Laden...
Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Oct 07, 2016
Younger adults more likely than their elders to prefer
reading news
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One of the things proponents of internet media have long
said is that people will read more than they ever have
before. This was to allay fears on the part of older
generations that too much screen time would make children
illiterate. Now while it appears the older generation may
have been speaking from experience, we see that the younger
generation turns to text, not video, when learning about
the news. "Younger adults are far more likely than older
ones to opt for text, and most of that reading takes
place on the web." The problem with video news is that
you have to sit and wait for it. That's find if you're in a
receptive consuming mode, but if you're engaged and active
online, you want the news now.
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Comparing the Effectiveness of Self-Learning Java Workshops
with Traditional Classrooms
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One of the longstanding criticisms of self-managed learning
is that students are unable to generate the motivation or
technique to accomplish their goals. This may be true in
cases where traditional instruction is simply converted
into online delivery, but well-designed instruction (as we
have seen for decades in things like computer games)
supports students quite well. This contention is confirmed
by the present study, which evaluates the use of 'spoken
tutorials' to teach the Java programming language.
Researchers have been reporting on large-scale uses of this
method for several years. In the current study, "the
performance of college students who self-learned Java
through the Spoken Tutorial method is found to be better
than that of conventional learners." Audio cues and visual
examples guide students through the tasks, where students
actually perform the actions (for example, author lines of
code) for themselves.
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The Effects of Captioning Videos on Academic Achievement
and Motivation: Reconsideration of Redundancy Principle in
Instructional Videos
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Cognitive load theory tells us that presenting the same
message in different modalities reduces students' ability
to learn. This is known as the 'redundancy principle'. But
this paper (10 page PDF
Link, released today,
presents disconfirming evidence. "The findings indicated
that, in contrast to the suggestion of the redundancy
principle, motivation and achievement scores of students do
not vary according to the instructional video type under
investigation (captioned vs. non-captioned)."
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An Interview With an Educational Realist and Grumpy Old Man
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I'm no fan of Paul A. Kirschner but I was curious as to
what a guest post featuring an interview with him would
look like (those of us who write blogs are quite familiar
with the never-ending stream of 'guest posts' being offered
by this or that source - they're always trying
to promote Linksomething).
It's not a bad interview, and it assures us that
Kirschner's intentions are honorable. And it linked tho
this guest post by Kirschner and Mirjam Neelen, which in
turn links to their blog
Linkwhich was
new to me. I've signed up, so now I'll be passing along
things like this useful discussion on feedback
Link
as well as pondering the basis for things like this ad
hominem attack
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on unnamed proponents of self-directed and self-regulated
learning. Some things never change, I guess.
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How user comments got ruined—and what to do about it
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I took the test
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and discovered I would have rejected all five of the
comments (they would have allowed three). Of course I've
never really had the fine-line judgements to make on my own
site (it was either well-considered criticism from a
regular reader or someone selling free essay services -
nothing in between). But in some previous incarnations -
most notably the 'NewsTrolls
Link//www.newstrolls.com/news/threads/list.cgi'
site I co-founded in 1998 - these questions came up. My
attitudes have hardened a bit since those days. I don't
care (much) what people wrote on their own sites, but if
it's going to show up on my site (or in my news stream) I
care a lot. When I reopen comments on downes.ca they will
be strictly moderated (I've thought a lot about how
to do this over the years, and it's going to take some tech
I still need to write).
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Bots are the new apps, only they suck (for now)
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I have resisted the urge (so far) to blast OLDaily to
subscribers through What's App and Messenger. But I could -
and I could even make it interactive - send me some
indication of what you're interested in, and I could keep
you up to date. Your wrist would tingle and you'd get a new
note any time something happened in the world of, say,
MOOCs. But should I do this? Goodness, no. I probably
shouldn't even have a Twitter channel (and I have shuttered
as useless my Facebook channel). But I want to be useful -
a stark contrast from advertisers, who want to be in your
face, no matter what. Privacy, security, trust - these
elude the world of social media, and will continue to so
long as we depend on centralized platforms like Facebook.
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An ethnographic interview with an AI
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This is a video of a presentation by Genevieve Bell
https://twitter.com/feraldata"
data-versionurl="https://darcynorman.net/amber/cache/a9a4e652cd0565665fa0cc0d91ec9cc4/"
data-versiondate="2016-09-29T20:24:11+00:00"
data-amber-behavior=" from Intel at O’Reilly’s
AI Conference
http://conferences.oreilly.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-deep-learning-bots-ny"
data-versionurl="https://darcynorman.net/amber/cache/99b2ae8f565ca3414995f2608a3e361f/"
data-versiondate="2016-09-29T20:18:54+00:00"
data-amber-behavior=". D'Arcy Norman comments, "I
don’t think of AI as trying to invent an artificial
human, but it’s extremely important to think about
the cultural, moral, racial, and gender biases that get
baked into code through histories of projects." We are
reminded of Microsoft's attempt to create a chatbot that
went terribly wrong
Link
It's a dilemma. If you want society to get bnetter, your
AIs have to do more than merely draw what they know from
society. But 'guiding' these AIs then becomes a position of
great responsibility, and who exactly is well-placed to
take this on? Besides me, I mean.
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The Commoditization of Deep Learning
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'Deep Learning' is the use of neural networks to do smart
things, like grade papers or make recommendations. This
article addresses the "commoditization" of deep learning,
that is, the trend toward making the data and algorithms
available for free. That's why you could use an open source
library like Tensor Flow Link
to do neat things with open data
LinkIt still takes
some smarts, but it's getting easier. The point of this
article, though, is that it still takes computing power -
quite a lot of it - and that's what companies like Amazon
and Google really want to sell you. And they can charge
more for it if the complementary products - data and
software - are free. And it gives them a market advantage,
because while anyone can produce data or write algorithms,
it takes a large enterprise with a lot of resources to set
up data and computing centres. So that's the play.
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Scaling Learning in an Exponential World
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You've been reading a lot of the same stuff by writers
featured in these pages over the years. In this article,
John Hagel argues that scaling learning "means developing
new shared practices that can increase impact in a world of
mounting performance pressure." It may seem like it's more
efficient to focused on standards and best practices, but
against this is the need to learn on an ongoing basis. "The
key imperative in a rapidly changing environment is to find
ways to develop new knowledge, rather than merely sharing
existing knowledge." This has to happen where the knowledge
is being used, and not in a research lab or training room.
"The goal is to improve performance more rapidly –
that’s why focusing on developing new shared
practices is so powerful. It provides us with results that
we can measure and learn from." See also: Institutional
Innovation
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For Tim Cook and Apple, the Future is AR
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AR stands for 'augmented reality' and it's the idea that we
can overlay the real world with digital objects. The first
instance of mass-AR is probably Pokemon Go, though people
have been trying with things like QR codes for decades, it
seems. The trick is to make AR (a) useful, or at least,
fun, and (b) easy. Using identifiers like QR codes have the
advantage of being very precise, but you need a reader.
Using GPS coordinates is easier, but less precise, and
doesn't really work indoors. We'll probably find there are
competing AR 'networks', each using the physical world, but
overlaying different (and incompatible, naturally)
interpretations. It won't be long where it will be as
natural for a web site to have a GPS identifier (latitude
and longitude, the way photos do now) as it is to have a
URL.
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Institutional Repositories: Response to comments
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Today's new word is 'Quasitory' and I believe it is
invented (in this use) in Stevan Harnad's response
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to Richard Poynder on the role of institutional
repositories. Poynder is clarifying emarks he made in a
recent interview, and in particular responding to the
Confederation of Open Access Repository (COAR) Executive
Director Kathleen Shearer's response
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-media/more-on-the-future-of-repositories-response-to-richard-poynder/("The
reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated").
Poynder writes, " 22 years after Stevan Harnad began
his long campaign
Linkto
persuade researchers to self-archive, it is clear there
remains little or no appetite for doing so, even though
researchers are more than happy to post their papers on
commercial sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate." These
commercial repository sites - which Harnad calls
'Quasitories' - "are doing just as badly as IRs." And the
largest Quasitory of all, Google Scholar, is waiting
patiently for academia to get its act together, writes
Poynder. The same story is being played out in the field of
open educational resources, and (as Harnad says) "the
optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The
Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one
global, interlinked virtual library.. and its [peer review]
expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the
[subscription cancellation] savings." Image: most image
search results were of British politicians, but here's a
picture of Laurel and Hardy which also turned up (from a
MoneyAM discussion forum
http://www.moneyam.com/InvestorsRoom/posts.php?tid=8123&from=20948
from 2005).
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Crafting Connected Courses: How The Web Is Won at DML2016
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I wish people would listen to old time radio westerns
LinkNot the kid shows
from the 40s, but the so-called 'adult' westerns like
GunSmoke, Fort Laramie, Frontier Gentleman, and others.
They're mostly from the 1950s - a time that included
post-war trauma, the Korean conflict, and the Red Scare.
But they work against all that - if you can ignore the
cigarette commercials, you'll be surprised to see how
progressive these shows are. Now all of this has nothing to
do with the Alan Levine article I'm linking to here, except
for this: you see the same values in today's open learning
movement that you do in those 1950s radio westerns: the
value of cooperation, the need for network, the importance
of every person in the community, the encouragement of
diversity, and more. "Connected is the way the web is won."
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From Dabbling to Doing: 6 Tools That Excite Kids About
Coding
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This is a bit of a listicle, but I liked the way the six
items selected progress from very simple stuff (Scratch,
Puzzlets) to more involved coding platforms (Google CS
First, Vidcode). Computer science today gets pretty deep in
a hurry and developing a basic aptitude for formalization
at an early age is probably essential. But like everything
involving learning, students have to want to do it, so
lively applications that get students creating (and seeing
what they've created) right from day one are the way to go.
I especially like the Karaoke machine students can create
and share with VidCode.
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Map of the Internet
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I think the presentation is the most interesting part of
this series of articles offering an overview of today's
internet. The individual articles address things like the
undersea cables, the physical infrastructure in pictures,
and challenges of censorship and the potential break-up of
the internet. At the same time, there's a well-deserved
sense of awe. "What allows all this to happen is the most
complex piece of physical infrastructure ever created."
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An Inside Peek Into the Education World’s Obsession with
Minecraft
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My own experience with MUDs served a similar function for
me, though of course I was a lot older. The closest
equivalent from my childhood is, I guess, the sand pile in
our back yard. ÈThe collaboration, engagement, and
exploration opportunities that Minecraft provides are
well-suited to give kids the experiences they need to build
tomorrow’s solutions—but Minecraft is just
where they start."
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Online Education Is Now a Global Market
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The Chronicle interviews FutureLearn head Simon Nelson. The
gist of the interview is, first, that universities have
completely absorbed MOOCs, and second, that this is opening
up international markets. "Universities are using MOOCs in
a whole range of much more strategic ways. To teach their
own students, to create pathways into their core programs,
to work in different ways with employers and transform the
way they offer training and development services to them,
etcetera. I don’t see any of that narrowing the
supply of free open courses to the world. Actually, I think
it’s going to significantly expand it."
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Citizen scientists now do more than collect data
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I've always felt that there is a huge learning opportunity
here. "The nature of citizen science is changing; citizens
aren’t simply used solely for data collection,”
says Steven Gray, assistant professor of community
sustainability at Michigan State University and the
study’s lead author. “They are designing the
protocols, conducting the experiments, securing funding,
and implementing the plans. They may not have the
credentials of scientists, but they have the capacity to
engage in the same approaches.”
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Coursera’s superheroes: Meet the Mentor team
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Coursera is now - and a bit surprisingly - drawing on
volunteer labour. "Coursera Mentors are learners who
volunteer to provide academic support in courses
they’ve already completed on Coursera. To be eligible
to be a Mentor, a learner must have passed the course with
a good grade and an exemplary forum participation record.
Mentors also complete a 2-week training course that covers
best practices..." You can see some of them here
Link
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Open Educational Practices: A literature review
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Useful literature review that breezes through the subject
with a light touch. At virtually any point it could dive
more deeply, but the 35 pages read briskly and are a fairly
comprehensive overview of the subject. I found the latter
parts of the paper less useful - why do we need a
'theoretical framework' to talk about open educational
practices? To my mind (and this is a general point) the
material itself tells us how it should be discussed;
bringing in a framework imposes an external frame of
relevance that can be (and is probably) inappropriate for
the current domain. Anyhow. I'll take off my "critic's" hat
now. Heather Ross describes the context in this short blog
post Linkwhich should be
read prior to reading the review. Image: Wikipedia
Link
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Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
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This is a long and detailed report that blows through tech
journalism like a breath of fresh air. It had me thinking
about what it is that i do with this newsletter - not
journalism, not curation - is it tech criticism? Maybe.
But: "criticism carries negative connotations—that of
criticizing with unfavorable opinions rather than
critiquing to offer context and interpretation." That's not
me. And also: "There’s so much glittery, breathless
writing about technology that fails to slow down and think
about why we’re making these things, who we’re
making them for, and who we’re leaving out when we
make them." That's not me either. Anyhow. Beginning toward
the end of the first third of the article there is a
terrific set of "traps of styles and tactics" that ought to
be required reading for anyone in the genre. There's some
discussion about who is a critic and where they publish
(sadly, mostly in mainstream pubs). Then (around the
halfway mark) there's a set of "critical lenses" (I don't
like the term 'lens' employed in this way - it implies
there's something 'real' that's being interpreted).
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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
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Sadly, it really is like this. "Wait, I learned OOP in
college, I thought that was good? -So was Java before being
bought by Oracle. I mean, OOP was good back in the days,
and it still has its uses today, but now everyone is
realising modifying states is equivalent to kicking babies,
so now everyone is moving to immutable objects and
functional programming." Sigh. Read the whole thing. Every
reference is real. I think.
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Initial xAPI/Caliper Comparison
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xAPI and Caliper are systems for recording student
activities, offered by ADL and IMS respectively. There are
ongoing discussions between the two organizations regarding
how the overlap and/or interoperate. They note "Caliper and
xAPI have very different origins. The core xAPI is to
enable any type of experience and evidence tracking, both
electronic and physical performance and not limited to just
web-based courses (as is the case for SCORM). Caliper
is the manifestation of the IMS Learning Analytics
Framework and the Sensor API and Metric Profile(s) are the
first two components of that framework. xAPI and
Caliper are NOT equivalent. Adoption should not be
‘one-or-the-other’, instead it is a
‘horses-for-courses’ decision." This document
offers an excellent table-based comparison of the two
specifications.
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Contextual Cognition in Social Simulation
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I have mentioned context a lot over the years and never
taken the time to discuss it properly. This chapter (22
page PDF Link is
far from a complete discussion but offers a good first
look, especially with respect to related concepts such as
"tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), the frame problem in AI
(McCarthy and Hayes 1969), framing in psychology (Goffman
1974), and the “situation” (Barwise and Perry
1983)." For me, context is essential for determining the
salience of relevant factors; salience, in turn, defines
what will count as 'similar' for the purpose of cognition.
This paper looks in particular at the impact of context in
social simulation; "very few social or cognitive
simulations represent any of the processes for dealing with
such context-dependency." Given that we are often not even
consciously aware of contextual factors, how would we model
contextual cognition? You can't just learn something (a
model, say), you also have to learn where it works best.
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What’s Wrong with MOOCs: One-Size-Fits-All Syndrome
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Jim Shimabukuro disc usses a recent initiative by the
Malaysian government to implement MOOCs in that country.
"The Malaysian government is taking steps to “make 30
per cent of higher education courses available as massive
open online courses (or MOOCs) by 2020” (Financial
Review
Link
2 Oct. 2016)." His concern is that the initiatiuve is
relying on a single MOOC platform - OpenLearn, based in
Australia - to offer the materials. This is too narrow, he
says. "The bottom line is that a MOOC, any MOOC,
isn’t a place. Instead, it’s a manifestation of
a pedagogy that’s continually reconstructed by the
individual participants, teacher and students. It exists
not in the world out there but within each
participant’s mind. As such, its shape and form are
limited only by the individual’s imagination. Thus,
to artificially and arbitrarily confine its form is
counterintuitive." That was how we developed MOOCs
originally, and where they should return again in the long
term.
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Student-Centered Educational Software
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This post combines results of two sets of studies. The
first suggests that students are more likely to complete
their program if they are emotionally supported and if they
take part in experiential learning. The second suggest they
are more likely to complete if they have a sense of
self-efficacy, experience a sense of belonging, and
perceive value in the curriculum. Success, writes Michael
Feldstein, means helping "campuses make the cultural
shift toward a focus on data-informed and research-grounded
teaching excellence." It makes sensed that the future of
educational technology isn't 'content delivery excellence'.
But we need to ask whether we need to cater to the five
points mentioned here, of figure out ways to surmount them.
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Sitelock Scam
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When you receive a report that your website has been
hacked, the first thing to do is not to panic. That may be
hard to do with your host provider warning that your site
might be deleted forever unless you take immediate action.
And as Jim Groom reports here, tthey may suggest that you
pay hundreds of dollars for security. But take a deep
breath, and check. It might be nothing - when Groom's site
was reported, for example, it turned out only to contain a
link to some other site that was on a Google blacklist.
"SiteLock wanted to charge me $199 to remove a link from a
blog post," he writes. Companies prey on users'
inexperience. We should be thinking about ways to counter
that.
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Book Review: 'Bourgeois Equality'
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This review of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality ends
too suddenly, almost in mid-thought, which is a pity. It
would have been worth reading Charles Wolf's criticism of
the 768 page tome (especially since it won't appear openly
on the internet in my lifetime - I remember when young I
could consume books voraciously, getting a stack from the
used book store or library and setting up in the park or
the pub; now, however, it would cost my salary to consume
books at that rate. My 'wealth' has increased but access to
what I need hasn't).
There are several themes in Bourgeois Eqiuality, of whch
I'll mention two: first is the idea that the increase in
the absolute wealth of the poor is more significant than
the growing gap between between the wealthy and the rest.
This is an old ideaa, popularized in an early TED talk
Link
and does not withstand scrutiny - if you can't buy the
things that are important (food in Venezuela, security in
Syria, an exit visa in Iran) then you are vulnerable, and
your recent rise in wealth is a chimera. The second is that
wealth is created by ideas, and the ability of all classes
to create and implement ideas is the key to prosperity. But
this argument is what Nathan Leites termed a
“self-sealer” - no matter what the development,
good or bad, the idea preceded the implementation.
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The ethical hole at the centre of ‘publish or perish’
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The abuses
Link
in academic publishing are well known. It has led to the
creation of what is known as Beall's list
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of predatory academic publishers. We are pursuing the wrong
metrics, argue Julius Kravjar and Marek Hladík. "The
current system of publishing scholarly papers needs a new
paradigm... Perhaps a primary argument could be that
science does not produce products so much as create ideas."
That sounds great, but in practice it would simply lead to
a system of gathering and counting ideas (and thereby, lead
to systems of producing and counting fake ideas, much like
the patent system). The problem doesn't lie in what's
counted, the problem lies in the counting.
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Postsecondary Success Advocacy Priorities
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The Gates Foundation has announced (22 page PDF
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the positions it will advocate (and presumably fund) for
2016. It's focused on the U.S. college and university
system and stresses the development of networks supporting
personal paths for students. There are three major areas of
focus:
a streamilining of data and information flows, so that
comprehensive information on every student is available to
all agencies
development of less complicated, more timely and more
effective financial and financial aid policies
student centered pathways leading directly and efficiently
to degree completion
None of these priorities is misplaced per se but the
program seems very focused on US-based students and
educational institutions, and seems to focus on working
within the traditional institutional structure. Though I
guess one could ask, what else would they do? Via EdSurge
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The digital age has destroyed the concept of ownership, and
companies are taking advantage of it
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The headline is probably not news to the people reading
this article. But to people in the movie theatres watching
the Cineplex advertising that they can "own this movie"
with a superticket
Linkmany
of the limitations may come as a surprise. The fact is we
are being misled with the purchase of just about everything
today - limitations on digital copying, restrictions on
repairing our cars or our lawn mowers, constraints on
resale or exchange, no rights of satire
Link
and fair use - none of these would be acceptable at the
prices we pay, and yet all of them constitute deliberately
hidden limitations on our purchase rights. If I, an
ordinary citizen, tried to do this, it would be fraud. But
in the digital marketplace it's business as usual. Do
people care? No. "Before anything like that can happen
millions of users will have to, at a bare minimum,
acknowledge that huge swaths of their lives are legally
controlled by contracts they have never even read."
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