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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Jun 24, 2016
Brexit
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Jun 24, 2016
I understand the feelings of the people who voted in favour
of the Brexit. They are Europe's Americans. The situation
of the UK and Europe is in many ways the inverse of Canada
and the U.S. And I would not vote 'yes' to a union of
Canada and the U.S.
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Staying Human in the Machine Age: An Interview With Douglas
Rushkoff
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This is one of the better lines I've read today (applies
equally to the internet and to Brexit): "What those of us
unversed in Marxist theory at the time didn’t realize
was if you get rid of government you create a very fertile
soil for the unbridled growth of corporations." Rushkoff,
of course, is talking about what happened to the world of
the internet he talked about in Cyberia
Link"Cyberia lay the
philosophical foundation for the internet as an opportunity
for a new kind of liberation. Rushkoff argued that the web
could generate a new renaissance by birthing a
technological civilization grounded in ancient spiritual
truths. But a different story emerged."
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Remix culture and education
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This post defines 'remix culture' and what it means to
education. It is a follow-up to an earlier piece
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on digital literacies in remix culture. "Remixing is the
act of taking previously created works or artefacts and
adapting them in some way," writes Steve Wheeler. I woukld
have used the word 'other' rather than 'previously created'
because items found in nature can also be part of a remix.
And as Wheeler says, even though some schools may see it as
undesirable, "Remixing is a creative process. It takes
imagination to adapt an existing piece of art or music into
something new or apply it in a completely different
context."
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Next Play for LinkedIn - an ePortfolio in every classroom
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I think you can view this article on LinkedIn without
signing into LinkedIn - if not, please let me know. Kathryn
Chang Barker writes, "LinkedIn can and should be in every
secondary and university classroom in the world, but it
needs to add one more tool – an ePortfolio." I have
no doubts about the benefit of an ePortfolio - or,
morewidely construed, a Personal Learning Record - but does
it have to be on LinkedIn? That said, the appeal for
Microsoft has to be undeniable. "Already Sony is working on
an education and testing platform powered by blockchain.
Already Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg have produced
personalized learning systems with algorithms.
Already machine learning is managing our curriculum and
careers. This is a chance for LinkedIn and Microsoft
to create an innovative space in the middle of these
innovations."
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21st Century Credentials: Telling the Story of the Whole
Student
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One of the criticisms of traditional testing and
credentials is that they represent only a narrow part of a
person's learning. This post summarizes a discussion by
Ryan Craig Linkmanaging
partner of University Ventures
Linkwho made the following
points (quoted):
We’re beyond the ‘take our word for it’
era – there is a loss of faith in the greater
community about what higher education does.
Technology has changed the game – learning is
ubiquitous and is pushing higher education toward
unbundling the degree.
The result is an emerging picture of credentials that are
at one more all-encompassing and more up-to-date. "It will
take radical shifts in all of our systems – the
alphabet soup of linked (or sometimes not) software that we
use to track students fiscally, academically, and out into
their time as alumni.È
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Making Sense of MOOCs: New UNESCO-COL guide now available
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From the intro: "The Guide is designed to raise general
awareness amongst policy makers in developing countries as
to how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might address
their concerns and priorities, particularly in terms of
access to affordable quality higher education and
preparation of secondary school leavers for academic as
well as vocational education and training. With very few
exceptions, many of the reports on MOOCs already published
do not refer to the interest and experience of developing
countries, although we are witnessing important initiatives
in more and more countries around the world." Here's the
direct link (102 page PDF
http://oasis.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/2356/2016_Guide-on-MOOCs-for-Policy-Makers-in-Developing-Countries.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).
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Coursera pilots a new course format
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Coursera is launching a new format today. You will
recognize it as "what we had before MOOCs". Here it is: "we
will begin piloting a few courses in which all content is
available only to learners who have purchased the course,
either directly or by applying for and receiving financial
aid." It may be time to rededicate myself toward creating a
genuinely open-only course framework, based to a large
degree on the work I did with gRSShopper. Of course, that
will require funding....
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Examining ethical and privacy issues surrounding learning
analytics
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Tony Bates reviews Drachsler, H. et al. (2016) Is Privacy a
Show-stopper for Learning Analytics? A Review of Current
Issues and Their Solutions
http://www.laceproject.eu/learning-analytics-review/files/2016/04/LACE-review-6_privacy-show-stopper.pdf Learning
Analytics Review. The problem stems when individuals who
provide data "are unable to specify who has access to the
data, and for what purpose, and may not be confident that
the changes to the education system which result from
learning analytics will be desirable." My own response has
been to focus on personal analytics, but this has been a
hard sell. As Bates notes, a European Commission project
called LACE (Learning Analytics Community Exchange)
Linkhas proposed an eight-point
framework (really badly) named DELICATE - it's described in
Drachsler, H. and Greller, W. (2016) Privacy and Learning
Analytics – its a DELICATE issue
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From my perspective, it seems to me that a complex
framework like DELICATE is full of loopholes, and
therefore, no real protection for individuals.
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Work Changes Culture
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Nothing is more true than this. "Work changes culture, not
words.... Creating new value requires people to do more
than communicate. They must work in new ways." Simon Terry
is talking about the future of work, but I'm thinking of
work more generically, in the sense of taking action rather
than merely thinking about it or talking about it. How many
times have I met people who want to lead change without
actually creating anything, who want to tell people how to
do things without actually doing things themselves?
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Of OER and Free Riders
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David Annand writes
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"Incentives need to discourage ‘free-riders’.
Otherwise, a valid competitive strategy for institutions...
would be to wait and merely use without cost the OER
resources produced by others." Heather Ross asks
Link"Is the idea of
'free-riders' really a concern in OER?" David Wiley replies
with an emphatic "no" and then, more usefully, takes Annand
to task for his presumed model of OER production. "If our
only model for creating the OER necessary to replace
traditional textbooks is to spend $250k of government or
philanthropic funding for each and every course offered at
each and every university, there is literally no path from
here to there. We need to enable and facilitate alternative
development models if our vision of universal OER adoption
is to become a reality. (It’s no secret that I
believe that these future models must be significantly more
distributed and stigmergic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy"
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data-amber-behavior=" than current models.)" Quite so.
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Part 2: Draining the Semantic Swamp of “Personalized
Learning†: A View from Silicon Valley
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Continuing from Part One, covered here
Linkearlier this week, Larry
Cuban continues his exploration of “personalized
learning spectrum,” as anchored in the tangled
history of school reform (he says) and now subject to more
recent developments. In a nutshell, "those
efficiency-minded school reformers, filled with optimism
about the power of new technologies to 'transform' teaching
and learning, have appropriated the language of 'whole
child' Progressives."
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10 amazing ways Blockchain could be used in education
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These are all ways blockchain could be used in education
(though a lot of detail would have to be added) but I'm not
sure I agree with the context. Introducing the piece Donald
Clark says he created a Napster like system for learning
resources in 2001 but "the public sector organisations just
didn’t like innovation and stuck to their
institutional silos." He predicts a similar reaction to
blockchain. "The biggest obstacle to its use is cultural.
Education is a slow learner and very slow adopter. Despite
the obvious advantages, it will be slow to adapt this
technology." Why would he expect these new systems to work
within traditional institutions? I did the same sort of
thing in 2001, but by not waiting for institutional
approval helped create the first MOOC. It is only after an
idea is demonstrated that it will change culture and be
adopted by institutions. The same is true for business and
enterprise software. It has nothing to do with education or
the public sector, and everything to do with large
organizations and culture in general. Image: Cable Green
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Open Innovation and the Creation of Commons
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Interesting article. You can probably skim the first five
paragraphs, but slow down when you get to this: "Today, a
broader conceptual framework for open innovation is
embedded in an integrated approach to openness. It is a
vital element of the open movement and should not be taken
out of this context. Open innovation is transcending the
boundaries of traditional knowledge production and fosters
cross-fertilization of knowledge. It can serve both as a
trigger for change towards openness and a cross-connector
of multiple segments of the open movement."
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How to Succeed at Work When Your Boss Doesn’t Respect You
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Here are the recommendations (all quoted):
Identify areas for growth and actively pursue development
in those areas.
Sleep, exercise, good nutrition, and stress-management help
ward off the noxious effects of disrespect.
Generate more meaning at work by shaping your activities
around your motives, strengths and passions.
Seek positive relationships. Positive relationships in and
out of work help you thrive.
Thriving in non-work activities doubles an
individual’s emotional reserves.
Sounds like a plan. Something everybody could use to more
or less a degree.
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Machine Learning for Designers
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Long post that introduces machine learning for designers.
It requires a (free) O'Reilly login (sorry). People already
expert in machine learning won't find anything new but I
think it's worth the effort if you don't have background in
the field.
"Conventional programming languages can be thought of as
systems that are always correct about mundane things like
concrete mathematical operations. Machine learning
algorithms, on the other hand, can be thought of as systems
that are often correct about more complicated things like
identifying human faces in an image." There's a good set of
recognition examples that illustrate this. It looks at
biological models and deep learning, then discusses
processing different types of inputs. Some of the tasks
described include creating dialogue, feature discovery,
designing, feedback loops, and more. It also looks at open
source machine learning toolkits (TensorFlow, Torch, Caffe,
cuDNN, Theano, Scikit-learn, Shogun, Spark MLlib, and
Deeplearning4j) and machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS)
platforms such as IBM Watson, Amazon Machine Learning,
Google Prediction API, Microsoft Azure, BigML, and
ClarifAI.
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Call for applications: Become a Digital Scholar
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Course announcement from a relatively new provider for
'applications' to "an open access course to support the
development of scalable digital learning." The course is
free but certification costs extra. I read this as an an
announcement for Scholar
Linka "digital
learning environment that models effective learning and
knowledge development in complex settings." According to
their materials, "in Scholar people focus on
co-constructing knowledge (by solving problems, building a
case study, developing an implementation plan) that is
relevant and applicable to their work." Probably
the diagram
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makes it most clear. What do you think, should I take the
course?
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Daniels: You make your luck
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Mitch Daniels says
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"that outside of the extremes it’s the luck you make
not the luck of the world that determines your fate." So
summarized Andrew Rotham. Or as Joanne Jacobs says, "except
for 'tragically bad luck,' it rarely 'decides a
life’s outcome.'" I think that on that basis we would
have to define "tragically bad luck" as "not being born
rich." Jacobs also quotes Barack Obama, speaking
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at Harvard: "Yes, you’ve worked hard, but
you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of
mine: People who have been successful and don’t
realize they’ve been lucky." I think Obama's take is
more correct. As Rotham says, “Daniels’
argument confuses what’s possible with
what’s probable
http://www.eduwonk.com/2016/06/mitch-daniels-on-luck-zhao-on-plus-nacps-and-virtual-hess-on-reformers-credits-and-inmates-ed-week-changes-hunt-inst-and-sanford-school-vince-gray-mcdonalds-testing-homeless-students-and-n.html."
Jacobs concludes, "for many born in poverty, economic
mobility is a longshot.
http://www.brookings.edu/%7E/media/research/files/reports/2015/12/aei-brookings-poverty-report/chapter-2.pdf"
I have no illusion that education by itself will change
this. For those not born rich, education is a necessary,
but not sufficient
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condition for prosperity.
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Education in Africa
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Long, detailed and damning investigation of Bridge
International Academies (BIA) on the African continent.
Graham Brown-Martin details the corporate and philanthropic
connections underpinning the organization. BIA is
essentially a commercial enterprise based on providing
education to African children (planned to expand to 10
million children within 10 years). This article challenges
the claim that BIA offers value for the service it
provides, and notes "the United Nations who, in an
unprecedented statement
http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC/C/GBR/CO/5&Lang=en"
rel="nofollow"
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made public on 9 June 2016, expressed concerns about the UK
'funding of low-fee, private and informal schools run by
for-profit business enterprises'." According to the
article, buildings are substandard, teachers are
underqualified and underpaid, and academic gains are not
proven. At a certain point, people give up on a system
that takes wealth out
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of an economy but puts nothing back in.
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The War on Stupid People
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Good argument against the idea of the 'meritocracy'. As
argued, "We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating
our society as a playground for the smart minority. We
should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even
our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the
majority, and to the full range of human capacity." I'm not
sure a thing such as intelligence exists per se. Insofar as
it does exist I don't regard it as some sort of inherent
property but rather far more influenced by the
circumstances of one's life and upbringing; and even if it
were inherent, I see it as no more grounds for elitism than
any other accidental quality of birth.
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Elon Musk Says There’s a ‘One in Billions’ Chance
Reality Is Not a Simulation
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When you say "one in a billion chance" what do you mean? If
you're Rudolf Carnap
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you mean that there are one billion logical possibilities,
and this is one of them. But then any state of affairs is
one in a billion, and you've said nothing. If you're Hans
Reichenbach
Linkyou mean
that of the last billion occurrences, this has happened
only once. But we've only had one occurrence, so again this
is meaningless. Or if you're Frank Ramsey
Linkit means
you would bet one billion dollars to get one billion and
one dollars back if you're right (and lose it all if you're
wrong). But there's nobody to take this bet, so again the
statement is meaningless. You can't talk meaningfully about
the probability of reality. And that (not this refutation
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is why Elon Musk is wrong.
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Canada’s Draft Open Government Plan — The Promise
and Problems Reviewed
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David Eaves posts an interesting and fairly detailed
analysis and review of Canada's open data plan. I'm in
accord with most of it but there are some things that stand
out to me:
- Eaves opposes a "national network" of open data users
because "There is nothing that will hold these people
together. People don’t come together to create open
data standards, they come together to solve a problem." If
we focus only on solving problems, then we favour
incumbents, at the expense of new uses which could be
enabled by creating affordances.
- On a "songle search window" Eaves argues "The point to
this work is the assumption that the main problem to access
is that things can’t be found. So far, however,
I’d say that’s an assumption..." Yes, fair
enough. But that's not an argument against it, it's an
argument against it being the sole strategy.
- Finally, Eaves says, "Please don’t call it
“open” science. Science, by definition, is
open. If others can’t see the results or have enough
information to replicate the experiment, then it
isn’t science." I'd love to believe that, but it's
not true. A lot of science, including federal government
science, is done for internal and commercial clients behind
closed door. I'd love to see this be more open, but
defining it as "non-science" accomplishes nothing.
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Draining The Semantic Swamp of “Personalized
Learningâ€â€“A View from Silicon Valley (Part 1)
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There is a spectrum of approaches to 'personalized
learning', writes Larry Cuban. "At one end of the continuum
are teacher-centered lessons and programs within the
traditional age-graded school using behavioral
approaches... At the other end of the continuum are
student-centered lessons and programs that seek student
agency." These might be terms the behaviourist and
ccognitivist approaches respectively, or the
traditional and progressive approaches. But within the
progressive camp there is yet another division, he writes.
"One wing of these early progressives were pedagogical
pioneers advocating project-based learning,
student-centered activities, and connections to the world
outside of the classroom, (while) another wing of the same
movement were efficiency-minded, 'administrative
progressives'" who "counted and measured everything in
schools and classrooms (and) reduced complex skills
and knowledge to small chunks that students could learn and
practice." In other words, "Thorndike trumped Dewey," says
Cuban, and we're looking at the same divisions today.
Image: Edward Thorndike, Wikipedia
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Leading in a time of tumultuous change: Our VUCAST world
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I'm getting tired of reading that we're living in a
changing world (or as O'Reilly has it, "volatile,
uncertain, complex, and ambiguous"). I think we all know
that things are changing. It's nothing Toffler didn't see
http://www.fastcompany.com/1695307/future-shock-40-what-tofflers-got-right-and-wrong 40
years ago. I'm far more interested in promoting the changes
we want and reshaping the changes we don't. For example, do
we really want a caste system, as suggested by Google's
Schmidt and Cohen
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No? Then what are we going to do about it? I admit that I'm
an utter failure as a manifesto writer, but at least I try
(a Cyberspace Charter of Rights
LinkThe People's Manifesto
Link.
I don't expect we'll all come together on a vision for the
future. But I think we can commit to working against a
dystopia, can't we? Rather than simply embracing it as do
the technocrats?
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Towards the new caste system: looking back at The New
Digital Age
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Bryan Alexander offers a lukewarm review for this
forward-looking book by Google's Jared Cohen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen and Eric
Schmidt LinkThe New
Digital Age LinkIn a way, he
says, the book is more about politics than technology. "Put
Google and the Department of State together and you have a
glimpse of emerging and aspirational American hyperpower:
confident, thoroughly global, combining virtual technology
with soft and very hard power," he writes. "Or that’s
the vision offered by these two authors." Alexander also
cites Julian Assange
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0,
who writes that the book is "is a startlingly clear and
provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism." He
continues, "This book is a balefully seminal work in which
neither author has the language to see, much less to
express, the titanic centralizing evil they are
constructing."
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Is Big Data Still a Thing? (The 2016 Big Data Landscape)
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I'm linking to this mostly so I have a reference to the
image, which is the latest landscape for big data. If
you're working in data and analytics you're working in a
very crowded field. Specialized Big Data applications
have been popping up in pretty much any vertical, from
healthcare (notably in genomics and drug research) to
finance to fashion to law enforcement (watch Scott Crouch,
CEO of Mark43 here
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Copyright-free material edging out Canadian educational
texts
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We may finally have reached the tipping point with respect
to open access educational content (it's not the sort of
thing I can put on my resumé but I derive tremendous
satisfaction from this). "A few years ago, Emond Publishing
sold more than $1 million worth of books to high schools
annually. Now, said
president Paul Emond, it's dropped to about
$100,000. 'That's what falling off a cliff in the
publishing business looks like,' he said." The publishers
claim that schools are just copying copies of the books.
But what's really happening is that they are using open
access materials and depending on 'fair dealing' for the
rest. The writers, meanwhile, are concerned about the lack
of access to Canadian materials. "Their institutions are
insisting that they use only free material, and a lot of
free material is coming from outside of Canada." Quite so.
And I've always said that an open access approach to
learning content should be supported by direct public
contracts to authors to support Canadian content and other
social objectives.
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The DAO: An Analysis of the Fallout
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Not long ago I linked to and described
http://www.downes.ca/post/65313 the DAO, a
bockchain-based corporation employing a system called
Ethereum to create 'smart contracts' to crowd-source
startup funding. This week the system was hacked barely
weeks after being launched, with millions of 'ethers' worth
$US 50 million
http://www.afr.com/technology/the-dao-hack-us50-million-lost-20160619-gpmke4 drained
from its accounts. Today a second attack
http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/06/19/second-assailant-drains-ethereum-funds-dao/ drained
even more money. More
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Now, maybe - maybe - the transactions can be rolled
back. "A 'soft fork
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in the code that would essentially blacklist the address
with the 3.6m ether in question; a 'hard fork
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that would actually return the funds to their state prior
to the attack; or do nothing and let the system sort itself
out." If this works, the overall result could actually be
good for Ethereum
http://www.coindesk.com/dao-attack-good-thing-ethereum/ -
you can't profit from hacking if it can simply be
rolled back? In the short term, though, the value of
Ethereum currency is collapsing
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Related: transcript of an interview
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/exclusive-full-interview-transcript-alleged-dao-attacker/ with
the alleged attacker.
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How your brain constructs reality
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You should not of course accept what you see in a TED talk
uncritically as fact, because TED is after all selling a
mythology along with its often interesting talks. having
said that, it's still worth taking an afternoon and
catching up with this playlist of six talks all focused on
the way the brain creates knowledge. Donald Hoffman,
for example, "is trying to answer a big question: Do we
experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it
to be?" Keith Barry, as well, "shows us how our brains
can fool our bodies — in a trick that works via
podcast too." There's more.
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Copyright 2008 Stephen Downes
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