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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Feb 09, 2018
Learning Analytics
e-learn, 2018/02/09
Blackboard's e-learn magazine has a special issue on learning analytics this month. The lead article by Priscila Zigunovas features multiple photos ofTimothy Harfield, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Blackboard Analytics (by a window, with a horse) and says "Analytics is nothing more and nothing less than the visual display of quantitated information." In another article, Cristina Wagner (or maybe Glen Fruin) interviews Niall Sclater on the ethical issues related to learning analytics. None of the articles is deep, but if you are interested in what Blackboard is thinking these days it's probably worth a look.
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Three Higher Ed Design Trends for 2018
Ben Bilow, Abby McLean, Shannon Lanus, Ben Conley, Higher Ed Live, 2018/02/09
That's actually more authors than there are trends, but OK. This list seems to me to be a bit more eclectic than most, because they are focusing exclusively on user-experience (UX) design. Here are the trends (quoted): design systems with modular components will take a greater role in design; less flash and boom and more subtle cues that help users find what they’re looking for; and internal-facing content is the next frontier.
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How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Sarah Aswell, SplitSider, 2018/02/09
"Facebook is essentially running a payola scam where you have to pay them if you want your own fans to see your content," writes Sarah Aswell (language warning in this article, sorry). The criticisms of Facebook are valid, and yes it's just one more reason not to use the AOL of the 2010s. But the thought struck me as I rattled around the nearly-empty internet outside Facebook how similar it is today to the internet of the 1990s. Most people are somewhere else (in the offline world, or behind some walled garden). The people who populate the wide open space outside the social network silos are the early adopters and the innovators, just like the 1990s (but with fewer personal home pages, which I miss).
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Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution
Yarden Katz, SSRN, 2018/02/09
This is an interesting paper from last November that reminds me a lot of the work being done by Audrey Watters. The value of this paper is an informed history of the history of AI and its critics (though I would have given credit for 'the view from nowhere' to Thomas Nagel rather than Alison Adam). It has a number of funny examples of deep learning systems misinterpreting images, though in all fairness a lot of humans would misinterpret them as well. That said, there's no doubt about the corporate flavour and intention of contemporary AI programs. And I agree that these corporate-run projects are indifferent to social and political content, even to the point where they perpetuate and even exaggerate historical injustices. But from where I sit, that's a criticism of corporations, not AI.
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Offline *Only* Viewing
Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks, 2018/02/09
I'm sure someone will find an application of this sort of technology for online learning. "The Disconnect is an offline-only, digital magazine of commentary, fiction, and poetry. Each issue forces you to disconnect from the internet, giving you a break from constant distractions and relentless advertisements." Don't worry - I'll never do that for OLDaily.
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‘Instagram for classwork’ Seesaw in 1/2 of US schools
TechCrunch, 2018/02/08
According to this article, " half of all U.S. schools have teachers using Seesaw, up from one-quarter in June 2016." The service offers " iOS, Android, Kindle, Chromebook and web apps where kids can share photos, videos, drawings, notes, links, files and blogs, and record voice-overs explaining their work." The idea is that if they're showing their work to a wider community, they'll work harder and pay more attention to it. As well, parents can look in to see the students' work directly. It's free for parents and students but "schools and school districts pay if they want to sync Seesaw with their student databases and grading systems, and get centralized administration, analytics and more grading features. They pay $5 per student per year." I think that allowing students to share their work is a good idea, but if you turn their portfolios into a grading system it can skew the incentives.
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Talking Killer Whales? Gullible Science Journalists More Likely
Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/02/08
We talk about literacies of various sorts but the enterprise begs the question: what counts as language? Geoffrey Pullum doesn'tt really tell us - though it has something to do with "the communication of simple ideas between people." But he's clear about things that are not languages. Music. Food. Sounds made by Orcas. " The claim that information transmission was demonstrated in the music is patently ridiculous," he writes. I think the definition of language as 'information transmission' is too narrow, and this mostly because I think that cognition is not information processing. But I will agree that journalists go over the side when talking about animals speaking human language. Image: LiveScience.
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John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018
Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2018/02/08
I met John Perry Barlow at Idea City in 2003; I said nice things to him about his work and he urged me to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he co-founded. "Barlow’s lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Internet into 'a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth . . . a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.'" Hail and farewell.
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Open Education Resources (OER) Applications from Around the World
Rory McGreal, Contact North, 2018/02/07
This is a set of thirteen OER case studies from around the world. The descriptions follow a common format, describing the opportunity, innovation, benefits, challenges and potential in turn. A contact person is provided for each. Some of the descriptions become fairly detailed. There's obviously some overlap with the OER world map (which has hundreds of projects listed) and in fact the text in both is the same (eg. Athabasca University in this document and in the OER world map, or this one and this one from Scottsdale Community College) - it would be useful to know which of these (if either) is the authoritative source where we see this overlap.
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Observing and Deterring Social Cheating on College Exams
Richard J. Fendler, Michael C. Yates, Jonathan M. Godbey, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07
This article (11 page PDF) contains a pretty good literature review and summary discussion on cheating. It "introduces a unique multiple choice exam design to observe and measure the degree to which students copy answers from their peers." What's fun is that it provides "a measurement of actual cheating frequency among students, as opposed to relying on reported cheating in anonymous surveys." The studied measured whether less cheating would occur if students were assigned seating randomly (thereby breaking up peer groups) and - surprise! - less cheating occured. Total N is 160, making it one of the larger studies in January's ijSOTL.
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Student learning with permissive and restrictive cell phone policies: A classroom experiment
Alexander L. Lancaster, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07
It's hard to know what conclusions you can draw from a study of 31 students in a Midwestern university class, but this study (13 page PDF) tries. According to the authors, banning cellphones did not improve the students' results in the course. More interestingly, banning cellsphones was associated with higher evaluation scores for the instructor. Here's the rest of January's ijSOTL filled with studies of similar scope.
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New Higher-Ed ‘Matchmaking’ Event Aims to Bridge Education Technology Silos
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/02/07
Jumping into the crowded event space are Micharl Feldstein and Phil Hill. Readers will recognize these names as their e-Literate blog is often cited here. "Their model will be to play the role of matchmaker to help get specific projects started. They’re encouraging pairs of people from each institution to attend, especially people from departments who might not usually interact." To make sure this happens they've already preselected all the attendees for the first conference. The real objective, though, is to have them continue the conversation between the events. " in between it’s really the same old thing,” Feldstein said when announcing the project. “If that happens with the Empirical Educator Project, we will consider it a failure and will not have another convening of the same type.”
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What It Takes for Employees to Own and Drive Their Own Learning (A Lot!) – Part 1
Mirjam Neelen, Paul A. Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2018/02/06
I'm not sure yet where Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner will take this discussion but it will be interesting to see. Interesting, I say, because there's p[lenty of evidence that employees can own and drive their own learning - not all, to be sure, but sufficiently many to say that it's not an anomaly. In this post we get a distinction between Self-Directed Learning (SDL) and Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). In SDL " individuals take initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs (etc.)", while SRL " is about the execution of a specific learning task and about managing the subsequent steps in a learning process." Also, the authors suggest that "we still need to clearly distinguish between ‘improving performance’ on the one hand and ‘learning’ on the other, as improving one’s performance doesn’t necessarily mean something has been learned." Stay tunesd for Part 2 next week.
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Educause Steps In to Save New Media Consortium
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/02/06
It's hard to imagine that the New Media Consortium ran up debts of half a million dollars, but that's what this article says. It also says Educause it picking up NMC's assets for a paltry $55K. Writing about the acquisition, Bryan Alexander suggests it was a " this is a bold and generous move" and that Educause is "playing the white knight, stepping up to rescue assets that many in the ed tech world value." It's interesting to note that it's the Horizon R
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Blogging With Young Students: Becky Versteeg’s Story
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2018/02/06
This article is part case study and part advertisement for their course. It introduces Becky Versteeg, a grade two teacher from Listowel, Ontario, Canada. "Most of Becky’s students are 6 and 7 years old," writes Kathleen Morris. "Becky’s fantastic blog is called Team 2 Eagles." She has published 631 posts, received 1372 comments, and created and moderated more than 100 student blogs. " Since my students are 6 and 7 years old, a blog that is used as a digital learning portfolio is their first chance to communicate online," writes Versteeg. "I haven’t met a child yet who was not motivated to by this. They want to share, and they want their audience to like what they share. Since I require them to share their Grade 2 learning, they put a lot of effort into what they are learning every day!"
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Personalized Learning Is a Problem of Privilege
Paul France, EdSurge, 2018/02/06
Yes it's another rant against personalization but there are also some interesting things in this article. First is this: "We often conflate individualization with personalization." According to Paul France, 'individualization' means " to have the assistance of a complex technological algorithm to assign activities to children," which he says is " impersonal and dehumanizing" and " focuses on consumption of educational material instead of interaction with meaningful provocations." But what is 'personalization'?
We read " Tools that minimize complexity, make educators more powerful, connect individuals, or redefine learning tasks can contribute to a more personal learning environment." But that's personal learning, much like I define it, " making learning personal by amplifying our humanity, not limiting it." It appears that 'personalized' learning falls somewhere in between. "'Personalized learning” tools don’t fulfill real needs," writes France. "Rather, they serve perceived needs that have been fueled by privilege." Me, I'm happy to lump 'personalized' and 'individualized' together. But for those who need it, there's a distinction there.
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Paulo Freire
Kim Díaz, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/02/05
The entry for Paulo Freire in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just been updated. It's worth taking a few moments to read if you are not familiar with the man or his work. "A native of Brazil, Freire's goal was to eradicate illiteracy among people from previously colonized countries and continents. His insights were rooted in the social and political realities of the children and grandchildren of former slaves. His ideas, life, and work served to ameliorate the living conditions of oppressed people."
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A decade of living in the gift shop
Dean Groom, Playable, 2018/02/05
"Exit through the gift shop." The phrase says everything that needs to be said about the commercialization of culture and heritage. The same phenomenon seems to be inhabiting Ed Tech and things like the #EdTech discussions, suggests Dean Groom. "The culture of online discussions (especially those being directed by individuals (they call themselves ‘founders’) is to repeat the most popular ‘trend’ statements, rather than make any real effort to evaluate claims," he writes. Things like personalized learning and blockchain are more marketing slogans than they are concrete ideas, he suggests. Well, as long as you didn't read that here...
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How I coined the term 'open source'
Christine Peterson, OpenSource.com, 2018/02/05
This 'I' in this post is the author, Christine Peterson. She describes in this post her contribution to the origin of the term 'open source'. " The introduction of the term 'open source software' was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users," she writes. The account seems plausible to me, and the alternative names discussed (including especially 'freeware', a cousin of the then widely used 'shareware') are familiar to me from the community at the time. Via David Wiley.
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The End of Cash; The End of Freedom
2018/02/05
What is freedom anyways? Doug Belshaw posted this article from last July. It argues that the move toward a cashless society means the end of freedom, because government and corporations could then surveil your every transaction and cut off your access to money. But is freedom the same as skulking in the dark and operating outside the law? Maybe I have "some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics," as the author suggests. We need safeguards, yes.But it's hard for me to see how we would be more free when the will of the criminal and corrupt prevail.
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Quick update on W3C Community Group on Educational and Occupational Credentials
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2018/02/05
This post updates work in the W3C Community Group on educational and occupational credentials, which was launched November 27. "The aim of this community group is to show how educational and occupational credentials may be described with schema.org, and to propose any additional terms for schema.org that may be necessary. Educational and Occupational Credentials are defined as diplomas, academic degrees, certifications, qualifications, badges, etc., that a person can obtain through learning, education and/or training." Mostly, I think, the news is that this group exists.
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Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
Aza Raskin, 2018/02/06
(Update) Doug Belshaw wrote me on Mastodon: "Stephen, this Mozilla project you link to in the latest OL Daily is almost a decade old. Aza Raskin left *years* ago, and the work you cite led to the (now defunct) Mozilla Persona."
Longtime readers of OLDaily will remember I created something called mIDm back in 2004. The idea was to put an identifying URL in the browers so I could automatically log into sites. Three days later (literally!) the first proposals for OpenID were released and that's the direction the web went. OpenID was basically replaced by Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which gives us the third party ID system we use today. It is not satisfying. See also: WebID and the W3C WebID Community Group.
As Aza Raskin writes in this post, "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company." Mozilla, he writes, has been working on a browser-based alternative (yay!). The full discussion is here. The first draft of the protocol is here. "The browser user requests 'connection' to the site. The browser negotiates account setup, possibly disclosing some personal information about the user, and learns a userid-credential pair. On a subsequent visit, the browser notices that it does not have an active session, and automatically establishes one."
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Educational Technology Magazine archive (1966-2017)
George Veletsianos, 2018/02/05
Nice. George Veletsianos writes " Educational Technology was a print-only publication. However, Howard Lipsitz, Larry’s brother, has collaborated with JSTOR to preserve Larry’s legacy and make all articles available online where they can be read for free. Here’s the Educational Technology magazine archives (1966-2017)."
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Copyright 2018 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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