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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Nov 18, 2016
Open Learning in the Future
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Nov 15, 2016
My contribution to the FutureOER discussion
LinkFormal
learning will be less and less focused on resources, which
will be available to everyone, and much more focused on
activities. Tuition will pay for materials, environmental
support and equipment, and professional assistance, often
on an as-needed basis.
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The changing boundaries of the MOOC identity
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This is a MOOC
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created out of the presentations and discussions I and a
dozen or so colleagues had at a colloquium
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on the Isle of Capri at the invitation of the University of
Naples Federico II. The enrollment page is here
LinkOnly the first
week is available so far, featuring short intro videos from
each of us, but the next few weeks will feature the longer
presentations from us all.
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The Learning Analytics Roadmap: The Dalton Plan
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This is an overview of how Moodle will approach learning
analytics under the leadership
https://mootau.moodlemoot.org/mod/data/view.php?d=20&rid=850&filter=1
of Elizabeth Dalton. "Dalton believed the offerings of
analytics spoke too much corporate and too little actual
intervention. It surprised her when the community seemed to
forget or overlook that 'learning analytics are about
learning'. It is understandable that marketing materials
and approaches are made in the context of a business case,
especially for learning organizations focusing on the
enterprise. But she fears the 'metaphor is going too far'."
The article isn't very informative, but you'll want to
follow the Moodle Analytics
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series, the link to the video
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from Dalton) as well as the reference to Schiro's
curriculum theory
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The Capabilities, Opportunities and Motivation
Behaviour-Based Theory of Change Model
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There are numerous behavioural change models, but John
Mayne expresses surprise that they are not used more in
educational literature. This is likely because behaviourist
accounts have largely been replaced with the sort of
cognitive modeling processes described in constructivism.
In any case, Mayne here (12 page PDF
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works with the Michie, Stralen and West (2011) COM-B model:
"behaviour (B) occurs as the result of interaction between
three necessary conditions, capabilities (C), opportunities
(O) and motivation (M)." I wouldn't adopt this approach,
but it's important to note because management programs tend
to favour behaviour-based Theory of Change
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(ToC) models, and this is what projects (like Silicon
Valley's) without a lot of educational background tend to
produce.
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The Coming Revolution in Email Design
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Could we be about to see technological innovations in
email? According to this article, email vendors are
beginning to awaken to the possibility. "The email industry
itself is in a state of reinvention," writes Jason
Rodriguez. "The web is leaking into the inbox." We're
looking at responsive layouts, animation and
interactivity, semantic elements, and tooling and
frameworks. Significantly, Microsoft (which has never
supported HTML email properly) is taking more of an
interest.
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Stereotyping, Behavior, and Belonging in the Open Education
Community
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David Wiley comments on the role of commercial actors in
the open space in light of yesterday’s
revelation that Microsoft has joined the Linux
Foundation
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He writes, "The open source software side of the open house
has absolutely no issue with commercial entities using or
contributing to open source software." That's not exactly
true, but the dissenting voices have long since been
drowned out. Anyhow, it's not the same in the content
world, but the fear of educators, he writes, is
unjustified. "There’s no excuse for judging an
organization based on whether it was incorporated as a
for-profit or non-profit entity." Maybe, but that's not how
commercial use is defined. It's when you slap a pricetag on
a learning resource and prevent them from accessing it
otherwise that people begin to question the practice. And
remember, in most countries, education, unlike software
development, is a public good. Which is why we resist the
commercialization of learning resources.
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HTML 5.1 is the gold standard
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As reported by the W3C: "A couple weeks ago the W3C Web
Platform Working Group published HTML 5.1
Linkas a
Standard. It was merely days after the second anniversary
of the advent of the 5th major version of the core language
of the World Wide Web (you may read the press release
Linkwe put out
when HTML 5 became a W3C recommendation)." Best line
of the day is from Ben Werdmuller
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"According to software precedent, the next version should
be HTML 7."
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Is Audio Really the Future of the Book?
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I don't think anyone has seriously suggested that all books
will be replaced by audio. It's far more plausible to
suggests that all paper versions of books will be
transferred to a digital format. Audio as a medium has its
limitations. But it is a terrific medium to help occupy the
mind while doing other things, like cooking, driving or
trying to sleep. Hence the continuing popularity of radio
and the recent rediscovery of podcasts. This article looks
at the history of audio books - aka 'talking books' - from
its origin in the 1930s. Audio books have always had their
criticisms, as though they were some form of cheating. But
there's also a sense in which audio is more.
“Listening to authors read their own memoirs
introduces an intimacy that cannot be achieved
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without the audio,” writes Amy Harmon.
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Thank You, Pearson: OER, Metadata, Gateways, and Elephants
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There's debate about Pearson's approach to OER, especially
through it's Equella Linkservice
(acquired in 2009). Lisa Petrides posts on 'open source
pillaging
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"see how our non-commercial resources are used
inappropriately here
http://oer.equella.com/access/home.do." Bill Fitzgerald
responds that Pearson is doing the community a service.
"Pearson is helping to expose more people to OER, and
subsequenty increase the adoption of OER," he writes. "By
selling access to communities around OERs, Pearson provides
a gateway, exposing many people to OER who might never have
used them otherwise." But if they're using them simply as
yet another commercial resource, where's the benefit in
that?
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4 learning and development trends for HR leaders to watch
in 2017
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It's not the first
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'end of the year' article (believe it or not) but it's
early. Too early, in my view, but I digress. Anyhow, it
makes four predictions, which I quote:
Video will continue to enable micro-learning
Millennials will continue to value learning and development
as a prime benefit
Gamification and virtual reality will continue to enhance
learning experiences
Mobile learning will continue to expand employee
development goals
Well, *yawn*. All of these (very vague) things are
happening now. If you're going to write an end-of-year
article, try to be useful. How will video be enhanced in
2017? What impact will defining learning as a benefit have?
What new features or types of gamification can we expect?
How will be define employee development goals? Come on - if
you're going to predict, try to actually engage with the
topic.
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In defence of the humanities: Why studying philosophy in a
world where welders earn more still makes sense
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It's telling that this defense of the most non-utilitarian
of disciplines appeals to a utilitarian argument: "Properly
applied, the humanities teach us how to formulate our
views, articulate them and defend them." That's a
side-benefit, but hardly the core of philosophy or any of
the humanities. I studied philosophy motivated by a spirit
of discovery and creativity, a desire to explore ideas and
perspectives and points of view. I didn't care (and still
don't care) whether welders make more money than me (I hope
they do; welders offer a valuable service to us all).
Philosophy doesn't need defending. The reduction of all
things to monetary value needs defending.
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'Augmented Intelligence' for Higher Ed
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As the story says, "IBM picks Blackboard and Pearson to
bring the technology behind the Watson computer to colleges
and universities." Watson is IBM's flagship analytics
engine. Pearson is working on an “intelligent
tutoring system” while Blackboard is working on
"tools for advisers and faculty members."
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What Edtech Can Learn from Theranos
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How do we explain the high-profile silicon Valley failures
in ed tech? Jennifer Carolan suggests we can learn some
lessons from their failures in other domains. First,
"Education expertise, which is critical to building great
education startups, has been undervalued in edtech."
Second, "top performing edtech companies almost always have
at least one investor with deep experience operating and
investing in the space." And third, "efficacy matters even
if it is hard to demonstrate."
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Oxford University to launch first online 'Mooc' course
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This of course is happening more than eight years after the
launch of the first MOOC. One wonders why it's the cause
for a news story.
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On metadata
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Daniel Lemire is exactly right in this article, and we
forget it at our peril: "Most metadata is unreliable.
Maintaining high-quality data is simply hard work. And even
when people have good intentions, it takes more mental
acuity than you might think." And the system is not set up
for it
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"One of the problems with metadata in the real world is
that you are in an adversarial setting.... you still have
to worry that they are going to lie to you."
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Aaron Perzanowski: The End of Ownership
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Summary of a talk on the new state of 'ownership' in the
digital age. "What rights do people think they have when
they ‘buy now.' Aaron and Jason did an experiment
that showed that if people bought through a 'buy now'
button, they thought they have the right to keep, device,
lend, and give their copy. People make this mistake because
they port over their real-world understanding of buying."
In 20 years, will we be free to use our education as we
wish, or will our knowledge of, say, calculus only be
licensed for particular uses?
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YouTube has (apparently) reinstated RSS feeds
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Brian Schrader writes, and I echo every word: "Well if
there's something I wasn't expecting to find tonight, it
was that apparently YouTube has decided to allow users to
follow channels via RSS again
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and unlike the last few years, this time it actually looks
to be officially supported! I have no idea when this
feature was added, but it's the first time I've seen it.
Most articles about YouTube's RSS feeds are either hacks or
from ancient history
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I don't know what mad(wo)man is behind this, but I love
them."
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Auckland Startup Launches Revolutionary eLearning Platform
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I think the Modlettes Linkproduct
looks really interesting but it's quite expensive to get
started (for me, at least) and the two-week trial doesn't
really give me the capacity to try it out
Linkwith a larger audience. The
idea is that "any member of a user organisation can be
given permission to create and upload Modlettes to their
organisation’s channel, all with just a few touches
on their smartphone." The authoring tool permits you to
upload content, but ideally it would allow you to make the
content on the fly - don't just 'upload' video, record
video. For what they deliver, it's way overpriced, but the
concept is good.
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Colossal
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Via Quartz I came across this excellent website devoted to
what is best described as folk art. But what art! Articles
include a Japanese exhibit of rocks
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that look like faces, layered yarn portraits
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of South Africans, a fiery-throated hummingbird
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urban geodes
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on the streets of L.A., Japanese candy
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sculptures, toilet paper rolls squished into funny faces
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a 2017 letterpress lunar calendar
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a metropolis of more than 600 paper sculptures
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and much more. Things like this inspire people, and they
should be seen.
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Ria #33: Dr. Inger Mewburn On Supporting & Training
New Researchers
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In this episode, Dr. Inger Mewburn shares about her
experiences as a research educator and blog writer.
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You’ll Know the Drones Are Coming When…
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So, if a delivery bot using the sidewalk crosses the street
at a crosswalk, does the driver have to give way and stop?
This is the very relevant question asked by Tony Hirst as
new technologies are forcing us to thing of devices as
ethical objects. Do their rights sometimes trump ours - for
example, if I am demonstrating in front of a political
office and impede a sidewalk-using drone, have I committed
an infraction? I've seen a few things recently depicting
the AI phenomenon not as an intelligence question but as a
test of ethics - for example, this article
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from O'Reilly, and episode 334 of Spark
Linkon
CBC. Does an AI have an obligation to the truth
Linkor to respect individual
privacy
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or is it waived from the limits that would constrain
humans?
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Meet the new IFTTT
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IFTTT - which stands for "If This Then That" - has long
enabled people to partner their services with each other.
For example, when I post a new photo on Flickr, I use it to
repost it to my art blog and send a notification to
Twitter. I also use it to create some RSS feeds out of
social media to make keeping track of the industry that
much easier. A similar (but expensive) service is Zapier
LinkAnyhow, IFTTT has overhauled its
technology, switching from 'recipes' to 'applets'. Applets
can do much more than exchange content, for example, this
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"Center the map on your home. When you arrive, your Android
device will be unmuted, automatically and the volume will
be set to 80%."
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Why do we test school kids anyway?
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The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC) is an
"independent think tank" that offers business-friendly
advice to governments and lobbyists. Normally they steer
away from education, but occasionally offer an item like
this recommending that we adopt a pro-testing
standards-based system that is definitely not
constructivist or 21st-century learning. Finn Poschmann
cites "evidence" (from another 'independent think tank',
the C.D. Howe Institute; actually a link error but probably
this
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to argue "too much emphasis on using differently coloured
blocks to represent 100s, 10s, and 1s, and not so much on
“what is 7 times 12?” seems to cause problems
for kids in later years." The evidence seems to say the
opposite; the highest-achieving students
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are in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta, and these are also
the most progressive schools
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in the country. It's where progressive education is
steadfastly resisted - as in Canada's Atlantic provinces -
where we see poor test scores dragging the nation down. See
also: high poverty school succeed
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by focusing on adventure, the arts, project based learning.
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Linked Research
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Linked Research "is set out to socially and technically
enable researchers to take full control, ownership, and
responsibility of their knowledge, and have their
contributions accessible to society at maximum capacity."
The idea is to have open calls for publication and open
reviews. The site is brand new; the most useful bit so far
is the resource page Link
Maybe it will go nowhere, but maybe it will become part of
the Solid Link(decentralised personal
data storage) and Linked Data Platform
Link (W3C standard for RESTful
read-write Linked Data resources) ecosystem. See this
paper
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from the same group from 2015.
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Towards a Trusted Framework for Identity and Data Sharing
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Good article discussing the emerging distributed framework
(a la resource profiles, now known as trusted data
ecosystems
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for digital identity. Two specific technologies are
discussed: a blockchain enabled system called Enigma, and a
lighter weight framework called OPAL. "Enigma
Linkis a
decentralized computation platform enabling different
parties to jointly store and run computations on data while
keeping the data completely private... a much simpler and
easy-to-deploy version called OPAL Link
(OPen ALgorithms) will soon be ready for pilot testing in a
few European countries.
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The Failure of the iPad Classroom
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I think it's far too soon to say the use of technology in
learning has "failed". But sceptics will enjoy this
thorough denouement of educational technology. But a
strand of thought half way through caught my eye. It was
this: the fear that computer screens will "will replace
more valuable, sensory activities, such as putting their
hands through a box of sand, or eating a tub of Play-Doh."
And I wondered: what is the impact of sand on test scores?
How about clay and paint? I don't think we'll find a
significant difference, but the argument against technology
is based on exactly that sort of data.
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Differences in Learning Style Preferences: A Study of
Mainland Chinese College Students Studying in Hong Kong
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There has been considerable argumentation in recent years
to the effect that learning styles do not exist. Such
argumentation, though, is firmly rooted in western culture.
What of the learning styles of different cultures? This
paper examines attitudes toward learning in Cantonese and
non-Cantonese students studying in Hong Kong, and 'local'
Hong Kong students. It concludes that there are significant
differences, and suggests these are based in Hong Kong
students' greater facility in English, which leads them
toward a more visual orientation. Similar results have
been found
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in previous
Linkwork
LinkThe
paper (36 page PDF
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is the subject of an open peer review process, and you can
read earlier versions as well as reviewer comments. Image:
South China Morning Post
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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