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by Stephen Downes


Mar 31, 2017


Coursera’s Rick Levin On the Evolution of MOOCs and
Microcredentials
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Interview-style article. Coursera CEO  Rick Levin
really does sometimes sound like he's from another culture.
"The quality differential is so striking, I think the
faculty and universities will realize they can truly
up-level what they're able to do by using materials from
the top universities in the world." Up-level?
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How I Let Disney Track My Every Move
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The MagicBand is a bracelet Disney hands out to hotel and
resort guests. It gives you access to rides, automatically
takes photos, and helps them run the park. It may seem
creepy, but it’s very convenient. The bracelets,
along with the rest of the technologies in this list,
communicate with other services using short-range
communication called RFID as well as long range wireless
internet
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‘Who shared it?’: How Americans decide what news to
trust on social media
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According to this report (13 page PDF
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"when Americans encounter news on social media, how much
they trust the content is determined less by who creates
the news than by who shares it." How much they engage with
it (for example, by passing it along) also depends more on
who shares it. This runs counter to those saying it is the
authority of the source that matters. This means that "Your
readers and followers are not just consumers to monetize,
instead they may be social ambassadors whose own
credibility with their friends affects your brand’s
reputation." True enough. When I read this, I ask, why do
people place trust in individuals who share the news - is
it that they can be relied on to have a point of view? or
perhaps they are trusted to assess the news critically? or
maybe they just have good sources themselves?
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Faculty Perceptions about Teaching Online: Exploring the
Literature Using the Technology Acceptance Model as an
Organizing Framework
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This is a  good article that does exactly what the
title promises. It is a survey article looking at a number
of research studies on faculty use of technology from the
perspective of the technology acceptance model (TAM). After
a brief overview of the model, the paper summarizes the
major findings (including an exceptionally useful table
starting on page 19. Having said that, the report
underlines common findings about faculty use of technology:
they are more likely to use it if they feel confident in
technology and report poorer experiences if they are less
familiar with it. They are less enthusiastic about
technology than their administrators, express concerns
about quality, and were concerned about effectiveness,
interactivity, and workload.
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New Study Recommends Key Actions to Improve Early Childhood
Education in Mongolia
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There's a lot of interesting reading in this World Bank
study on early childhood education (ECE) in Mongolia (113
page PDF
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The summary article doesn't do it justice. Mongolia has
made great strides in recent years, but gaps remain,
especially among poorer and more rural populations. In
rural communities, access is provided through a
ger-kindergarten (using a traditional yurt (from the Turkic
languages) or ger (Mongolian)). Because of issues with
access, spending in education thus far tends to favour the
welathy more than the poor.  Not mentioned in the
summary is that the report calls for greater private sector
involvement in several areas, which seems to me to be the
World Bank repeating its past mistakes.
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K-12 OER Podcasts
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This is a series of podcasts (a.k.a. MP3 audio files) was
launmched today in a CIDER workshop. There are 17
recordings in all, most of them in the 10-20 minute range.
There are also videos
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and transcripts in the BOLT OER resource
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The AI Misinformation Epidemic
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This ios the first of what promises to be a series of posts
on what the author calls the 'misinformation epidemic' in
AI. Here are the major sorts of misinformation:

lists of the AI Influencers populated mostly by people
with no discernible contribution (or even expertise) in AI.
With startling regularity, if I tell an educated
person what I do, a question quickly follows in
reference to the Singularity
Despite the increasing familiarity of machine learning in
the media, the quality of journalism hasn’t
improved appreciably.

This list will be familiar to people who work in any branch
of technology. The 'influencers' jump on a technology,
leveraging contacts to get a book (or some such) published.
The myths are spread by these and other non-experts in the
field. And the journalism follows the popular icons and
ignores what's actually happening in the field.
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Installing Mautic with PHP7-FPM on Docker, Nginx, and
MariaDB on Ubuntu 16.04
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This is pretty interesting. Ignore the tech, unless you
enjoy that, and focus on what it does. "Mautic
Linkis an open source marketing automation
web application. Here at the OER Foundation, we use it to
manage enquiries from prospective learners and partner
institutions, to deliver timely emails to cohorts of
learners undertaking our partner's online courses, and to
measure our effectiveness in achieving our goals
Linkand mission: to makes higher
education accessible to everyone." I should get one of
these.
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Ten Years on the Twitter
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I joined Link
Twitter as @Downes in July, 2007. Since then I've
accumulated 7,217 tweets and 8902 followers. I have a
second account, @OLDaily Linkfor
these posts. 7,590 tweets and 5,413 followers. By Twitter
standards, both numbers are low. James Clay, who joined ten
years ago, writes, "I have posted nearly 43,000 tweets and
have nearly 5000 followers." Clay writes, "Twitter is
mainly now about mainstream and traditional media accounts
who in the main use Twitter for broadcasting, I still think
there is a community there that use it for conversations
and sharing." That seems right to me. And it also feels
like I'm posting into the void when I post to Twitter. But
that's true of online media in general these days.
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Netflix's anti-piracy team aims to make stealing content
uncool
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I never actually did this (honestly!) but it was a thing
when I was young to sneak into movie theatres. One person
would buy a ticket and then open the emergency exit for
others. Or you'd sneak under the ticket window (this was
before the days of the multiplex). Today's dodge is to see
one movie, and then as many others in the 9-plex as you
can. Technically it's illegal, I suppose, but nobody is
harmed, and I never heard of anyone doing hard time.
This is what illegal downloading is like. It's like
sneaking into the movies, not like stealing a car. And
yeah, it's not something that you do as a socially
acceptable adult. But if you're young and bored and can't
afford the cost of a movie, well, yeah, I can see people
doing it. If you really think it's a problem in the age of
Netflix then the answer isn't to make absurd comparisons,
it is to give people an alternative (like, maybe, not
delaying the availability of programs for years). "Make it
good, make it more attractive than the alternative...
Ultimately, people steal content because they can't get it
otherwise."
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Apple’s Augmented Reality Debut Will Look More Like
“Pokémon” Than Magic Leap
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This article is mostly speculative at this point. The idea
is that Apple is working on augmented reality, but that an
eyepiece (think Google Glass) isn't in the works yet.
Apple’s strategy may be to release a technology that
gets people used to the idea, and then release a headset in
a couple of years.” From where I sit, though, the
story is in the headline - Apple was impressed by the
success of Pokémon Go and has decided to copy it,
creating a proprietary infrastructure for the same idea
into the iPhone. Augmented Reality (AR) is coming, no doubt
about it. But we'll know it's here when someone sells
overpriced AR contact lenses.
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AAUP Issues Report On Adjunct Philosophy Professor
Allegedly Fired For High Standards
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Though the post is about academic freedom, there's an
interesting perspective about attitudes here. Here's the
professor in question speaking: "I was told,
‘here’s the textbook you will teach
from…here’s how you will teach, you will not
assign hard papers, you will not make the class
difficult…’ Basically, they turned the entire
class into a unit that could be done by anybody." My
emphasis. There's an attitude here that education should be
so challenging that some people - most people, even
- don't get through. That's fine if you're a game show
and you pay the contestants. But, you know, it's not. See
also: Inside Higher Ed
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Self-paced language learning
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The point of departure for this post is self-paced language
learning using Duolingo, but it quickly moves into a
fascinating history of self-paced learning generally.
Efforts began in the 1800s with the massification of
learning, and very quickly self-paced was associated with
personalized learning as designers attempted to adapt their
designs to the different abilities of students. Another
early feature of self-paced learning was the
student-teacher learning contract. Self-paced learning
flourished in the 1970s with programmed learning, an
offshoot of behaviourism, and the cycle began again. For
all that work, the results have been less than impressive.
"Over forty years ago, a review of self-paced learning
concluded that the evidence on its benefits was
inconclusive (Allison, 1975: 5). Nothing has changed
since."
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Cloud computing pushes into the classroom, but not without
challenges
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"Slowly but surely, in spite of the issues, cloud tools are
coming to the classroom," according to this report. But
infrastructure challenges remain. "One of our biggest
challenges is providing technology solutions that require
bandwidth and some computer." As well, there is the
complexity of adding new tools to a classroom environment.
No single set of tools provides a perfect fit. " In order
to decide which tools are best from the universe of choices
on the Internet, teachers communicate with one another,
participate with other teachers on social networks to find
what's working for them."
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The three exclamation point problem
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The best way to create a bias against a group is to
normalize a behaviour that others can't, or won't, conform
to. American digerati have perfected this in the form of
casual profanity in writing. It's a marker they can use to
identify each other in writing and because many cultures
and individuals won't indulge, they can maintain a firm
barrier between themselves and outsiders. Which -
ironically - the the point of the current article, though
the example is different. You must write a certain way. You
must not write a certain way. Only the latter can be
resisted in any real sense, which is why the effective
biases are formed out of the former. Now straighten your
tie, don't slouch, look people in the eye, and smile.
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Education is Changing—It’s Time Assessment Caught Up
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This is a lightweight article touting the benefits of
adaptive testing "where, based on a student response to one
test item, that student was presented with another item,
appropriately targeted so that the student’s response
would provide more information about his or her range of
understanding." This won't be new to educators but it does
point to where Stanford's future work may go.
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Can We Afford Free Textbooks?
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This is an argument that can't be ignored. It runs as
follows: OER textbookss address the cost of higher
education, and while cost is a significant problem, the low
completion rate is an even more significant problem. Part
of the reason for the low completion rate is poor learning
strategy, a strategy that is entrenched with existing (and
now OER) textbooks. Compare that to what paid learning
materials provide: activities, interactivity, analytics,
and more. So we should continue to pay for learning
resources. It's a lovely argument and Robert S. Feldman
should be commended.
But. First, neither publishers nor professors were not
prepared to budge from the textbook model until free
textbooks came online. Moreover, only some OERs are
textbooks; the vast majority are learning resources that
are out in front of publishers in addressing real learning
needs and challenges. Finally, many features of progressive
education - interactivity, constructionism, etc. - really
work only with open learning resources. If we drop support
for OER we lose all this, and we lose the main force for
innovation in our field.
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Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous
algorithms are ruining millions of lives
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When I spoke Linkat
the London School of Economics a couple years ago, part of
my talk was an extended criticism of the use of models in
learning design and analysis. "The real issue isn’t
algorithms, it’s models. Models are what you get when
you feed data to an algorithm and ask it to make
predictions. As (Cathy) O’Neil puts it
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'Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.'" This
article is an extended discussion of the problem stated
much more cogently than my presentation. "It's E Pluribus
Unum reversed: models make many out of one, pigeonholing
each of us as members of groups about whom generalizations
-- often punitive ones (such as variable pricing) can be
made.
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Pisa data may be incomparable, Schleicher admits
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A change in the way the 2015 PISA tests were administered
may have resulted in changes in the outcome. “It
remains possible that a particular group of students
– such as students scoring [high marks] in
mathematics on paper in Korea and Hong Kong – found
it more difficult than [students with the same marks] in
the remaining countries to perform at the same level on the
computer-delivered tasks.”
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How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them
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Last week the U.S. Congress made moves
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to allow internet service providers (ISP) to track their
customers. This is a lot harder to block than Facebook or
Google; you can't use 'do not track' or anonymized
browsing. Even encrypting your data still allows them to
see where you go. As this story explains, there are really
only two ways to stop ISPs from tracking your internet
activities: route your traffic through a VPN, or use Tor.
With a VPN
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though, you're simply trusting a different host not to
track. Tor Linkmeanwhile, is
effective - but now you may be flagged as a security risk.
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Quality for news is mostly about solving the reputation
issue
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I hear this sort of sentiment a lot, and also with respect
to learning resource quality as well. The idea is to be
sure you're depending on authoritative sources, or at the
very least, reliable sources. But how is this established.
"A close look at a precise set of signals can reveal a lot
about journalistic quality," says the authors. What
signals? Awards, newsroom size, years of operation. But
wait, I say to myself. Awards can be manipulated, you have
to pay to qualify, and they reward conformity and
compliance, usually. Continue to the bottom and you see the
advertisement for the data journalism awards. Coincidence?
As it turns out, no. The author, Frederic Filloux,
is affiliated
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with the awards, and is on the board
Linkof Global
Editor News, the sponsor of the awards. OK, it's not
Watergate. But this is how you evaluate whether whether
journalism is credible.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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