Laden...
Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Nov 04, 2016
Why Udacity and EdX Want to Trademark the Degrees of the
Future—and What’s at Stake for Students
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So this is not good. "No one owns the term
“master’s degree.” But upstart education
providers dream of getting a lock on the words for the next
generation of online graduate certifications... Udacity won
a trademark for Nanodegree last year. And in April, the
nonprofit edX... applied for a trademark on the word
MicroMasters. And MicroDegree? Yep, that’s
trademarked too, by yet another company." It's clear that
these new players in the world of e-learning demonstrating
the same corporate bad behaviour as their predecessors in
the LMS industry.
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Future OER
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From the website: "What is the future of Open Education?
This panel and audience discussion will explore possible
visions of open education in 2036, using a series of
broadly solicited papers as a starting point. These
essays are available at Link
Link target="_blank" rel="nofollow me
noopener noreferrer — please review, comment and
consider in preparation for this discussion." One of my own
essays is in there: Open Learning in the Future
Link
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Textbook Example of Unbundling
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We've been reading recently about the unbundling
Linkof textbooks and
this article continues that discussion, contrasting it with
"patchy" evidence for predictions of the unbundling of
education generally. "Textbooks – the big, expensive,
indispensable anchors of academia – are being
unbundled at a frenetic pace... What textbook companies
originally fought – the threats of pirated and copied
digital versions of their property – they now
embrace." Why would anyone think this will stop with
textbooks, though?
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Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter
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This article cites a couple
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters studies
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arguing that ethnic, racial and gender diversity increases
returns and growth in corporations. But the bulk of the
article is intended to show "nonhomogenous teams are simply
smarter." They focus
http://www.apa.org/releases/0406_JPSP_Sommer.pdf more
Linkon facts,
argue David Rock and Heidi Grant Halvorson,
they process
Linkthose
facts more carefully, and they're more
Link
innovative
LinkNot
a long article, but well written and tightly argued.
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Art & Design Students Produce Virtual Reality Musical
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These are probably the same people who will be pioneering
this art form professionally in a few years. Hands-on
experience like this is invaluable. "As Michael Chaney, a
professor of film and television and one of the faculty
leads on the project, explained in a video about the
production https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29alwubl6eI"
target="_blank process, 'We consulted with the leading
pioneers in this industry and we ourselves are becoming
pioneers." It's worth visiting the project website
Linkwhich gives you a
far better idea of the project than this short article.
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The Durability and Fragility of Knowledge Infrastructures:
Lessons Learned from Astronomy
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Yes, it's a specialized case: "Research reported here draws
upon a long-term study of scientific data practices to ask
questions about the durability and fragility of
infrastructures for data in astronomy." But from what I
observe these trends exist in every discipline (and most
fare worse than astronomy). "Infrastructure is fragile,
even for one of the most durable of sciences –
astronomy. The invisible work necessary to maintain
individual systems, tools, technologies, standards, and
other resources – much of it done by information
professionals – may only become visible upon
breakdown." Why not take a look archive.cgi for the
websites, articles, conferences and other digital artifacts
from our discipline from just ten years ago? It's
astonishing how much has been lost, because nobody's taking
care of it.
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Open Research
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You'll find that this 'textbook' based on the open
course
Link
of the same name is a very quick read. But it does offer a
glimpse at what the open textbook of the future may look
like, containing not just text but hyperlinks, audio and
video. "This new textbook edition builds on our earlier
facilitated versions of the course by including group
activities and incorporating participant contributions
into new activity commentary sections. You can now work
through the course material as an individual, group or if
you’re a facilitator or educator, use the content and
activities to aid discussion." Via Beck Pitt
Link
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21st Century Learning, 20th Century Classroom
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"It’s time to match classroom and school design with
our changing philosophies and teaching practices," argues
Zoe Branigan-Pipe. From the way children sit, the way they
are isolated from each other, to the way they are lumped
into age-based groups, the realities of the 21st century
school reflect an earlier age. "What if students could
attend learning sessions based on their individual
interests or needs, similar to the EdCamp model or MOOCs
(massive open online courses) that allow choice and
interest-based learning?" she asks. We begin to see some of
the answers in the work of the the Enrichment and
Innovation Centre, she writes. "The best examples that we
found were Kindergarten classrooms." More on this in the
Pipedreams blog
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Teaching and Learning in a “Post-truth†World
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The idea that we are living in a "post-truth world" has
become fashionable, but I like Andrew Campbell's take:
"There are many historical examples of commonly held
beliefs that have little basis in fact. Since the 1700's
people have believed in the existence of a plot to control
the world by the Bavarian Illuminati
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati" target="_blank.
McCarthy's communist witch hunt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism" target="_blank,
the belief in a flat earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth"
target="_blank, assertions that the Apollo Moon landings
were faked
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories"
target="_blank and the conspiracy theory that the attacks
of September 11th 2001 were an 'inside job'
http://www.911truth.org/the-top-40-reasons-to-doubt-the-offical-story/"
target="_blank are more modern examples of popular ideas
which have no basis in fact, yet still endure." The
internet did little to correct this, and if anything, has
accelerated it. This creates an onus on us to ensure that
the students we teach are aware of filtering algorithms,
gather news from multiple sources, and have the ability to
understand different perspectives on issues.
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Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!
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Via Digital Humanities Now
Link
"Omeka S Linkis the next-generation, open
source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated
into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to
serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who
wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a
single installation." The source (PHP and Javascript) is
available on GitHub
Link"Omeka S is a
free & open source platform for institutions that want
to publish linked open data; integrate their collections
with the scholarly communications ecosystem; and manage
many users & sites from one installation."
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3 Types of College Friendships That Matter For Student
Success
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Interesting summary of a new book
Link
from by Janice McCabe, a researcher at Dartmouth College,
on the different types of networks students form in college
or university. What's interesting is not the typology but
the idea that your network of friends can, as the article
says, drag you up or drag you down. "Among the students who
said their close group of friends provided academic
motivation and support, every one of them graduated. Among
the ones who said they lacked this support and their
friends distracted them from schoolwork, only half managed
to graduate within six years." The usual caveat about
sample sizes applies.
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Building a News Bot for Facebook Messenger
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Building a Facebook news bot is all very fine, but there's
this: it's easy (relatively speaking) to import content
into Facebook. My own gRSShopper did that, and gRSShopper
is also a web aggregator (though I had too much respect for
readers to simply dump aggregated content into Facebook).
What's difficult is getting content out of Facebook. Oh
sure, it can be done, after a fashion - gRSShopper could
harvest Facebook page feeds, for example. But Facebook
doesn't really want you sharing Facebook content outside
their platform. It wants everyone to use Facebook, which is
why you hear that giant slurping sound as it tries to suck
everyone in. Related: Here's why young people are
abandoning Facebook
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"It’s clogged with brands, news and the odd meme.
It’s lost any semblance of a personality." Via Ben
Werdmuller
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The State of Javascript 2016
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This is a terrific website (it wouldn't be accurate to call
it an article) covering the many flavours of Javascript
libraries assembled in various web site and web service
stacks. There's too much to summarize here, but there seems
to be a general divide between Facebook's React framework
and a range of other options. But don't think it's a neat
divide; it's not. Anyway, these frameworks don't last long
- JQuery (which powers this website) is already history.
This work will take some effort to read and comprehend,
especially if you haven't kept up, but it's well work the
effort.
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Deep Learning is Revolutionary
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Yes, this article is pretty superficial (and a "ten
reasons" listicle) but if you haven't been looking at some
of the things neural networks are doing you may want to
take a look. Also, it makes me feel good, because I always
knew they'd perform like this.
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Blogging is a Choral Act
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Bonnie Stewart: "Blogging is a choral act. Posts are
commented on; ties are formed. Stories and backstories
become known. As I connected with other bloggers and found
community first with other parents and then with those
whose writing, like my own, unpacked identities in various
forms, I stumbled into something extraordinary: a space
wherein I was able, in small ways, to publicly mother a
child who was not here."
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Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of Libraries
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I don't write about libraries a lot because I'm not
enthused by stacks of dusty paper. But of course libraries
are evolving (slowly) with the digital age, as this report
(28 page PDF
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attests. I think what we'll see over time is a convergence
of the library's traditional role with that of housing and
disseminating academic resources, ultimately replacing
publishers. Hence we read recommendation 4, "the MIT
Libraries should be a trusted vehicle for disseminating MIT
research to the world." And recommendation 6: "the
Libraries should generate open, interoperable content
platforms that explore new ways of producing, using,
sharing, and preserving knowledge and that promote
revolutionary new methodologies for the discovery and
organization of information, people, ideas, and networks."
Via Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
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University Videos on YouTube Get Custom Search
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This is interesting. Campus Technology summarizes it
neatly: "A "boutique" search company has developed
a free online resource
Linkthat lets users search for
university and college videos that have been posted to
YouTube and then clip and share segments of those videos
with students and colleagues." Leaving aside the danger of
depending on Google for anything, it raises the possibility
of other 'boutique' video search engines./ For example, a
search engine specifically for cooking. Or scanning
electron microscopes. Or...
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Microsoft Teams challenges work chat rival Slack
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Microsoft has announced Microsoft Teams
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a product to support work teams, rivaling Slack
LinkThe pending announcement prompted Slack
CEO to run a newspaper ad "warning that running such a tool
is 'harder than it looks'," according to this BBC article.
"You're not going to create something people really love by
making a big list of Slack's features and simply checking
those boxes," it says. "Tiny details make big differences.
If you want customers to switch to your product, you're
going to have to match our commitment to their success and
take the same amount of delight in their happiness." More
from Ars Technica
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Tech Crunch
Linkthe
Verge
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Look out below: Cuts underway as advertising tumble
accelerates
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It was not so long ago I heard people declaring that paper
newspapers would endure and that large publications like,
say, the Wall Street Journal, were too entrenched to
imagine being impacted by the internet. Two weeks ago the
WSJ offered buyouts to the paper’s entire editorial
staff. Today came the layoffs and the dramatic reduction in
size of the physical product. Meanwhile backs refused to
back a loan that would allow Gannet to buy Tronc, the
owners of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune. The end is near
for paper-based newspapers.Â
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Six strategies for Canadian universities to foster
innovation
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This is a set of six short articles that overall represent
an industry-driven approach to support for innovation in
universities "by being willing to work with industry as
partners and having our researchers work closely to solve
key industry issues, rather than looking for places where
university discoveries can be plugged in." From where I
sit, this may (may) support innovation, but it puts the
brakes on disruption and transformation. In a certain sense
it represents a diversion of effort and resources toward
incumbents and away from new ideas and businesses that
would genuinely move us forward. This has been my
experience with the policy over the last several years.
Yes, this document deserves deeper discussion and
criticism. But in my mind it represents a failed innovation
policy.
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Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving
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I've been tending to my own archives lately and I echo this
sentiment from this Library of Congress publication (79
page PDF
Link:
"One of the still unfolding impacts of the computer age is
that everyone now must be their own digital archivist.
Without some focused attention, any personal collection is
at high risk of loss – and quick loss at that." Here
are some resources to underline this important effort:
Library of Congress Personal Archiving
Link
website
Kit to hold your own PDA day event
Link
Columbia University Digital Humanities Center – PDA
online resources
Link
Guide from Cornell University is based on the workshop
Personal Digital Archiving
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Paradigm Project
http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/ - guidelines
Link
for the creators of personal digital archives
The Digital Beyond http://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/ is
a blog about your digital existence and what happens to it
after your death -
PDA Conference archives
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Rural Malawians About to Go Online
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My colleague from Assibiboine Community College, Dinah
Ceplis, sent me this item describing the launch of rural
internet access in Malawi. This is significant as Ceplis
has spend the last two decades
Link
or so working in rural Africa supporting agriculture and
distance education (areas in which Assiniboine
specializes). "We are building towers, installing Wi-Fi
hotspots, backhaul links, some of these will be ready
before end November.... Because there’s intermittent
power supply in Malawi, we are running all our equipment on
solar.... We’re getting financial and technical
support from Microsoft…we’re a grant recipient
of the Microsoft Affordable Access Initiative
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/affordable-access-initiative/home."
Increased access to learning is only one of many benefits
Malawians will realize from this initiative.
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Top 10 Higher Ed IT Issues of 2017
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There's a table comparing the top IT issues in higher ed
over the last three years and this is probably the most
interesting bit of the article. We see that IT security is
the top issue for the second year in a row. But beyond
that, there's a much greater focus on student success and
even affordability as it seems that this year IT has become
much more core to the institutional mission (compare 2014
when "demonstrating IT's value" placed a solid fifth).
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Micro-Barriers Loom Large for First-Generation Students
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I can attest from personal experience that the
microbarriers described in this article existed in my
university days and exist in my life to this day. It's
true, in my experience, that "a relatively tiny difference
in culture can make a huge difference in access." There are
numerous opaque systems and unwritten rule sets. In
searching for opportunities, employment and even
internships, for example, "successful people are playing an
entirely different game. They don’t flood the job
market with résumés, hoping that some
employer will grace them with an interview. They network."
And even the little things. "Your shoes and belt should
match."
But our approach differs. Where J.D. Vance, the author of
Hillbilly Elegy, wants to open up this culture of privilege
and teach its nuances to those lucky enough to get into the
system, I want to make it irrelevant. Widening access to
privilege does not eliminate privilege, it entrenches it.
We need to eliminate it. That's why I want to see learning
and networking available to everyone, not the merely
wealthy and their acolytes.
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Ria #31: Dr. Tracy Teal On Data Carpentry
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In this episode, Dr. Tracy Teal shares about how the
organization Data Carpentry came to be and some of its
programs to help researchers be more data literate.
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What should the next generation of digital learning
environments do?
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The U.K.'s JISC is asking for contributions (in the form of
tweet chats) to a series of 'six challenges' posed by the
future of learning and research in a digital environment.
You will want to read their set of visions before
participating in this exercise (or indeed, before
participating in JISC-funded research, as these visions
will guide funding decisions). It is for the most part
based on data-driven decision-making (as opposed to, say,
design) and it is focused mostly on skills and employment,
with a nod toward resources and personalization.
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Virtual assistants spend much of their time fending off
sexual harassment
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It's the sort of issue that tends to turn out poorly in a
free market environment: people prefer bot assistants that
have female voices, and a significant number of users want
their bots to behave in a subservient fashion. So these
bots "must now suffer the indignities unethical bosses
inflict on their human assistants, especially sexual
harassment." You might say, "So what? They're bots." Yes,
but if they're representative of women to the user, they're
more than just bots. They become part of the way the user
interacts with women generally. Anyhow, so far, bot-makers
are trying to take the responsible route. For example,
"Kasisto Linkdesigned its bot to avoid
demure or deferential responses when confronting sexual
innuendo, or inappropriate personal questions such as
asking Kai out on a date." And Microsoft's Deborah Harrison
says "We wanted to be really careful that Cortana... is not
subservient in a way that sets up a dynamic that we
didn’t want to perpetuate socially."
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Net neutrality is up for debate at CRTC hearings
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Hearings on net neutrality are being held by Canada's
telecom regulator starting today. The issue is of
particular interest in Canada because we have fewer
providers, bandwidth is more expensive than elsewhere, and
we have lower data caps. So the internet service providers
have a lot influence and their ability to offer better
pricing to one or another content provider will create a
significant advantage. For me it's a personal issue. It's
hard enough to provide reasonable load times; the last
thing I need is to have my own internet service provider
throttling back the speed my site loads. Differential
pricing hurts OLDaily. It's that simple. More: Globe and
Mail
Link
Financial Post
Link
Open Media
Link
Global
Link
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Carré Technologies Astroskin Gets Green Light for Use on
the International Space Station
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They're calling
Link
it a 'smart shirt' though it's actually more of a singlet.
It monitors blood pressure, skin temperature, activity
level, heart rate and electrical activity, and breathing
rate and volume. It will be worn by Canadian astronaut
David Saint-Jacques during a six-month mission in
2018-2019. According to the article, "Astroskin's
commercial spinoff is already available to the public under
the brand Hexoskin http://www.hexoskin.com/" target="_blank
and can purchased at Best Buy and other retailers."
Technology like this has learning implications, as it is
able to generate immediate performance feedback.
Eventually, the phrase 'online learning' will mean you have
your digital feedback mechanisms in place. More:
Carré Technologies
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42 or why one college does not wipe out previous options
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What I like about this article is that it speaks directly
against the sort of magical thinking that characterizes
Silicon Valley innovations, the latest being 42
Linka college built "around the idea of
peer learning, without the interference
Linkof teachers. "
Inge de Waard writes, "MOOCs and 42 are not the solution
for education, just as humans are not the solution for
peace (clearly). It is a positive, engaging combination of
elements that makes things happen." Fair enough. Yet at the
same time 42 does tap into the need for self-managed
tuition-free learning. And 42 does speak to a certain
culture of self-made do-it-yourself autodidacts. But
there's a model here based on rigorous competition and a
live-in 4-week boot camp that suggests something more is
going on, one that makes me just wish their design
(illustrated in the diagram
Link
weren't so phallic.
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(This Is Not a Morphology of) The Monsters of Education
Technology
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I'm not a fan of holiday-themed articles (they're far too
easy and forrmulaic) but I thoroughly enjoyed Audrey
Watters's rant on the monsters of educational technology
(even if I did make the list). I'm glad it's not a taxonomy
nor a morphology, tools far to lightly wielded in our
discipline. Structurally, I would have jumped into the list
much earlier in the talk, offering my caveats and
explanations in the context of the descriptions of our
Frankensteins and our Draculas. But I like the way it ends:
"Technology, education technology, is our creation. It need
not be our monster."
P.S. Audrey Watters's unofficial slogan is "Be less pigeon
http://hackeducation.com/2016/06/08/pigeons" - "a companion
species gone awry, a border creature that might mark its
own and our own trainability" and a warning of a future
where "our cyborg fantasies, despite their subversive
theoretical promise, turn out to be quite submissive to the
technologies of command and control." If I had my own
version of the slogan, it would be be more sparrow. It's a
huge world, but we can (and must) explore and discover and
make our way across vast distances even where danger looms
above and below, and it only works if we look out for each
other and let none fall to the ground without our taking
notice.
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Teachers’ Informal Learning via Social Networking
Technology
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I've talked about the way teachers use informal learning
for a long time, so it's good to see discussion of this
trend in the formal literature. "This research attempts to
investigate how teachers engage in informal learning for
their professional development when using Social Networking
Site (SNS) technology." At this point, it is true that a
"social networking site, such as Facebook is a potential
platform to engage teachers in informal learning for their
professional development." But I wouldn't depend on these
over the long term; we need a social network, not a social
network site. "Content knowledge is the most frequently
exchanged knowledge on the teachers’ Timelines (33%,
n=35). This is followed by knowledge of curriculum (25%,
n=26), general pedagogical knowledge (16%, n=17), knowledge
of learners and their characteristics (14%, n=15), and
knowledge of educational contexts (11%, n=12)."
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Extraction of Relevant Terms and Learning Outcomes from
Online Courses
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This approach is a natural, and something I would have
liked to have seen in LPSS. The project described "applies
natural language processing(NLP) techniques to analyze the
course’s materials and discover what concepts
are taught, their relevancy in the course and their
alignment with the learning outcomes of the course." You
would use this eventually to assemble relevant resources
from a repository network in order to build a course on the
fly, based on competency information or needs assessments.
This is a good core reference for projects intending to
develop such systems.
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Quality Assurance for Reusable Learning Objects on a
Peer-To-Peer Network
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Are learning objects making a comeback? We saw Cengage
basically lay claim to the term last week with
its announcement Linkof a
platform called Learning Objects. In this paper we read of
a project evaluating learning objects using the Learning
Object Review Instrument (LORI), another blast from the
past ../post/5195. But the interesting part of the paper
isn't the evaluation process. It's the effort to assemble
learning activities from reusable learning resources in an
entirely peer-to-peer environment. "The result is, for the
first time, a self-contained end-to-end, P2P eLearning
system with no reliance of any sort on client-server
eLearning systems. This research on quality assurance has
successfully contributed in achieving the overall goal."
Alas, not the first. P2P learning object networks
are yet another Canadian invention
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.201.573&rep=rep1&type=pdf
ahead of is time.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
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