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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Oct 28, 2016
Learning Objects Debuts Competency-Based Education Platform
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The website
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doesn't have many words, only the bare minimum to get the
idea across. Campus Technology explains: "Learning Objects
https://www.learningobjects.com/#/" target="_blank, a
company owned by Cengage Learning,
http://www.cengage.com/us/" target="_blank is out with a
new platform that streamlines competency-based education
(CBE) programs at colleges and universities." It's one of
now many entrants in the field. The platform "is designed
to support programs built around learning goals that map to
assessments and learning activities." Actually, the Campus
Technology article doesn't have many words either.
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Choosito & Quick Key Partner to Provide Resource
Suggestions Based on Assessment Results
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Richard Byrne summarizes: "Choosito
https://www.choosito.com/" target="_blank is a neat search
engine for students and teachers to use to find websites
based on reading level.... Quick Key
https://goo.gl/12QRs6" target="_blank is a popular app that
lets teachers quickly score formative assessments." We can
see how the two would go together quite well. See
also this article
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from ed Circuit.
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Virtual Courses Are Now Second Nature
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Post about Cisco's announcement about the launch of a new
Digital Education Platform
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target="_blank from the show floor in Anaheim. According to
the release, the product "integrates Cisco WebEx and Spark
into existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs)." The
illustration is the most interesting part of the
announcement and speaks to Cisco's growing incursion into
the traditional learning technology marketplace.
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100 Stories: The Impact of Open Access
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From the abstract: "This report is a pre-print that has
been submitted for publication with UNESCO. It looks to
answer the question: "why does open access matter?" We
examined 100 stories of impact to produce a framework for
describing the concrete benefits of open access for
readers, authors and institutions. We aspire to move the
open access conversation forward by making the case, backed
by data, that the benefits of open access are real,
widespread and significant." 27 page PDF
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article is mostly an overview, with each of the stories
taking up about one paragraph.
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To promote growth, Canada needs to fixate on data before
credentials
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The proposition is this: "If innovation is going to be the
means through which we achieve growth and talent is the
driving force behind innovation, let’s start by
measuring this key input to growth correctly." For example,
writes Nobina Robinson, "Canadian firms use individuals
holding technologist designations, BAs, and Master’s
degrees more than they use PhDs for R&D." So are we
overproducing PhDs? The data don't tell us. What's key in
drawing this sort of assessment is the explanation for what
we are seeing. Maybe, for example, Canadian firms don't use
PhDs for research because PhDs aren't available, or are too
expensive. And over-reliance on data is a but like using
stock market data the day before a market crash. In many
models, what is happening now is far less important than
our assessment of what is going to happen.
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Wednesday at Educause 2016: Power of introverts, top IT
issues
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So if there's no such thing
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as learning styles, why is a talk about introverts an
EDUCAUSE keynote? "Susan Cain's keynote on the
often-untapped potential of introverts was particularly
relevant to an IT crowd that, when asked to raise
hands, was roughly split 70/30 on introverts and
extroverts." Interestingly, a survey of teachers will give
almost the opposite result. It turns out there are
differences between people, and some of them can classify
us in some interesting, albeit superficial, ways.
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Twitter is killing off Vine
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The news today spread faster than any Vine video (it came
and was over while I was watching a single Bill Mahar
video). Twitter "said it would not delete any Vines that
have been posted — for now, anyway. 'We value you,
your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,' the
company said in a Medium post. 'You’ll be able to
access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the
website online because we think it’s important to
still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have
been made.'" Translation: download your videos now and put
them in your own archive, before they disappear forever the
way your Google Video, Blip and Ustream videos did.
Interestingly, you can read the announcement
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on Medium but not on the Vine website Link
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Patterns in Course Design: How instructors ACTUALLY use the
LMS
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I'll save you the suspense: they mostly use it to
distribute course content and announcements. They also use
it as a gradebook. Even in the 11% use of the 'social'
course archetype, more than half the use is content
distribution. John Whitmer writes, "in initial exploration
we have found a similar distribution in final grades in
courses across all categories, and uneven results across
tool use by course category. This suggests,
counter-intuitively, that grade may be independent of
course category." It's not that counter-intuitive. The
majority of courses are based largely on the transfer of
content from instructor to student. Grades reflect suvvess
using that methodology, and are not some sort of
independent arbiter between methodologies.
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Prosthetic hands link to nerves to make touch feel real
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The leading edge and obviously best use for this technology
is of course to help amputees gain feeling in their
artificial hands. But there is no reason why the technology
developed would stop with amputees, especially if the
interface between mind and machine were not excessively
invasive. The applications could literally redefine what we
mean by "hands on" training and development. Imagine
working with a simulation that could respond to your touch
exactly the way the real environment would. The work was
published in Science Translational Medicine
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Emily L. Graczyk, et.al.
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Against Assessment: You Can't Measure The Unmeasurable
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"Looking at student work completed as part of course sounds
much better than trying to create standardized
assessments," writes John Warner. But "the
massification and standardization of this kind of
assessment seems likely to hold many potentially bad
unintended, but entirely foreseeable consequences." This
sort of focus would shape teaching into certain types of
'best practice', which is the opposite of what classes
should be like. "We should be keeping it as diverse and
exploratory as possible," he says. For example, students
must find meaning in assignments, and this depends on their
individual preferences and needs.
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Chatbots with Social Skills Will Convince You to Buy
Something
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What happens when the chatbot we think is there to help us
is actually a skilled sales agent? This adds a different
flavour to the use of such applications to, say, support
students or provide advice. We might think that's what
they're doing, but in fact they may be more interested in
persuading us to buy some software or to sign up for the
advanced tutorial. Or they may be programmed by some
company to recommend their staff and affiliates as experts
within a domian. If there's no truth in advertising, what
will we then say about adbots? This article discusses Sara
http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/projects/sara/"
target="_blank, an unreasonably persuasive chatbot was
developed by Justine Cassell
http://www.justinecassell.com/" target="_blank at Carnegie
Mellon University.
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Responsive Design and Vertical Video Add Up to Engaging
eLearning
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Most readers will be familiar with responsive design - web
pages and services that adapt to different device sizes and
capabilities. But vertical video? These are the videos shot
in vertical mode (like 'portrait mode', they're taller than
they are wide), like the screen of a mobile phone. They are
typically seen as "as amateurish and was resoundingly
ridiculed." But "that's changing," according to Pamela
Hogle. "Pairing responsive design with innovative use of
vertical video, eLearning designers can create content that
is appealing, usable, and attractive on phones, tablets,
and laptops." Quite so - but it typically also means
shooting two videos, one in each mode.
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The myth of the sophisticated hack
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Good article about hacking. It relevant as there has been a
spike in recent activity, probably timed to coincide with
the election (I'm hoping so; my own website is being caught
in the crossfire). It's important to note, though, as this
article makes clear, the majority of hacks are really very
simply technologically. Hackers often go after the must
vulnerable component: the user. Whether trying commonly
used passwords, or tricking people into giving up personal
information, these attacks rely not on technology but on
social engineering. The article also looks at other attack
types, such as the 'man in the middle', SQL injection, and
endpoint attacks using USBs or mobile devices. If you're
not familiar with these terms, read this article. I would
have includes 'denial of service
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(DOS, or DDOS) attacks, not because they're hacks
(technically they're not) but because they're behind so
much recent disruption.
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Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems
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I'm looking forward more to the latter two parts of this
three-part series in which Terry Anderson "explores the
learning management system (LMS), social media, and
personal learning environments – and how they might
best be used for enhanced teaching and learning" but as
only the first part is available today we'll have to settle
for that. Anderson offers a brisk overview of the LMS and
then examines the challenges: "as the number of features
increases, so does the complexity and challenges of easy
adoption," he writes, while " perhaps the greatest
challenge is the inherent 'school focus' of the LMS." We
don't really get to the promise of this article - how to
get the most out of an LMS - but perhaps what that means is
using social media or personal learning environments
instead.
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'Star Trek: Bridge Crew' finds a new frontier in VR co-op
gaming
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I spent the summer of 1981 in a basement programming every
bit of a TI-99 computer in order to build a Star Trek game.
It wasn't much (but for the time it was great, with a
strategy view and a viewscreen view and enemies that
avoided being shot). You couldn't do a lot with a computer
in those days, but this was always my objective: a fully
immersive Enterprise bridge crew simulation. So, some 35
years later, for me, the future has arrived. Or will
arrive, when I get to play this puppy.
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The NYT buying Wirecutter and Sweethome is so much more
amazing than you think
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You can just imagine the sceptics, says this article: "You
can’t build a tech site that doesn’t publish 20
times a day. You can’t build a content site that
isn’t covered with advertising. You can’t build
an entire business on Amazon affiliate revenue. You
can’t take on Consumer Reports and expect to get any
traction. You can’t pay for this level of in-depth
reporting. Ok, great, you built this, but why would anyone
ever come back?" If I wanted to monetize OLDaily, this
would probably be the route I would take.
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Deep-Learning-Papers-Reading-Roadmap
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This is an unfinished work, but it illustrates nicely the
use of academic papers as open educational resources by
sequencing useful and important resources in such a way as
to guide the reader through the essentials of a discipline.
"The roadmap is constructed in accordance with the
following four guidelines: from outline to detail; from old
to state-of-the-art; from generic to specific areas (and)
focus on state-of-the-art." It's best to think of this as a
proto-MOOC. People can (and should) add resources (not just
papers and books), and these can create branches and
sub-branches. The resources themselves are all openly
accessible. GitHub does provide limited social interaction,
but you would expect a social network or community to grow
around this collection. Actual MOOC classes would involve a
self-managing cohort moving through the material together.
Yes, it takes commitment and effort to learn a subject this
way, and a lot of people don't have the skills. That's
where educational institutions and student support should
come in.
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What is the difference between CSS variables and
preprocessor variables?
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The world of web page style has become complicated and
complex, partially because of the need to support numerous
browsers (both PC based and mobile) and partially because
large-scale projects require variables and functions to
facilitate management. This article looks at one aspect of
that, CSS variables. Of particular value is the discussion
of the role of CSS preprocessors like Stylus
LinkLess
Linkand PostCSS
LinkThese take
youir default values for things like colours and text
styles and turn them into standards-compliant CSS code. Of
course, you could just use CSS variables to accomplish the
same thing without so much work. And you can use Javascript
to manipulate these directly. But you begin to run into
cross-browser implementation issues.
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Reaching the Tipping Point: Insights on Advancing
Competency Education in New England
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This report (89 page PDF
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provides an overview of competency-based education (CBE)
and then drills down to look at some lessons learned in New
England. CBE is motivated by three major strands of
thought, according to the report: first, the current system
is focused on delivery, not results, with the result that
students have gaps in their learning; second, CBE ensures
that students move on to the next grade level only after
they have acquired the required competencies; and third, a
system defined by CBE is rooted in equity and transparent
process. "Rather than expecting compliance from students,
competency-based schools seek to ensure students feel safe,
respected, valued and empowered." You have to more than
just provide opportunity; steps need to be taken to support
and engage students. The report discusses the challenges of
implementing a paradigm-changing program, and stresses
providing support and a focus on results. The
assessment of the New England experience is generally rosy.
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The Great Unbundling of Textbook Publishers
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Th unbundling of the university is more story than fact,
writes Michael Feldstein, but the unbundling of publishing
is imminent. This tipping point may be open educational
resources (OER), which are making textbook publishing
unprofitable. He writes, "The real money will be in a few
areas:
High-end digital products that directly or indirectly
improve student outcomes
Related services that help colleges improve student
outcomes
Services that help colleges improve the unsexy but critical
aspects staying viable, from marketing to administration
Loans to schools looking to make changes that will
(theoretically) make them more sustainable in the long run
but require significant up-front
investment—preferably in the products and services of
the company offering the loan."
Will these separate services be offered under a single
brand, or are we seeing the beginning of a marketplace with
multiple players? As usual, the answer is "yes".
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Open Educational Resources
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This article opens as an account of the nature and history
of open educational resources. But then it turns sceptical.
Michael Q. McShane writes, "open resources are offered free
to users, but they are not necessarily free to produce...
the people who create them want to be paid for doing so."
Fair enough, and for the most part creators are paid by
their school, company, university or government department.
The article then turns to a criticism of a (U.S.) federal
government program. "It is important to examine what
productive role, if any, the federal government can play in
the evolution of OER... the federal government is putting
its thumb on the scale for one particular type of
content-creation mechanism, and that could disrupt the
marketplace." This presumption that there is some 'natural'
state of the marketplace that is 'distorted' by government
intervention is of course a fallacy, as is the presumption
that the government has no business being involved in the
education of its citizens.
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Can Your Productivity Be Measured?
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I think we all knew this, but in this review of Yves
Gingras's Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: Uses and
Abuses
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bibliometrics-and-research-evaluation"
target="_blank we read of a detailed examination of the
topic. "While study of publication and citation patterns,
“on the proper scale, provides a unique tool for
analyzing global dynamics of science over time,†the book
says, the 'entrenchment' of increasingly (and often
ill-defined) quantitative indicators in the formal
evaluation of institutions and researchers gives way to
their abuses."
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Building A Higher Ed Social Media Budget
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I haven't seen this topic covered elsewhere, which is by
itself something to recommend it. "Paying to promote
posts—either to the organic audience or to a target
audience.... is becoming the norm in higher ed. Of the
1,100 respondents to the 2016 CASE Social Media in
Advancement Survey
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59% said they paid to promote posts on Facebook, and 18%
paid for Twitter promotion." In addition to paying social
media companies, institutions will also need to budget for
staff. "Engagement assistants are given 'the keys' to
social media accounts to publish content and respond to
inquiries." And of course there are software costs for
tracking and monitoring response. "Don’t start by
contacting vendors. First, know what data you need. Then,
find a tool (paid or free) that provides you with that
data."
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A Devil’s Dictionary of Educational Technology
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Bryan Alexander hits the mark again and again with this
lighthearted look at terminology in our field. Also
published in Medium
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Ria #30: Dr. Sean Zdenek On Rhetorical Analysis
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On this episode, Dr. Sean Zdenek discusses his book Reading
Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which focuses
on rhetorical analyses of closed captions.
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Internet of Broken Things
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As is always the case, technology as planned works very
differently from technology when mixed with humans. Witness
the Internet of Things (IoT), the nascent linking of
phones, printers, cameras, and a host of other dumb smart
devices. They have now become the prime vector internet
attacks. As Michael Caulfield says, " I worry that
it’s not just an internet of things, but a
proprietary mess of interdependent services built on the
shifting sands of unstable business models. Unless we
develop standards and protocols that reduce that
proprietary interdependency we’re eventually going to
have a lot bigger problem on our hands than Twitter
outages." True. But what are the odds that the corporate
community will get this right?
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Geishas, headdresses out as Canadian universities stave off
offensive Halloween costumes
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In Canada we have a tradition of dressing in costume on or
around Halloween (October 31). Traditionally these costumes
were of scary things (such as skeletons, ghosts or
monsters) but it has since branched out to include most
anything (I once went out as the Empire State Building). We
are now beginning to see the limits of 'most anything', and
in one noted case, Brock University's student union has
prohibited "any form of headdress, costumes that mock
suicide or rape, those depicting transgender activist
Caitlyn Jenner, or outfits featuring a culture’s
traditional attire" at its pubs and events." So of course
some people are crying "censorship", as though mocking
someone's culture or personal life is somehow a form of
free speech. I think the student union's message is clear
and reasonable: if you're going to be racist or offensive,
don't do it here.
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Has AI (Finally) Reached a Tipping Point?
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Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers a useful overview of
contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) from a
non-technical perspective referencing Stanford
University's One Hundred Year
LinkStudy on Artificial
Intelligence (AI100, 52 page PDF
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including the list of 'hot' areas of current study (quoted,
p.9):
Large-scale machine learning - algorithms to work with
extremely large data sets.
Deep learning - has facilitated object recognition in
images, video labeling, and activity recognition
Reinforcement learning - experience-driven sequential
decision-making
Robotics - train a robot to interact with the world around
it
Computer vision - form of machine perception; automatic
image and video captioning.
Natural Language Processing - systems that are able to
interact with people through dialog; machine translation
Collaborative systems - autonomous systems that can work
collaboratively with other systems and with humans
Crowdsourcing and human computation - make automated calls
to human expertise
Algorithmic game theory and computational social choice
draw - handle potentially misaligned incentives
Internet of Things (IoT) - devices interconnected to
collect and share their abundant sensory information
Neuromorphic - mimic biological neural networks
The report notes, "Contrary to the more fantastic
predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel
found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to
humankind. No machines with self-sustaining long-term
goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely
to be developed in the near future."
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Quality Standards for Competency-Based Educational Programs
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You have until December 1 to provide comments
Linkto the
Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN
Link on this draft set of guidelines
for quality in competency-based education. The ideas is
that "Competency-based education uses an intentional and
transparent approach to curricular design that provides a
learner with a clear pathway to completion based on an
academic model that builds a unified body of knowledge
leveraging frameworks, disciplines, standards, workforce
needs, and national norms... Each competency is explicitly
stated and unambiguously provides descriptions of what a
learner must master before program completion... The
assessment strategy provides multiple modalities of
assessment intentionally aligned to learning outcomes and
uses a range of assessment types to measure learning and
the transfer of learning into novel contexts."
The eight elements, with expanded principles and related
standards, include (quoted from the press release
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Coherent, competency-driven program and curriculum design
Clear, measurable, meaningful and complete competencies
Credential-level assessment strategy with robust
implementation
Intentionally designed and engaged student experience
Collaborative engagement with external partners
Transparency of student learning
Evidence-driven continuous improvement processes
Demonstrated institutional commitment to capacity for CBE
innovation
I couldn't find the actual quality standards anywhere on
the C-BEN website (you have to sign up for the survey to
view them), but can access this copy (11 page PDF
Link.pdf)
at Inside Higher Ed.
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H5P Examples and Downloads
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This site came up in one of the online discussions I
follow. From the website: "H5P makes it easy to create
interactive content by providing a range of content types
for various needs. Preview and explore these content types
below. You can create interactive content by adding the H5P
plugin to your WordPress
https://h5p.org/documentation/setup/wordpress"
target="_blank, Moodle https://h5p.org/moodle"
target="_blank or Drupal
https://h5p.org/documentation/setup/drupal" target="_blank
site, or you can create content directly on H5P.org
Linkand embed it on your
website."
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Attending to the Digital
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Interesting article from Audrey Watters, as is so often the
case, and I like the focus on the origins of the meaning of
the word 'attention' and the oft-cited concern that the
digital is creating an attention deficit. "You can see that
the noun is accompanied by all sorts of verbs. We pay
attention. We give attention. Attract attention. Draw
attention. Call attention. Fix attention. At which
noun-verb combination are we failing?" Fair enough. And the
idea of the 'attention economy', with its values firmly
planted in the capitalist ethos, is surely typical of
western culture. But I was surprised to see her overlook
the sense of 'attend' meaning 'to wait'. That's what the
french verb attendre actually means. To wait, and to wait
on, to attend. This sense changes the meaning of such
phrases as "the tongues of dying men enforce attention like
deep harmony." In the words of Arcade Fire: We used to wait
LinkNot any more.
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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem
for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is
tracking.
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Some good points here following Google's quiet change
of policy
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to allow personally identifiable web tracking. "Google
could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a
user by name, based on everything they write in email,
every website they visit and the searches they
conduct," says
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Julia Angwin. "Tracking is no less an invasion of privacy
in apps and browsers than it is in homes, cars, purses,
pants and wallets," says Doc Searls. "Our apps and browsers
are personal and private. So are the devices on which we
use them...Tracking people without their clear and
conscious permission is wrong... Claiming that advertising
funds the “free” Internet is wrong." True. But
tracking isn't the only problem with advertising. I tried
looking at the new map of the Galaxy today and even with
ad-blockers turned on couldn't see it behind the barrage of
popups and auto-play videos running on news sites.
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