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by Stephen Downes
Dec 23, 2016
Feature Article
Icts In Higher Education Systems Of Arab States: Promises And Effective Practices - A Summary Report
Stephen Downes, Dec 19, 2016.
The Regional Forum on ICTs in Higher Education Systems of Arab States was held in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 7 and 8, 2016, with the objective to provide conceptual clarification with respect to the usage of ICTs in Higher Education, to take stock of existing initiatives in the Arab Region, and to contribute to enhancing cooperation and synergies among stakeholders. This report summarizes these discussions, first with respect to some specific topics, and second, with respect to overall themes and concepts.
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Principles
Ray Dalio, 2016/12/23
While I agree that it is important to understand the values and principles that guide your life, I am cautious about formalizing them into rules, and I warn against self-serving rationalization. We see both in this article by Ray Dalio. At the core of his value set are two principles (one of which is stated explicitly): first, the value of seeking the truth, and second, the value of focused hard work. But is is equally an error to suppose that you have found the truth, and that your success is specifically due to hard work. I'm sure he believes "reality + dreams + determination = a successful life" but it also helps to get a job as a caddy at age 12 and to fill your summers as an intern on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. For me, empathy is as important as truth, and happiness is as important as hard work.
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words, 2016/12/23
This is one of the better things I've read in a while, and I also like the way it's presented. The point of departure is the concern, expressed by many, that artificial intelligence might exceed humanity and ultimately wipe us out. Maciej Cegłowski has very clearly thought about this in some depth, and the argument he lays out against superintelligence is a nimble application of demonstration and reason. The talk ventures into some interesting territory as well, including the foundational crisis in mathematics, and the surprising story of the great Australian Emu War. And there are some searing comments about the AI community that spawned the argument in the first place, "like nine year olds camped out in the backyard, playing with flashlights in their tent. They project their own shadows on the sides of the tent and get scared that it’s a monster. Really it's a distorted image of themselves that they're reacting to." Awesome.
Simplicity
Alan Baker, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016/12/23
Keep it simple. Yes, that excellent advice - but what exactly do we mean by "simplicity". As this article notes, on the one hand there's ontological simplicity, in which the fewest number of objects possible is contemplated. But there's also syntactic simplicity, in which the shortest formal principles are employed. And what about causal simplicity, which prefers the fewest number of causes for each event? This raises the question of why we would prefer simplicity at all. I face that a lot - education is filled with simply explanations and principles that are probably wrong.
Knovation Integration Services Simplifies Access to OER
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2016/12/22
This is an entrant into the single-signon arena, and it does so by offering easier access to open educational resources (why anyone would need to sign on to access open educational resources is not explained). And it's not clear to me how all if this is "simplified". "Knovation maintains a collection of thousands of online lessons and learning objects for use by teachers, which are maintained in its Content Collection, searchable via netTrekker and organized and shared with icurio." Related: ISKME partners with Clever which offers - you guessed it - single sign-on for OERs.
The DigitalLearningification of Museums
Barry Joseph, DMLcentral, 2016/12/22
Wouldn't it be interesting if libraries and museums took over the bulk of the educational responsibilities we currently assign to schools? That's not exactly what Barry Joseph is suggesting here, but it seems like a logical consequence. He does make the case that "that museums are unique and influential informal learning institutions that can be powerful spaces for young people to learn, connect and create digital media." Why then would you also need schools and lessons and such. Oh sure, there's a scheduling and management problem, but young people could explore different fields of interest at different facilities over time.
Death of the Textbook, Really
Ryan Petersen, Jared Pearlman, EdTech Digest, 2016/12/22
the use of digital textbooks in academia has faced two related problems: first, the textbooks are still more expensive that other options, such as buying and reselling physical textbooks, and second, students are in increasing numbers simply not buying the required texts. While Ryan Petersen and Jared Pearlman suggest that this may herald a new model for textbook publishing, it's not clear the solution they describe will be greeted with open arms. The model, called "Inclusive Access" offers a radical solution: force everybody to buy the digital materials, and add the cost to their course fees. Its a model only a publisher would love, and does nothing to address the core issues.
Top 100 - Innovaciones educativas
Fundación Telefónica, 2016/12/22
This resource (169 page PDF) is in Spanish. Don't let that deter you. The actual list starts on page 43 and in the pages following there's a lot to explore. If you do read some Spanish it's also worth looking at the first 27 pages where they offer major themes and the lay of the land in educational technology. "Estamos seguros de que los resultados de este esfuerzo serán una herramienta que permitirá difundir un conocimiento que consideramos de gran valor para toda la comunidad educativa y la sociedad en general."
Next Generation Science Standards-Based Assessments Are Coming. How Should Teachers Prepare?
Jane Jacobson, EdSurge, 2016/12/22
This no doubt will attract criticism from the usual sources. "Rather than asking that students simply 'know' the science of reproduction, the NGSS requires that they 'develop models to describe' its processes." It's a constructivist approach; rather than simply being given models, students need to build them for themselves. The reason (in my mind) is that each student's cognitive environment is unique, and models developed from this environment - you can't simply impose it from above. Aligned with this, the NGSS creates "three dimensional learning" (3D learning). "in 3-LS1-1, the basic Core Idea is reproduction, the SEP is use of models, and the CCC is patterns of change."
CRTC rules high-speed Internet a basic service, sets targets
Christine Dobby, Globe, Mail, 2016/12/22
This is a pretty basic issue in our household. The targets set by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission - at least 50 megabits per second and upload speeds of at least 10 Mbps - are five time download (and 10 times upload) what we are currently able to reach here in Casselman, a rural community roughly half way between Montreal and Ottawa. There's no excuse for it, not when telecommunications companies made $8 billion in profit last year. Related: Michael Geist column.
Top Ten Makerspace Favorites of 2016
Laura Fleming, Worlds of Learning, 2016/12/22
Fun toys: a list. I like the one where you saw your own balsa wood planks and build stuff. "We noticed an important shift in Maker Education. Once driven by STEM and makerspace in a box types of kits, we are seeing much more of an emphasis on open-ended exploration and stocking makerspaces with materials that foster that. "
What is design thinking?
O'Reilly, Jonathan Follett, 2016/12/21
Design thinking is to a large degree what I do. “It's not as simple as [just] identifying a problem. ‘Yay! We found something that customers are frustrated with.'" You need to do more; you need to engage people and consider a wider set of possibilities. "Traditional business thinking methods can overemphasize analysis and deliberation, making it difficult for organizations to react quickly. In contrast, design thinking emphasizes learning by doing and agile, iterative solutions that can have startlingly effective results."
Districts Realize the Personalized Learning Vision, See its Future
US Department of Education, 2016/12/21
Obviously the messaging coming out of the US Department of Education will be in a state of flux. But one thing unlikely to change much is the emphasis on personalized learning. And as always, teachers have to experience it before they will teach it. "Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin, Superintendent Patricia Deklotz found that they 'had to give teachers the opportunity to experience personalized learning' for themselves. This was an effective professional development model and cultivated buy-in from teachers."
Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education
Patrick Blessinger, TJ Bliss, OpenBook Publishers, 2016/12/21
Here's some nice year-end reading for you. This collection of essays covers a range of perspectives on open learning around the world. The authors range froam a consideration of open learning as emancipation, to an analysis of open education users, to open assessment. As David Wiley says in his Preface. "The importance of openness in education is only now beginning to be appreciated, and I hope this volume can increase the pace of its spread. This volume contains stories of people and institutions around the world acting in accordance with the value of openness, and relates the amazing results that come from those actions."
Online learning in 2016: a personal review
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/12/21
The inimitable Tony Bates offers his personal restrspective on 2016. Normally I don't post end-of-year stuff, but it's Tony Bates. And I really like that he begins with the Global Peace Index. He notes, " blended learning is not only gaining ground in Canadian post-secondary education at a much faster rate than I had anticipated, but is raising critical questions about what is best done online and what face-to-face, and how to prepare institutions and instructors for what is essentially a revolution in teaching."
Making Change
Miles Berry, An Open Mind, 2016/12/21
This is interesting for a number of reasons. Probably my best practical learning in mathematics came while working at the concession stands in the local football stadium; I had to make change a lot. Here's how you do it: leave what they paid you easily video (so they don't later say "but didn't I give you a twenty?). Start with the amount owed. "That'll be $2.21." Count small change to even the number (in this case 4 cents to reach $2.25), large change to add up to an even dollar ("50... 75... 3 dollars), dollars to all to the total (5 dollars, 10 dollars, thank you). It's the opposite of the 'greedy' algorithm described by Miles Berry, and is what you actually do in practice.
Follow the chain
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2016/12/20
One of the hallmarks of the copyright industry is the use of the @copy; symbol, and later on, the Creative Commons badges. The latter offers a link back to the license itself, while both reinforce the concept of copy protection. The Attribution Engine, desc rived in this post, does the same thing, but is linked to a mechanism giving credit to the original artist. Nice, right? Well no - in reality, they're no different from the Pinterest or Flickr logos that appear over embedded photos - they use the photo as advertising for some service, which in turn reaps the benefit of the traffic and exposure. Look at how MediaChain's Attribution Engine awards credit. Fully two thirds of the visible credit belongs to themselves and Creative Commons. What would really give credit is a link back to the source of the image (like this: Image by Ryan Hafey). I believe in attribution, not in unearned advertising for third parties.
Ria #38: Dr. Katie Linder On Podcasting In Higher Education (Conference Panel)
, Ecampus Research Unit | Oregon State University,
On this episode of the Research in Action podcast, Dr. Katie Linder shares the audio recording of a podcasting panel at the Online Learning Consortium Accelerate Conference that took place in Orlando, Florida in November 2016.
The SAP platform and digital transformation
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZD Net, 2016/12/19
This is a good but almost impenetrable article reporting on the fundamental shift in digital technology taking place today. If you want the two-line version it is this: the digital world is shifting from self-managed centralized services to distributed cloud services, but the weight of the platform is such that only a few very large vendors are competitive in this market. I think both observations are correct. As Hinchcliffe notes, "Amazon now offers over 50 separate categories of enterprise-class cloud services across the technology spectrum. Competitive offerings have to be literally stunningly rich in features to effectively compete in today's sophisticated and nuanced technology landscape." Who can set up that sort of infrastructure?
Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/12/19
"Which information literacy do we need?" asks Michael Caulfield. "Do we need more RADCAB? Do we need more CRAAP?" We can certainly agree that critical thinking has to go beyond simplistic five-step rubrics. But here Caulfield steers off a cliff. We need to know the background, he argues, in order to differentiate between legitimate news and conspiracy theorists. "Abstract skills aren’t enough," he maintains. For example, "When I saw that big 'W' circled in that red field of a flag, for instance, my Nazi alarm bells went off." He explains, "My point is that recognizing any one of these things as an indicator — FEMA, related sites, gold seizures, typography — would have allowed students to approach this site with a starting hypothesis." Well, yes. But how do students learn which indicators to recognize? By being told? We know that this is a non-starter. No, they need to learn deep and authentic critical thinking skills. More: my essay On Teaching Critical Thinking.
Model for the transformation of higher education in Africa
Phillip L Clay, University World News, 2016/12/19
I have my questions about former MIT Chancellor Phillip L Clay's proposal to renew African education, but the report he refers to is neither named nor hyperlinked, so all we have is this column. In it, he proposes what amounts to a recreation of the elite university system for Africans, on condition that "governments would promise that students from their country would receive the resources that would otherwise be available for the best opportunities in their countries." Also, "by closely fitting education with industrial development, and by aggressively leveraging global sourcing of knowledge and resources to build first-class institutions" and "enrolments would be sized to foster excellence (ie., small)." No mass education for Africa. Clay should make this paper available online and be held to account for his policy positions and advocacy.
What Can We Learn From Countries That Effectively Teach Math?
KQED, MindShift, 2016/12/19
This report accords with my own sense of the matter. "In every country, the memorizers turned out to be the lowest achievers, and countries with high numbers of them—the U.S. was in the top third—also had the highest proportion of teens doing poorly on the PISA math assessment." By turning math lessons into rote exercises, administrators not only weaken math scores, they also effectively increase inequality.
My Workflow
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2016/12/19
I was thinking about working openly recently and decided to document my workflow, such as it is. As you can see I need to devise a way to make my projects and courses more transparent. There's also a PowerPoint version of the image with working links. No HTML version, sorry.
Decentralized, P2P Chat in 100 lines of code
ZeroNet, DecentralizeToday, 2016/12/19
I spent several hours this morning messing around with this and actually created my own peer-to-peer discussion board as described in the article - it works, but I'm not sure people can access it as the port is closed. You won't be able to access it by clicking on your own browser - the link points to a location on your own computer, and if you need to have ZeroNet installed to read it. Ah, but ZeroNet is an easy install, open source and free - download from here, extract into a directory, and then (on windows at least) run zeronet.cmd by double-clicking on it in the directory. It will open in your browser and you're on the distributed internet. What you've done is to load a Python interpreter and personal web server (which only you access). Here are the full ZeroNet documents. I like this a lot.
Wiley'S Misguided Advocacy
, noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), CC BY-NC-ND, Half an Hour,
David Wiley once again launches into advocacy for the CC-by license. We've been through this many times, so I'll keep it relatively brief. His text is italicized.
> There is a growing consensus among those who work in open education that the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) License is our preferred license. No there isn't. The list of organizations hasn't grown over the years, and the number people from this list remains stable. > Since the first release of the Creative Commons licenses, newcomers to the field have been attracted to licenses containing the non-commercial (NC) condition. There's a whole paragraph devoted to depicting advocates of the Non-Commercial license (NC) as "newcomers". As if I am a newcomer. As if MIT's OpenCourseWare is a newcomer. > The BY license best reflects our values of eliminating friction, maximizing interoperability, and promoting unanticipated and innovative uses of OER. >No one knows what the NC license condition means, including Creative Commons. The license language is so vague that the only way to determine definitively whether a use is commercial or not is to go to court and have a judge decide. This vagueness is cited by proponents of CC-by but hasn't actually been a problem. There are some good rules-of-thumb which can guide you: - if you have to ask whether your use is a commercial use, it probably is - if someone has to pay to access your resource, it probably is > Example – I want to use some NC-licensed content in my course, but students can only attend my course if they pay tuition. Is that a commercial use? It's a commercial use if the only way people can access the resource is to pay you tuition. But if the resource is free to access for everyone, it doesn't matter whether your students use it also. > For would-be authors of NC-licensed content, the only way to resolve the confusion arising from someone using your content in a way that you think is commercial but they think is non-commercial is to lawyer up and send a cease and desist letter. This isn't unique to the NC condition. It applies to all CC-licensed content. In practice, I find that there has been more of a problem enforcing the attribution condition. But nobody has suggested removing it on these grounds. > The primary thing you gain by choosing a license that includes the NC condition ... The primary benefit is that you prevent people from turning it into a commercial product and selling it. There are numerous reasons why you may want to do this. > Why would someone go to all the cost and effort involved in selling copies of your CC BY licensed material (e.g., paying for ads to drive traffic to the site where they’re selling it) when every copy will include instructions on where people can get the same material for free instead? Because this access is often theoretical. Should the original ever disappear (or in the case of OpenStax, should the URL ever change) there is no resourse; the user must pay for the resource. Saying things like "there would be very little incentive..." creates a nice hypothetical, but we have no way of knowing that there won't be an incentive. We've seen that large businesses can be created out of very marginal returns, soour "very little incentive" is someone else's business plan. > The CC BY language gives you practical protection from newcomers’ concern that some interloper is going to make a million dollars from their work (even if it does not offer protection against all theoretical possibilities).... This is why you don’t see Pearson, McGraw, or other major publishers reselling copies of CC BY textbooks. If we limit the example to textbooks, the statement is possibly true. However, publishers have made millions selling out-of-copyright works, such as the classics of literature. Walt Disney made a fortune by appropriating folklore and fairy stories and marketing them as Disney property. > The only counterexample I can offer to this line of argument, and it’s not a direct one, is the CC BY simulations created by PhET. As I understand it, at least one major publisher includes PhET simulations in their offerings. The publisher doesn’t sell the simulations as a product – I don’t think they could sell the simulations this way for the reasons I’ve described above. But they do include the simulations as a “free extra” to make their textbooks or courseware more attractive than those offered by other publishers. This sounds like exactly the sort of situation I would like to avoid. And it's not nearly as rare as described here. Consider, for example, companies like ResearchGate, which have slurped up all the open access publications they can find, and then require that readers log in to read them, thus creating data they sell to advertisers and publishers. > On the one hand, the faculty member you speak to may feel like this possibility represents a lost opportunity to make some money. I don't actually think this is what motivates supporters of NC. Mostly, people don't want their work to become part of a commercial product that people would have to pay money to access. > Personally, for the OER that I create, I want every learner in the world to use them – regardless of which major resource (commercial or open textbook) their faculty have decided to adopt. If publishers decide to throw my OER in as free extras with their textbooks or courseware, that just decreases the amount of search engine optimization and other work I have to do to make sure people know about the OER I’ve created. It’s free advertising for my OER. It's the existence of commercial content that makes SEO and advertising a requirement. This alone should be a reason to discourage CC-by. It shouldn't be necessary for us to have to advertise open access content. It's a requirement only because commercial publishers want to make sure readers cannot find the free content. Most of us do not want to become entrepreneurs or publishers or whatever. We simply want to share the work we've created. It's the commercial publishing system that makes that hard. As always, I argue that people should adopt whatever license best suits their interests. I continue to fail to understand why David Wiley doesn't respect that choice.
Learning Design Principles
Pearson, 2016/12/19
Michael Feldstein points to this report on learning design principles from Pearson. The report (102 page PDF) is called "Objective Design and Instructional Alignment," which gives you a sense of their perspective. The recommendations are (quoted):
Explicitly specify observable knowledge, skills, or attributes a learner will achieve in the learning experience in objective statements. Derive these from relevant standards. Align all assessments and content to objectives to create aligned learning experiences, which are essential to effective learning experiences and Pearson's efficacy goals.The report itself steps through a series of design principles, ranging from 'assessments' to 'learning object design' to 'critical thinking', and accompanies each with a set of rubrics for evaluating the concordant design. I like the structure of the document, though I think the authors could have been more discriminating in their selection of subjects - 'grit', in particular, doesn't really belong. There's also a blog post providing more background on the project.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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