PDF
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"in the aim of understanding more about these questions and
how some countries are trying to answer them."
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Coursera’s New Strategy Takes Inspiration From
Netflix—and LinkedIn
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Coursera is continuing its migration from being a MOOC
provider offering free online learning to a
subscription-based learning provider charging fees for
access to learning materials. The model, as this article
points out, has already been established by Netflix (for
videos) and Microsoft (for its LinkedIn owned Lynda course
platform). According to this article the big problem with
the model is the size of the courses ("meaningful education
cannot be delivered at massive scale") but of course the
real problem for students is the course fee.
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Loving It
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Just a day or so after authoring a good article Alex Usher
comes out with this piece defending the agreement made
between McDonald's and Colleges Ontario to recognize part
of the corporation's training program as equivalent to
college credit. There are probably good argument that could
be made to defend the deal but Usher instead
misrepresents the OSPEU response
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knee-jerk anti-corporate reaction, which it most certainly
is not. Nowhere does the OSPEU even suggest that
"McDonald’s is a big evil corporation," as Usher
says, though it does criticize the company's business
practices, "tax-evasion schemes, anti-union tactics, and a
reliance on a precarious low-wage workforce,” all of
which are well-substantiated. The OSPEU response is
eminently reasonable and boils down to two major points:
first, the McDonald's curriculum is not transparent, and
second, corporate training is probably not equivalent to a
college education. For example, "it is difficult to see how
principles of macroeconomics, involving such issues as
interest rates and national productivity, are learned
hands-on or in two weeks of classes over three years."
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Top Fears Shutting the Door on Open Education
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Some people say fear is the reason professors don't want to
open up classrooms, but I agree with MERLOT's Gerry Hanley:
""I think it's really a workload issue. Open educational
resources don't often have the full package of supplemental
material that publishers provide, and so it often means
faculty have to pull together additional assignments,
homework assignments, what might be lecture materials
— things along those lines." People forget that many
if not most university professors see teaching as a burden,
not a profession. They want to do research not recitations.
I know we live in the era where fear prevails and
everybody's afraid, but I still think fear is cited far too
frequently, and that most people are guided by much more
pragmatic emotions.
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Inspirational teaching in higher education: What does it
look, sound and feel like?
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In a paper tht could have used a good edit James G.
Derounian identifies factors associated with inspirational
teaching in the literature and then validates the findings
through a study of actual practice. "Three clear elements
of inspirational undergraduate teaching emerge: First and
foremost, undergraduates believe it to be motivating;
second, and related – inspirational teaching is
deemed encouraging and third such teaching flows from
teachers’ passion for their subject." Deemed? Like I
said, a good edit. In conclusion, "a simple formula:
Inspirational teaching → Aspiration →
Transformation."
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The University and Student Learning: A System in Conflict?
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According to this article, the globalization of the
education system "creates tepid universities all doing the
same thing and producing similar results." This results
from the primacy of the market-driven economic model at the
core of globalization, which eliminates specialization and
favours standardization and commodification. "Streamlining
such a complex system means courses need to be compatible
both across, as well as up and down the system. Systems
need to be simple to achieve vertical and horizontal
alignment."
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Is ‘fake news’ a fake problem?
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Not to keep harping on this, but I wonder whether the
failure of traditional news to come to terms with fake news
is a failure to understand what fake news is. I turn to the
venerable Columbia Journalism Review, which has just posted
this highly questionable study about the amount of time
people spend on fake news sites, as compared to 'real news"
sites. But you can't judge news as fake or not based on
where it was published. Not a week earlier, the same
Columbia Journalism review published an "open letter
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to Trump from the US press corps," and signed at the bottom
"The Press Corps" which turns out later
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to be the work of a single writer. Classic fake news, from
the Columbia Journalism Review. Don't suspend disbelief
just because the source is authoritative.
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on academic travel
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D'Arcy Norman is reconsidering academic travel, especially
to the United States. I know many other academics are
thinking the same thing, and I've been asked a couple of
times about my position. I won't be changing any plans nor
refusing invitations. This is not because I endorse the
current administration. I do not. It's because I'd have to
boycott a lot of countries if I applied a similar standard
worldwide. And I'm not willing to do that. People aren't
perfect, governments aren't perfect, and I'd rather be an
activist by setting a good example rather than passing
judgement on the bad. As for the carbon footprint - well, I
spent years trying to get by with public transit in New
Brunswick, and that should buy me a lifetime pass on carbon
emissions.
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Take a closer peek at this complimentary eBook, Eliminate
Nonessential Content below
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Something I've learned in several decades of speaking and
writing is that the space between the words is as important
as the words themselves. We might be tempted, as this book
title suggests, to eliminate them as unessential content.
But spacing mattters and you can't just dump nonstop
content on people. You need to interject pauses, shifts in
perspective, animation and even play and nonsense to
provide people with context and space to comprehend and
maybe even learn from what you are saying or presenting.
That's not to say that all the content in the eBoom is
wrong, it's just that the title focus is misplaced. Anyhow,
you get your 'free' eBook in exchange for your name and
your email address. Here's the link I got to the 47 page
PDF
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European Union regulations on algorithmic decision making
and a “right to explanation”
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We've seen how an AI can become a racist xenophobe
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in one day of training. We've also seen how propaganda can
create the same effect
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in an entire nation. So it stands to reason that algorithms
can embody the prejudice and hate present in the data set
used to train it, and can even magnify that effect in its
decision-making. So it's reasonable to require
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made by these AIs be vetted in some way. This is the
purpose of European Union regulations related to profiling,
non-discrimination and the right to an explanation in
algorithmic decision-making.
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« Back to News Print This Is 'Inclusive Access' the
Future for Publishers?
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What's brilliant about "inclusive access" is that it makes
universities and their professors willing accomplices in
publishers' campaigns to gouge students for textbook
content that should be free or nearly free. This article
plugging inclusive access (which is actually the opposite,
exclusive access comes in the wake of a one-day 30
percent drop
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in Pearson share prices due to declining sales. So they're
really pushing this alternative model where the cost of
expensive digital textbooks is added to course fees and
made a required fee for all students, offering no escape
for those wanting to borrow or buy copies of books from
other people.
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Free images done right
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If you want free images you can use in your class, you can
use any of my 28,374 photos
Linkall of which
are openly licensed. Of course, many other people offer
similarly free photos as well, which is great. Photos
for Class Linkis a service that
performs a search on Flickr to find openly licensed photos.
Of course you can easily do this
https://www.flickr.com/search/?saved=1&text=photo&license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C6%2C9
too. So far so good. But Photos for Class edits the photo
file and adds an attribution block to the bottom. OK, no
problem, I guess. But a full third of that attribution is
an advertisement for Photos for Class. Now here I draw the
line. I at least chose to use Creative Commons and Flickr,
even if I don't want their marks on my photo, but I never
endorsed Photos for Class and I definitely don't want their
advertising on my photo. Free images done wrong, in my
books.
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An Amazing Statscan Skills Study
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A recent Statistics Canada report
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makes for fascinating reading, though I caution that it's
based largely on perceptions, which as we know can be
misleading. Alex Usher does a decent job summarizing it.
Basically, they examine job descriptions to see what skills
are required, examine university graduates to see what jobs
they get, and through that determine what skills
characterize what university programs. It's interesting
because 'humanities' sits at the bottom of the scale on
just about everything, as does education (which does
marginally well in social skills). Scientific, technical
and professional programs rank the highest, even for skills
normally associated with the humanities, such as reading
comprehension and critical thinking. So what accounts for
this? Well, like I say, perception. If we look at the most
common jobs table, we find a disproportionate number of
humanities majors in sales and retail, the rest in
education. These are either not perceived as higher-skilled
occupations, not described as precisely as scientific,
technical and professional occupations, or really are
lower-skilled. Take your pick.
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The state of Jupyter
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If you've been doing any work in data analysis you might
have run across references to the Jupyter Notebook
LinkEssentially this is an application
that allows you to embed running bits of code into a text
document. So you have text, then a code sample, and then
(voila!) the graph that the sample produces. What's nice is
that you can mess around with the code and see the results
immediately - this is known as "interactive computing" and
has been a mainstay of the reserach community for some time
now (and you can also see web-based examples in code pens
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See also this item
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from Tony Hirst.
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The State of Personalized Learning
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Not all http://www.downes.ca/post/53501 personalized
learning the same. That's the main message in this article.
The authors write, "The current use of the term
'personalized learning' varies from:

small group instruction based on performance levels to
longitudinal history of all assessments students ever took
to provide them with knowledge of what to assign to
artificial intelligence based products that assess the
cognitive level and learning style of a student and provide
a variety of resources based on the student’s
learning style, current performance, and understanding of a
subject."

True enough, and I've read accounts of all three. But these
days people almost universally mean the third. Almost
universally. The first two versions are essentially terms
applied to in-person learning applied without the use of
technology.
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Continuous, Curated Learning: The Business Case
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Sometimes people call what I do here 'curation', but I
really dislike that word, because it's not what I do. Maxim
Jean-Louis came up with a better word recently:
scholarship. I think sometimes people have forgotten what
that means, and have substituted soulless academic
make-work in its place. Anyhow this article makes the case
for learning professionals to engage in scholarship (the
real thing): "You’re not just aggregating content
from multiple sources. That’s what machines do.
You’re acting as an intelligent human filter, drawing
attention to what really matters – because you
understand your audience, their needs and their context.
It’s a very personalised service – and it
scales really well if you use the right tools. As Beth
Kanter put it, you’re spotting the awesome
http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-3/"
target="_blank." Yeah.
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Why Are We Still Using LMSs?
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Good question. The author offers responses in terms of
convenience, consumerization, connectedness, and
compliance, but none of these responses seems to satisfy.
And so we should prepare for an inflection point. "The
technology has reached a stable, dominant design
http://edutechnica.com/2016/10/20/5-reasons-why-consolidation-of-the-lms-market-isnt-necessarily-a-bad-thing/. Typically
when this happens in a product category, a new wave of
innovation characterized by different ways to
address the same need." It hasn't happened yet to the
LMS, says the author, largely because of the way they're
procured - selection committees in large institutions. He
says the tipping point "will be driven by courageous
choices made by individual institutions," but more likely,
to my mind, it will be driven by forces outside the
institution. Image: edutechnica
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