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OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Mar 17, 2017
Problems with Personalized Learning
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Dan Meyer takes a swipe at this article
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(behind a paywall, for no good reason) in Educational
Leadership on “personalized learning” and in
passing also raises questions about potential conflicts of
interest on the authors' parts (there's an interesting
exchange with the publisher in the comments). "This
isn’t good instruction," writes Meyer. "It
isn’t even good direct instruction. When someone is
explaining something to you and you don’t understand
them, you don’t ask that person to 'repeat exactly
what you just said only slower.'" On a related note: they
could use the volume switch to have them repeat it louder
as well! See also this MathiaX review
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(source of the image above).
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Teachers’ Awareness of Guidelines for Quality Assurance
when developing MOOCs
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This article at least gives a nod to Martin Weller's plea
to let MOOCs define their own standards for quality. "Let
people play and explore in this space without tying it down
with the types of quality overhead we already have in
formal education." And then it shrugs as says "whatever".
"MOOCs must be shown to meet some of the same quality
standards that other online courses are expected to meet,"
writes the author, without justification. It then proceeds
to question "How aware are teachers of quality assurance
systems when developing MOOCs?" along the usual lines. I've
offered alternative accounts of quality in MOOCs: how
diverse are the participants and technologies? How
interactive is it? How open is it to different people and
different types of participation? How free are people to
define their own objectives and learning strategy?
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​The college transcript of the future — and the
processes holding it back
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Discussion of the concept of a "modernized transcript".
It's similar to what I have been calling a "personal
learning record", with the main difference being that it is
specific to a single institution, as opposed to
incorporating data from multiple institutions and specific
to a single individual. And it also seems to be focused
more on academic record - "secure, verifiable credentials
that reflect more comprehensive data on student learning" -
rather than a more general statement of competencies and
achievements. What's holding it back? "A better way to
track, communicate, and authenticate the depth and
diversity of these experiences in a reliable and coherent
way." That, I guess, and an affinity for fax machines.
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Group Process Design Principles in Times of Turbulance
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This is an article that deserves a deeper discussion, but
in the space I have here I want to make just one point: the
list of effective leverage points in a system, as described
by Donella Meadows
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is exactly the inverse of the list of effective leverage
points in a network. And we can understand this by
understanding how any sufficiently complex system becomes,
effectively, a network. To change a system, you change
paradigms, objectives and rules. But a network is not based
on paradigms, objectives and rules, and trying to change
them is like trying to push a fog bank. In a system, a
change to a small parameter, like the rate of return on a
rental property, is insignificant. In a network, these
small parameters are everything., because there are no
higher-level parameters to which these must conform
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Houston school allows students to make rules
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I'm not sure whether this is an experiment that will spread
(because its successes won't be measured in any traditional
metric) but I'm still happy to see it taking place.
“You're in charge of figuring out who you are, what
you will do with your time, what you want to learn, who you
want to be, what kind of person, and kids who spend their
whole life growing up in that system, when they go to
college, they know who they are,” DeBusk said.
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How Higher Education Leaders Are Making Great Teaching A
Priority On Their Campuses
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This to me reads like those articles from the 90s and 00s
about how newspapers were making quality writing and
reporting their top priority. I can see them now: "yes,
even though we employ more lower-paid stringers than ever
before and are walking all over each other to commercialize
the offering, we will save our declining market share by
doubling down on our core offering." OK, here's what
they're really saying: "ACUE’s recommended teaching
techniques are steeped in four decades of research
http://acue.org/references/" target="_blank. 'That was
critical for faculty buy-in,' she said." Note: 40 years ago
it was 1977.
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Rationalizing Those 'Irrational' Fears of inBloom
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On certain levels, I think this is a good article. It makes
the point that "while 'personalized learning' might be a
powerful slogan for the ed-tech industry and its funders,
the sweeping claims about its benefits are largely unproven
by educational research," and makes the case that "the
public’s 'low tolerance for uncertainty and risk'
surrounding student data is hardly irrational." But there's
a false dichotomy in the idea that "the unreasonable
effectiveness of data will supplant theory." For one thing,
I think "theory" argues for its own replacement with
something, anything. Maybe "data" isn't it (and certainly
not the narrow data available to most systems extant
today).
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FutureLearn’s New Pricing Model Limits Access to Course
Content After the Course Ends
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As this article notes, MOOC provider FutureLearn is putting
the squeeze on students, cutting off access to MOOC
contents unless they pay. It's what we're seeing in the
market as a whole. "As Matt Walton — Chief Product
Officer at FutureLearn — notes, charging for
certificates hasn’t proven to be an effective
business model for MOOC providers. For many learners,
certificates are not a priority. So now MOOC providers have
started charging for course content." Of course, at a
certain point, all of these enterprises are going to have
to relinquish the name MOOC and go back to using the
original product category name: commercial courseware.
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What Colleges Should Know About A Growing 'Talent Strategy'
Push By Companies
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The purpose of this post is to advertise the founding of
the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent
Strategy Linkat
Northeastern University. Based on the premise that there is
"a mismatch between what employers say they want and what
they believe colleges and universities are producing" the
article looks at what are called 'talent strategies',
a euphemism for the use of non-academic data to evaluate
job applicants. "For one thing, bad grammar is a proven red
flag.... (and) it turns out that which Web browser a
candidate uses to apply correlates to later success for
some coding jobs." What the article does not say (but
should) is that a person's online presence and social media
are rife with the data companies need to make these
evaluations, and that this (and not college credentials,
microdegrees or badges) will be the hiring data of the
future.
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Build a talking, face-recognizing doorbell for about $100
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Even if (like me) you don't have the time and space in your
life to construct one of these, just reading the article is
enough to give you inspiration. It also gives you a 20-20
glimpse into the future. The idea is to hook up a camera to
a $40 minicomputer called Raspberry Pi, take pictures of
visitors, and then send them to the cloud where you'll
apply Amazon Web Services (AWS) face-recognition technology
to them. The expensive bit is the $50 Echo Dot, a
hands-free, voice-controlled device that you use to control
your device.
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AT&T dismissed the idea that providers would redline
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I first noticed this in the 1980s when I discovered that
groceries in the suburbs were way better than the ones in
the inner city where I lived. And now it's an internet is a
problem I'm living with right now. I live in Casselman, a
small town in rural Ontario, and even though fibre-optic
internet cable passes right through town we cannot obtain
high-speed internet. The phenomenon is known as 'redlining
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According to Wikipedia
Linkit's "the practice
of denying services, either directly or through selectively
raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the
racial or ethnic composition of those areas." Wikipedia's
definition is too narrow, of course. "The data... show a
clear and troubling pattern: A pattern of long-term,
systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required
to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to
residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and
to lower-income city neighborhoods." This article notes
"AT&T dismissed the idea that providers would redline
or cherrypick communities, and legislators apparently
believed them." Of course, that's exactly what happens - in
the U.S., in Canada, and around the world.
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Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?
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I found this to be an interesting result. After cheating in
Romanian exams was curtailed, "the pass rates of poorer
students - those in receipt of financial assistance
payments - fell by 14.3%, compared to 8.1% for better-off
students." Now it might be tempting to say that the
anti-cheating policy was anti-poor. But that would be
simply to blame the messenger. "When corruption was
widespread, we couldn't know the true scale of
inequality… Our findings have revealed just how much
greater the equality gap is. Once we know the true gap in
attainment, the government can tackle the source of the
inequality."
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Microlearning: What It Is Not and What It Should Be
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'Microlearning' is one of those terms that is becoming
increasingly vague with use and popularity. According to
this article, "the term 'microlearning' was coined by the
Research Studios Austria as "learning in small steps," and
it has been heavily popularized due to most of its
interventions being Web 2.0 friendly." It is not itself a
theory but can be associated with cognitive load theory
(CLT). According to t he article, "CLT was first described
by John Sweller, and it proposes that 'learning occurs in
two mechanisms: 1) schema acquisition, or forming a mental
map, and 2) transfer of knowledge into working
memory.'” The idea is derived from George A.
Miller's work Linkin the
1950s (setting our cognitive capacity at 7 items, plus or
minus 2). Microlearning, says the article, "is not a
one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a good companion for
formal instruction. Microlearning may not be an optimal
solution for complex tasks in workplace learning."
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Every day I'm online, it seems, there's a whole new
technology to learn. Yesterday I was messing around with
Bower Linkwhich has been around a
while but which I hadn't time to learn previously. Today
it's on to WebVR. This article looks at Mozilla's A-Frame
Linka web framework for building virtual
reality experiences. A-Frame is based on HTML and the
Entity-Component pattern
https://aframe.io/docs/0.5.0/introduction/#entity-component-system."
There's a demo based on "a basic VR voxel builder." Think
Minecraft. "The voxel builder will be primarily for room
scale VR with positional tracking and tracked controllers
(e.g., HTC Vive, Oculus Rift + Touch)." It also works on
desktop and mobile - see the demonstration here
Linkand play with it
yourself by downloading code from GitHub
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The open in MOOC must include the ability to create courses
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"If we want truly open education," writes Graham Attwell,
"then we need to open up opportunities for creating and
facilitating learning as well as participating in a
programme." I agree. He also adds
Link"Brian Mulligan
responded... with a link to the Moocs4All web site
Linkthe web site includes this promo
video for a free course held last year on ‘Making
MOOCs on a budget.'" But as he notes, "it is possible to
hack a MOOC platform together with WordPress or to install
Open edX https://open.edx.org/" target="_blank. But it
isn’t simple." All true.
But. As readers know, my gRSShopper
Linksoftware has always been open
source. This is what was used to launch the first MOOCs and
what I still use to manage my newsletter. Like the other
hacks, however, it is difficult to install. But this will
soon change. I am almost completed work on gRSShopper in a
box. This will be a fully contained gRSShopper server
you can easily run anywhere. You will be able to use it as
either a MOOC or as a PLE (and of course you can use your
PLE to take MOOCs). It's not an official project so it has
been slow going, but it won't be long now. Stay tuned.
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Debate heats up over free higher education plan
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Japan is the latest country considering free higher
education. "Hakubun Shimomura, the LDP’s executive
acting secretary general, said at a press conference on
Friday that procuring funds for free higher education
warrants careful deliberation... A special task force was
created within the party on Feb. 15 to discuss the
financial aspects of free higher education." This
follows sharp growth
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in California's free college tuition programs. We're also
seeing more
http://higheredstrategy.com/the-free-tuition-impulse/ voices
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opposed to such plans on the grounds that free tuition only
benefits the rich. By that same logic, though, free health
care would only benefit the rich, because only the rich can
afford health care. Our experience with public health care
in Canada, though, proves that the opposite is the case.
The poor are the major beneficiaries.
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MéxicoX: Meet the MOOC Platform Funded by the Mexican
Government
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As Class Central reports, "MéxicoX
http://mexicox.gob.mx/" target="_blank, which has over one
million registered learners (is) a MOOC platform backed by
Mexican government... unded by Mexico’s Ministry of
Education, and it is managed by the General Directorate of
Educational Television (Dirección General de
Televisión Educativa from the Ministry of Education)
in coordination with the National Digital Strategy."
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JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000
Hours
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Knowledge workers take note: "The program, called COIN, for
Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of
interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the
project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work
each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software
reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never
asks for vacation."
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Analytics isn’t a thing
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By this headline Mike Sharkey doesn't mean that analytics
doesn't exist, nor does he mean it isn't something
important. Rather, he says, software is defined by the
problem it solves, and 'analytics' isn't a type of problem.
"Analytics isn’t a thing. Analytics help solve
problems like retention, student success, operational
efficiency, or engagement," he writes. He raises this point
because 'learning analytics' is dropped from this year's
NMC Horizon report
https://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2017-higher-education-edition/."
I wouldn’t say that analytics 'has arrived,' so I was
a little surprised that it wasn’t called out as a
specific trend," he said. It wouldn't be the first time a
trend simply disappeared in a Horizon report - analytics
also vanished in 2015 only to reappear a year later.
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The OA interviews: Philip Cohen, founder of SocArXiv
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Interview with hilip Cohen, founder of the new social
sciences preprint server SocArXiv
Link"Can the newly
reinvigorated preprint movement gain sufficient traction,
impetus, and focus to push the revolution the OA movement
began in a more desirable direction?" Interestng response:
Writing on the LSE blog
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last year he said, “I hope that SocArXiv will enable
us to save research from the journal system.”
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Neural Networks and Deep Learning
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Between meetings with notaries today I was wondering to
myself whether work had been done on using one neural
network to train another neural network. I didn't find the
answer (if you know, send me a note!) but I did find this
nice guide to neural networks and deep learning
LinkMichael
Nielsen Linkexplains these a bit
differently than I've seen before, but in such a way as to
make some things clearer to me, so I felt it was certainly
worth passing along. There are also examples you can work
though.
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The Coded Language of For-Profit Colleges
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"For-profit colleges," writes Tressie McMillan Cottom,
"target and thrive off of inequality." She calls these
examples of "lower ed" - in contrast with higher ed, which
is where the more economically successful go. "Flexible
solutions, on-demand education, open-access career
retraining, reskilling, and upskilling—these are
terms that talk about inequality without taking inequality
seriously."
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An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing
Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy
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I read Manufacturing Consent many years ago. Its core
claims are lavishly documented (indeed, most of the book
consists of the documentation; the argument itself begins
and ends in the first chapter). Here is an excerpt of the
'five filters' portion of the video:
Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is
profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever
guarantees that profit.”
Advertising—What do advertisers pay for? Access to
audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is
selling you a product. They’re also selling
advertisers a product: you.”
Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on
power, because the very system encourages complicity.
If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to
the margins.
Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the
powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in
action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and
diverting the conversation.”
The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you
need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists,
immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public
opinion.”
I try to make OLDaily the opposite of all that. OLDaily is
non-profit. The audience is not for sale to anyone. It
functions as a check on power. It acts against the flack
machine and restores the conversation. And it rejects the
dialogue of demonization.
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Collision Course — Why Are Funders Straying from Their
Lane?
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The pro-publisher website The Scholarly Kitchen is noting
with alarm the shift in funding away from publishers and
toward initiatives that compete with publishers. "What has
led to this lane-changing behavior from funders and
philanthropies with regard to researchers, technology, and
publishers?" asks Kent Anderson. "Why are they moving into
the publishing world with competitive attitudes? Why are
they seeking to define publication choices for their funded
researchers?" The responses range from antagonism to
opportunism, he writes, with a dose of short-sightedness:
"funders may not realize that there may be one or
two Jenga blocks that, if pulled out, could bring major
functions of the industry down in a tumble." Actually,
I think they do realize this, which is why they're scouting
for a replacement.
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Learning is the Reward
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This article makes a nice use of James Nottingham's concept
of the 'learning pit
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to make the point that "school, as we know it is driven by
grades as the main reflection of what students do, or do
not, know. What has resulted is a rat race of sorts
where many kids and parents alike have their eye on the
prize." It's nothing we haven't heard before, but I like
the expression of it. Image
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Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
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Tim Berners-Lee champions a vision of the web as "an open
platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share
information, access opportunities and collaborate across
geographic and cultural boundaries." But this vision, he
writes, is challenged on three major fronts (quoted):
companies (and) governments are also increasingly watching
our every move online, and passing extreme laws
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that trample on our rights to privacy
through the use of data science and armies of bots, those
with bad intentions
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can game the system
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to spread misinformation
political advertising online has rapidly become
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a sophisticated industry... political campaigns are now
building individual adverts targeted directly at
users.
These are significant issues, and as Berners-Lee says, they
are complex issues. And they are the result of people and
companies working directly against the idea of the web as
an open and decentralized medium build by, and for the
benefit, of everyone.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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