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OLWeekly

by Stephen Downes


Feb 10, 2017


A conceptual framework for integrated STEM education
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The conceptual framework in this paper employs the metaphor
of a pulley system whereby scientific, engineering and
mathematical thinking lead to integrated educational
approaches. The idea is to promote STEM and a
metadiscipline offering "an integrated effort that removes
the traditional barriers between these subjects, and
instead focuses on innovation and the applied process of
designing solution to complex contextual problems using
current tools and technologies." The really interesting
part of this paper, though, is the comparison between
scientific and engineering methodologies. The paper also
looks at the engineering perspective of technology as
compared to that found in the humanities. These create
tensions, and the model essentially uses a community of
practice as the 'rope' to mediate between them and
integrate the educational program.
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The Legacy of InBloom
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As the story (34 page PDF
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says, "InBloom was a $100 million educational technology
initiative primarily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation that aimed to improve American schools by
providing a centralized platform for data sharing, learning
apps, and curricula." It collapsed three years ago amid
accusations of privacy violations. This article depicts it
as in part "a clash between Silicon Valley-style agile
software development methods and the slower moving, more
risk-averse approaches of states and school districts" and
in part a problem of communication. "InBloom’s
communication materials and messaging were developed by
consultants rather than in-house experts and explained the
technology solution without conveying any useful purpose,
thus failing to communicate a compelling value proposition
to teachers, parents, and students." But in racing for
federal dollars, the project also scaled up too quickly,
attempting to achieve overnight a vision that did not take
into account the public's interests and concerns. Via
EdWeek
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Gillard and Riseboro: How Canada can help boost girls'
education globally
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This article fits a standard pattern worth exploring. The
lead author is a well-known politician (in this case former
Australian prime minister Julia Gillard). The article has
four major sections:

a story describing the problem (a 12-year old girl sold
into marriage);
a policy or mandate (Goal 4 of the recently agreed
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs));
outline of the responding organization ((GPE) is the only
global partnership focused exclusively on education);
and the ask (Global Affairs Canada will soon release its
response to Canada’s International Assistance
Review... We hope to see Canada’s continued and
deepening support).

Textbook. And it's published in a major newspaper in
Ottawa.
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Lessons Learned: Expanding technology-enabled approaches
for out-of-school children and refugees
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This article describes a learning program in Sudan where
tablet computers with learning resources are made available
in learning centres in communities, where the learning
centres are themselves solar powered. On the surface it
looks like a good program, and though it has yet to be
evaluated is similar to other programs with the same
objectives. The story itself led me to follow links to the
Center for Educational Innovations
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and its parent, Results for Development
LinkLike many US-based initiatives, the
organization tend to look for private-sector based
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responses to social challenges.
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Folk Intuitions about the Causal Theory of Perception
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If I see a clock, my perception of the clock is caused by
the clock. Right? This is the so-called 'folk intuition'
about perception, but not only is it not clear that it is
true, it is not even clear that ordinary people (aka
'folk') think it is true. This paper reports on a test of
folk intuitions about perception and finds that, instead of
the strong 'causal' theory of perception, folk are content
with a much weaker 'non-blocker' theory of perception. We
don't feel obligated to say that there actually is a clock
when we report having seen a clock. This has all kinds of
implications for our understandings of testing, experience,
and learning. Image: Böhm and Pfister
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How will education change in the next 10 years?
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This is a question thread on Quora which has just been
graced by Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. Khan
predicts the rise of mastery-based learning,
competency-based credentials, and alternative and clearer
career paths. It's not wrong, per se, but it feels like a
very incomplete picture to me. There's a number of other
responses as well which make for interesting reading.
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MOOCs and Open Educational Resources: A Handbook for
Educators
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This is a longish guide (60 page PDF) outlining MOOCs for
instructors and (mostly) developers. There are long
sections devoted to video and open licensing, which I
consider to be the least important aspects of a MOOC.
Interesting terminology half way through - "a Massive
Really Open Online Course—a MROOC" (which would
distinguish it from a merely open online course, I guess).
Vie OER Knowledge Cloud
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If content is king, why are OER still uncrowned? A
developing world perspective’
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This is a conference presentation from 2010 which was
listed in the OER Knowledge Cloud today (10 page PDF
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So it's a bit dated but it's well written and I felt it was
a pretty good description of some fundamental trends and
issues in open educational resources. The prize you get for
reading it to the end is this redefinition of OER: "The
phenomenon of OER/OLR is an empowerment process,
facilitated by technology in which various types of
stakeholders are able to interact, collaborate, create and
use materials and processes, that are freely available, for
enhancing access, reducing costs and improving the quality
of education at all levels."
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A Growing (But Controversial) Idea in Open-Access
Textbooks: Let Students Help Write Them
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I've promoted the idea of having students author learning
resources since forever Link
but not surprisingly the idea hasn't caught on. It won't
catch on after this article either but each voice in
support is a tiny step forward. The article describes
physics teacher Delman Larsen's project called LibreText
https://chem.libretexts.org/" target="_blank in which his
students write the wiki-like textbook. Jessica Coppola,
another professor doing the same thing, has a very
practical reason for doing so. “I commonly have
students who are homeless, students who have to choose
between feeding their child and buying a textbook,”
she says. “I had to find a way to get them a free
resource.”
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The Shattered Mirror, Part Two: The Underwhelming
Recommendation for Open Licensing at the CBC
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Michael Geist has authored a two-part review of The
Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital
Age (108 page PDF)
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released by the Public Policy Forum in January (part one
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part two). The report itself is a mixed bag, on the one had
seeking to strengthen revenue for news media (partially by
extending copyright), and on the other hand seeking to
address local needs (partially by helping CBC reduce
reliance on advertising). Geist's first article attacks
(quite rightly) the recommendations on copyright. And in
his second posts he applauds opening CBC content under
Creative Commons but wonders why the authors would
recommend the "no-derivatives" clause, which would prevent
people from making anything new with CBC content.
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The Path to Prosperity
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The Canadian Government's Advisory Council on Economic
Growth has released a set of five papers under the heading
of 'The Path to Prosperity'. Here they are:

The Path to Prosperity: Executive Summary (PDF 356 KB)
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Unlocking Innovation to Drive Scale and Growth (PDF 697 KB)
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Building a Highly Skilled and Resilient Canadian Workforce
through the FutureSkills Lab (PDF 1.04 MB)
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Unleashing the Growth Potential of Key Sectors (PDF 1.4 MB)
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Positioning Canada as a Global Trading Hub (PDF 730 KB)
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Tapping Economic Potential through Broader Workforce
Participation (PDF 506 KB)
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The second (FutureSkills Lab) and Fifth (Workforce
Participation) have the greatest impact on education and
training. The latter is the 'skills gap' argument for 2017,
with a focus on reskilling and workforce integration. The
former would "solicit, select, and co-finance innovative
pilot programs in skills and competency development. I can
think of a few things I'd propose for such a program.
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The Security Impact of HTTPS Interception
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The state of web security is, um, awful. Specifically, with
respect to HTTPS, here's what this pointed study reports:
"we find more than an order of magnitude more interception
than previously estimated, ranging from 4–11%." This
was determined by studying different browsers, e-commerce
sites, and content distribution networks. But worse,
software installed by corporations to increase security may
be making the network more vulnerable. "62% of traffic that
traverses a network middlebox has reduced security and 58%
of middlebox connections have severe vulnerabilities. We
investigated popular antivirus and corporate proxies,
finding that nearly all reduce connection security and that
many introduce vulnerabilities." Via O'Reilly
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Announcing the new CC Search, now in Beta
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Creative Commons has launched a new search service. "The
new CC Search harnesses the power of open repositories,
allowing users to search across a variety of open content
through a single interface. The prototype of this tool
focuses on photos as its first media and uses open APIs in
order to index the available works.... we selected the
Rijksmuseum, Flickr, 500px, the New York Public Library as
our initial sources." The beta, I think, needs to be
refined - none of my 36K Creative-Commons licensed photos
on Flickr appear to be findable
https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/?search=Downes&page=1&per_page=20&search_fields=title&search_fields=creator&search_fields=tags&work_types=photos&providers=500px&providers=flickr&work_types=cultural&providers=met&providers=nypl&providers=rijksmuseum.
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CLOs, Move From Conduit to Curator
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A CLO is a 'Chief Learning Officer' and the point of this
article is to suggest that CLOs shift their role from being
a 'conduit' of knowledge and information to being a
'curator'. This is a three step process:

Personalize employee learning experiences - "deliver
content in a way that’s personalized and similar to
the content employees view on their personal devices; think
Netflix and Facebook."
Enable the (l)earning curve - encourage learners "who are
always ready to learn and evolve to meet new challenges"
Crowdsource employee knowledge - "have learning technology
in place that can capture and store employee knowledge on
the business"

Of course none of these is nearly as simple as the quick
one-paragraph form suggests. And I thin k the process
involves far more than mere curation.
 
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Algorithms and insults: Scaling up our understanding of
harassment on Wikipedia
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I've seen this type of result before, but it's worth
reiterating. "Registered users make two-thirds (67%) of
attacks on English Wikipedia, contradicting a widespread
assumption that anonymity is the primary contributor to the
problem." The other two observations are also consistent
with my own experience of Wikipedia (and speak to why I
don't get myself involved in editing Wikipedia documents):
"Only 18% of attacks were followed by a warning or a block
of the offending user" and "While half of all attacks come
from editors who make fewer than 5 edits a year, a third
come from registered users with over 100 edits a year."
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Gavagai and TZQQA
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I thought this was a fun post. Quine's thesis on the
indeterminacy of translation is that in the case of a
radical translation - that is, a translation of a
completely unfamiliar language - we don't have sufficient
evidence to be certain of the meaning of any specific word
- 'gavagai', say - in the other language. What's amusing
here is that this theory is applied to teens' use of text
messaging. What does 'TZQQA' mean, anyways? "There is
nothing in linguistic meaning, then," says Quine, "beyond
what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable
circumstances."
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Next Generation Repositories
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The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR
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a part of its efforts to define a vision for resource
repositories. "The vision is to position repositories as
the foundation for a distributed, globally networked
infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which
layers of value added services will be deployed." the
current report outlines 12 user stories that help define
the functions to be supported. This is a draft for public
comments (which will be open until March 3). You can
comment paragraph-by-paragraph right on the web page.
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“Xenophobia”
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You can split a lot of hairs by saying that 'xenophobia'
means 'fear of foreigners' and then saying you don't fear
them , you just want them treated differently. The
traditional Greek suffixes (-mania, -philia, -phobia)
doesn't seem to leave us any alternatives. But there are
some
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I like 'xenovilic', meaning 'one who vilifies foreigners',
for example, by treating them differently. So the Canadian
Federation of Students could say that differential fees are
'xenovilic' and avoid the brunt of Alex Usher's argument
(which is essentially say "no they're not").
Now it's true that xenovilia is popular
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worldwide
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub.
But should it be? Is there a good rational (morally
justified, politically economic, etc) argument to support
treating foreigners differently? Usher argues, "services go
in priority to people who pay taxes in that jurisdiction."
But what about infants and children, and the disabled, and
the poor, who pay no taxes? No, the "he who pays" argument
doesn't work. Finally, and as an aside, the goal of
international trade agreements is to eliminate xenovilia -
that is, to ensure foreigners and domestic businesses are
treated the same way in each others' countries. They do
this very imperfectly, and they do not extend their
protections to people, which ultimately is their Achilles
heel.
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Scientists Need to Stop “Othering” the General Public
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I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree that
scientists should see themselves as a part of the general
public. I also agree that some (not all) scientists should
engage the public "not only to communicate their research,
but also to encourage non-scientists to use the scientific
method in everyday life." But I don't think scientists -
not even Neil Degrasse Tyson - should be silent on issues
on which they are not expert. If you are approaching an
issue in a reasoned and scientific manner, then it is
perfectly appropriate to voice your thoughts. Ours is a
society not of experts but of the people, and if there is a
problem with society it is not that we don't listen to
experts, it is that we don't talk back to them.
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Against mass consumption of ‘already certified’
credentials
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Doug Belshaw bemoans the unsurprising co-option of digital
badges by established institutions. "Even though the tools
to do something radically different are available, people
seem content to do as they’re told, going cap in hand
to the existing powers that be." Sure, there were
alternative credentials, but these were swept away by the
mainstream. "If we have a landscape full of
‘alternative credentials’ provided by the
incumbents," writes Belshaw, "then, I’m sad to say,
this may all have been for naught." I don't think you can
disrupt certificate-granting institutions with more
certificates. I think you need an approach that makes
certification superfluous.
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What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
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Meta https://meta.com/ is a tool that analyzes
scientific publications. For example, in one study
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it predicted the number of citations a published article
would receive. Now it has been acquired by Chan Zuckerberg.
This, writes a Meta board member, is a good thing. "The
acquisition
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/23/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-meta/"
target="_blank of Meta by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
(CZI) promises to transform scientific investigation. As a
byproduct of this, it will likely transform scientific
publishing as well." There's no doubt that scientific
publication is changing; 'research' these days consists of
running (more or less) intelligent searches against
databases of hundreds of thousands of articles. People
don't look at the content of the articles any more; they
analyze global trends. That's what Facebook tries to do
already with social media. And that's why they acquired
Meta.
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What Research Says About Transferring Explicit Knowledge:
To Share or Not to Share
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As always, convenience is the major usability factor when
introducing new technology. "Acceptance of technology for
knowledge sharing is directly related to how employees view
the usefulness of the technology in supporting their job
performance, without extra effort. Those last three words
are key." Meanwhile, they are more likely to use the
knowledge management system if it is useful: they need to
be able to access content where they are, and they need
efficient search (that doesn't take a training program to
understand).
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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