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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 07, 2017
Open Education Sweden
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This is a very comprehensive look at open education in
Sweden, beginning with the country's open access policies
in general and proceeding through a detailed list of
specific open education and OER initiatives in the country.
"Because of its emphasis on independent studies, Sweden is
ranked among the world leaders in higher education. The
teaching model applied at Swedish universities and
university colleges is expressed in the motto 'freedom with
responsibility.' Students have somewhat less teacher-led
time than in other systems of higher education, mainly
pursuing their studies on their own or in groups. Sweden
also aims to have one of the most research-intensive
university systems in the world. The uptake in higher
education among Swedes has risen sharply over the last few
years. In the autumn term of 2012, there was a record
126,000 first-time applicants to higher education in
Sweden."
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We Don’t Need More Mousetraps!
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In the spirit of Who Moved My Cheese
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Tim Kastelle makes the case that innovation should not be
measured in terms of new discoveries, patents and
publications, and instead focuses on "something that solves
actual problems for real people." This, he argues, is a
circular process. "We talk to people a bit to understand
what problems they’re struggling with, then build
something that might help with that to see if it works. And
we do this repeatedly." Fair enough, but my experience is
that when you ask people what they want, they ask for a
better mousetrap, and they won't buy it from you until you
have patents and publications to prove it works. Real
innovation goes beyond what people say they want, and
addresses challenges they never imagined could be solved.
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Bold ideas for a better world
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This is a list of finalists from "the first Google.org
Impact Challenge in Canada
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nationwide competition to find and fund the most innovative
nonprofits that are using technology to tackle tough social
problems." There are two education-related finalists: The
LearnCloud Portal, an offline, tablet-based curriculum to
help indigenous high school students, and Services Advisor
"an application aimed at welcoming new Canadians to our
shores, making it easier for newcomers to access immigrant
services like mentorship and employment skills."
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Bots go bust
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I like predictions that go against the grain, especially
when I am fundamentally in agreement with them. Here are
the predictions:
Bots go bust
Deep learning goes commodity
AI is cleantech 2.0 for VCs
MLaaS dies a second death
Full stack vertical AI startups actually work
One explanatin summarizes a lot of this: "The bottom line
on why it doesn’t work: the people that know what
they’re doing just use open source, and the people
that don’t will not get anything to work, ever, even
with APIs." Heh. Read the rest for some better insights
than the vendor-based predictions will offer.
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Why students in Moldova are performing better
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Between 2009 and 2015 Moldova significantly increased its
PISA scores. This article looks for possible explanations
and finds three: schools adopted a reporting process,
per-capita financing was introduced, and baccalaureate exam
security was enhanced. These explanations are unsatisfying,
and there isn't any actual evidence that they were the
cause of attainment increases in that time. Alternatives,
such as greater mobility, enhanced internet access, and
increased cooperation with European nations, also suggest
themselves.
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How “News Literacy†Gets the Web Wrong
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Michael Caulfield astutely diagnoses what is wrong with a
lot of the 'new literacy' guidelines for evaluating news
reports on the web. These guidelines spend a lot of time
urging students to assess the trustworthiness of the
website, instead of getting to the source of the report
being passed along. It's as though these guideline authors
are still rooted in the world of newspapers where you have
no way to check additional references or original sources,
both of which are often available on the web. Who cares
whether you read something on Kos or Facebook? What matters
is where the story came from originally, and the web
provides abundant resources to help you find that. And -
notably - exactly the same is true for online research
generally. We trace the work back to the original
publication, then we assess the method.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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