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OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes ((56901))[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Jan 05, 2018
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Stephen Downes, Jan 01, 2018, ,
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What’s behind the Intel design flaw forcing numerous patches?
Peter Bright, Ars Technica, 2018/01/05
This is probably the best technical description of the newly-discovered security problem in Intel chips ('newly discovered' in this case meaning 'discovered in November'). The problem has to do with the "speculative execution" of code by the chips (for example, in an expression "If A then B", the expression B will be evaluated only if the expression A is true, but the chip might begin executing B even before it knows that A is true, storing the data in a cache, just in case). Meanwhile, how did Intel's CEO respond to the news? By selling stock before it leaked to the public. Meanwhile the patches to fix the flaw are expected to slow computers by as much as 30%. More individual users won't feel the impact so much but cloud server farms are expected to be impacted
Today: 72 Total: 72 HESA and Jisc collaborate with the Guardian and the Times to produce interactive higher education league table dashboards
JISC, 2018/01/05
Jisc has done a lot of useful things over the years. This isn't one of them. The enterprise is to "publish interactive dashboards of rankings and measures drawn from their higher education (HE) league tables." The use of thee term 'league tables' suggests that universities are like football teams, locked in struggle against each other. And how is this for douybletalk?: "Although league table position does not drive our activities, we are nevertheless conscious that they are one of the primary ways in which potential students and other members of the public form opinions about different providers.
Today: 76 Total: 76 Libraries and Librarians Aren't About to Disappear
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/01/05
This post is a response to recent reports that "libraries and archives to be among the fastest-declining industries in America." At frist glance the numbers are significant. "Employment change in libraries and archives from 2007 to 2016 was -80.3 percent, with a current employment total of 33,033." But is the decline that dramatic? "The RSL Research Group, which reported in 2015 that there were 139,213 full-time employees at public libraries, 44,623 at school libraries and 85,752 in academic libraries." This would mean employment was more-or-less stable. Still, the perception persists and the story continues to be printed.
Today: 75 Total: 75 Living and Learning
Emmett Hall, L.A. Davis, Connexions, 2018/01/05
Subtitled "The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario" this document dates from 1967 and was mentioned in a post from Doug Peterson today. In 1967 I was in school would move to Ontario the following year. So I am the outcome of this policy, to some extent. So it's no surprise to read things like "The underlying aim of education is to further man's unending search for truth... wisdom and understanding, sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility, as well as intellectual honesty and personal integrity, will be his guides in adolescence and his companions in maturity." Or this: "slogans such as 'unity in diversity' and 'the bifurcation of Canadian culture' are used to describe the national and cultural identity of Canada." Read more.
Today: 83 Total: 83 How our skills support and shape our career
Steven Forth, TeamFit, 2018/01/04
To find the really interesting bit you have to read to the bottom and click on the link at the very end (or just click it here, but why skip the prequel?). Here's the scenario: "we asked a number of people at TeamFit and our sister company Ibbaka to reflect on their careers and aspirations." the result is a series of mind maps of "how one thinks about career success will shape how one thinks about skills." OK, so far as it goes. But the link to one person's skills portfolio along with information about previous projects, connections, and more. It's the closest thing to a personal learning record I've seen out there in the world. Beautifully done. Here's the company. Here's their blog.
Today: 108 Total: 227 Global HR Trends are Affecting Corporate Learning: It’s time that HR and Learning came closer!
Arunima Majumdar, G-Cube Blog, 2018/01/04
This short article summarizes trends more than it makes the case for moving HR and Ldarning closer together. But the trends are useful. Along with talent acquisition, writes Arunima Majumdar, talent management is a priority, and this means in-house skills development. The workplace is in flux, tech is transforming everything, and younger staff bring a new type of work and learning culture with them. Perhaps most significant: "organisations are seeking the help of third party organizations to handle the administrative duties within the organization. This offers the HR managers the opportunity to take on a more strategic role and focus more on talent management, organizational training, skill-building and so on." Or HR managers might just be let go, with these third parties being left to manage training and development. That couldn't go wrong, could it?
Today: 81 Total: 212 Beyond the Horizon Report: towards a new project
Bryan Alexander, 2018/01/04
Beyond the Horizon Report, writes Bryan Alexander, "’d like to kick off a process that could lead to a prototype or even a new publication." This of course is not to be confused with the existing Horizon project or report in any way, since these are in bankruptcy court, and through some magical process could be harmed by people talking about what should be done. Maybe the best new thing that could be done is to change the methodology, which yielded mixed results at best. The Horizon Classic used the Delphi process, but New Horizon could use scenario creation, trends analysis, prediction markets, or any number of other methodologies. What would be key, I think, is for New Horizon to be able to draw on the same sources of support that funded Horizon Classic.
Today: 86 Total: 263 Taking stock of 2017: What we learned about personalized learning
Luis Flores, Christensen Institute, 2018/01/04
This post reads like a focused issue of OLWeekly, so naturally I like the format. It offers a dozen or so links from different sources, each with a capsule description, on topics related to personalized learnig, and specifically: Competency-based education, Online and blended learning, Personalized learning, and Preparing students for the future. The reports themselves are a mixture of case studies, research briefs, findings and results, and progress reports.
Today: 124 Total: 295 Podcasting Equipment Setup and Software I use on the 10-Minute Teacher
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2018/01/03
I always appreciate article like this describing the why and how of some aspect of education technology. In this case it's Vicki Davis describing the tools and methods she uses to broadcast a regular podcast (I've always been tempted - I love audio - but it would take more time than I have in a week). Just for fun, as well: try to guess the sponsor link in the article - she discloses that she has a sponsor link, but doesn't tell us who the sponsor actually is (which breaks the spirit of the Federal Trade Commission regulation she says she's following in the disclosure, I think). I'm guessing it's the podcast course.
Today: 57 Total: 353 10 Reasons for Optimism About Ed Tech in 2018
Matthew Rascoff, Learning Innovation, 2018/01/03
This article combines some much-needed optimism about educational technology (which has been in short supply lately) with some useful links. There's the HAIL Storm Network, Tsugi and NGDLE, Authorea (built on top of GitHub), and closer to the author's home at Duke, the OSPRI Lab's open source education technology project.
Today: 51 Total: 362 Dude, you broke the future!
Charlie Stross, Charlie's Diary, 2018/01/03
This is the text of science fiction writer Charlie Stross's address to the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig in December. The speech rambles a bit but there are interesting reflections on how to predict the future (the key is combining the 85 percept of trends that will continue as expected and the small percentage that leave you wondering what happened), the role of corproations in society, the question of what AI wants, and what went wrong with it all (his explanation: the "mistake was to fund the build-out of the public world wide web—as opposed to the earlier, government-funded corporate and academic internet—by monetizing eyeballs via advertising revenue.").
Today: 28 Total: 288 Online Markdown Converter For Open Educational Resources
George Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/01/03
The story here (buried in the third and last paragraph of this short article) is that "the University of Oklahoma Libraries has made available a Pandoc-based, web-hosted, open-source Markdown Converter." The idea behind 'markdown' is that it's a way of writing text that can be formatten (into bold, paragraphs, lists, etc) without the use of computing code (like HTML or the languages used to define PDFs and MS-Word documents). It makes entering text into (some) web-based forms a lot easier. That's it. Meanwhile, I'm wondering why the author refers to Lincoln, Ryan and Konrad only by their first names while Alex Gil gets the full first-and-last name treatment. (Update: figured it out: Lincoln, Ryan and Konrad are regular Chronicle bloggers, while Alex Gil is not.)
Today: 61 Total: 370 A news site gave would-be commenters a quiz. Here’s what happened.
2018/01/03
The Columbia Journalism Review is not above writing click-bait headlines, it seems (rememeber when clickbait headlines were the biggest problems in social media?). The idea has merit on first glance: make sure people have read the story before they can comment by asking them simple questions about what the story said. This did reduce the number of comments, but did not keep commenters on track. And critics point out that making it more difficult to engage with the story does not encourage people to engage with the story. When my high school English teacher used the same tactic on me I boycotted a year's worth of content quizzes.
Today: 33 Total: 267 People Are Not Talking About Machine Learning Clickbait and Misinformation Nearly Enough
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, 2018/01/03
"In short," writes Mike Caulfield, "the social media audience becomes one big training pool for your clickbait or disinfo machine." True. But even without social media, there will be no shortage of data for the machines. Consider, for example, the content from our learning management systems. Or our loyalty card programs. Or the telephone listings. There are issues with the input end - biased training data, for example - but the real problems are happening at the application end. That's when this data is used by machine learning algorithms to perpetuate stereotypes, create fake news, teach falsehoods, etc., and this can't be solved by the technology. Nor even by teaching people how to spot fake news. It's a social problem. It's a governance problem.
Today: 30 Total: 245 Frontend in 2017: The important parts
Kaelan Cooter, LogRocket, 2018/01/02
I'm generally three or four years behind in frontend technology (that's the technology that makes your website do stuff in your browser, like CSS and Javascript, but now much more complex). That's because the lifespan of a lot of them is about equal to the length of an undergraduate computer science education. I won't join the React bandwagon (because React is a Facebook product, with all the associated risks), but jQuery works just fine. WebAssembly is still too new for me. Package managers are a great idea, but are often more complex than the packages they manage. Same with CSS preprocessors. Redux and GraphQL are on my radar, but that's about it.
Today: 46 Total: 401 In Our Connected World, What If Empathy Is Learning?
Thom Markham, Mind/Shift, 2018/01/02
I'll file this one under 'pedagogy of harmony' though the fit is a bit uneasy. Thom Markham taskes as a point of departure the end of the transmission model of learning asks "what now?" He observes that in today's world, more than ever, people learn together, an d "living a densely linked life and operating in a non-linear, intimately connected, globally diverse, culturally conflicted world... requires entirely new thinking about learning itself." To learn, on this new model, he suggests, may be to develop empathy, where empathy is characterized not merely asd a cognitive state but also a physiological state. Markham adds that "in the transmission model, learning is very much geared toward self-fulfillment; in the new model, we can expect empathy to shift the focus to the common good."
Today: 18 Total: 296 Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Is Completely Busted
Eric Ravenscraft, ReviewGeek, 2018/01/02
"Facebook has no idea what you want," writes Eric Ravenscraft in this scathing review of the social network site's news feed. It tends to focus on recently added friends andf frequently-posting people as well as controversy (as signified by engagement) and, of course, advertisements (a.k.a. "promoted posts"). Users can't really define what they want to see (just what they don't, and Facebook "seems to re-follow some people if you unfollow too many"). The reason the feed is so bad is that you wouldn't use it if it only showed you what you want to see. "Facebook’s never going to reach a point where they say 'Well, that’s all your close friends have to say! Maybe you should go outside.'" So it fills your feed full of junk to keep you scrolling.
Today: 18 Total: 294 An Impressively Detailed Philosophy Paper Grading Rubric
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/01/02
This article from lasty May showed up (deservedly) in a year-end wrap-up. As the title suggests, it is an impressively detailed rubric for grading philosophy papers (and, frankly, would serve as an excellent rubric for grading most essays in general, with perhaps some token points for correctly describing the 'content' of various subjects. The diagram is hard to read in the article so here is a link to the full JPG file. Ud there's a weakness, I would like to see a consideration for other types of reasoning besides 'argumentation' (for example, explanation, extrapolation, compare-and-contrast, etc). But those could be easily inserted into the diagram.
Today: 19 Total: 296 Whatever Happened to the Coalition of Essential Schools?
Larry Cuban, National Education Policy Center, 2018/01/02
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was an initiative launched in 1987 that "spread rapidly across the nation throughout the 1990s (see here, here, and here)." Based on a set of ten principles (listed in the article) the coalition sought to encourage a matery-based and personally-supportive mode of education based on a generally constructivist pedagogy. It reach a peak of more than 1,000 schools in 1997 but since dwindled ro fewer than 100 in 2017. CES, writes Cuban, "shut its national office doors in 2018" (which must mean today, since yesterday was a holiday) a victin of dwindling funding and loss of organizational focus.
Today: 17 Total: 279 Workflow Lock-in: A Taxonomy
Roger C. Schonfeld, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/01/02
"Lock in" is a business term that describes the effect of tactics that make it harder for customers to switch to another company offering the same (or even better!) products. "Everything from affinity programs, such as frequent flyer miles, to pernicious tying strategies that elicit antitrust scrutiny are forms of lock-in." This article provides a taxonomy of types of publisher lock-in strategies, though it should be noted that these could apply equally well to education (quoted):
providing exclusive benefits for mutual customers of a single provider’s many products developing discrete services so that they are interdependent, or preferentially functional, with one another data in context such that data cannot be reused with the same functionality elsewhere institutionalizing services that are today already used by individualsNote that even is some given service or product is free, if the provider employs these lock-in strategies it could have the effect or requiring payment for free goods.
Today: 2 Total: 191 25 education trends for 2018
Meris Stansbury, eSchool News, 2018/01/01
This is a booklet (20 page PDF) with a set of predictions from various EdTech writers. The participants include a mix of school officials and (mostly) e-learning technology provider representatives. Immersive experiences and hyperconvergence highlight the trends. As well, "as competency-based learning bursts the boundaries of the online and virtual learning spaces and moves directly into the classroom where it is becoming the foundation of, as opposed to a supplement to, broader learning."
Today: 2 Total: 381 2018 eLearning Predictions: Updated Hype Curve
Andy Hicken, Web Courseworks, 2018/01/01
I like the use of the hype cycle diagram to tie together these predictions for 2018. The advantage of using the hype cycle is that you're reporting on trends rather than specific things. This makes the predicting easier and more general. For example: "we’ll see greater application in the next three years or so." The technologies described are pretty specific, though: Distributed CE ledgers ("AKA credit hours as cryptocurrency"), value-based accreditation, "electronic health records (EHR) data being incorporated into performance improvement projects," and "getting your high-fidelity medical simulator to talk to your LMS and LRS" (we did that a couple of years ago in LPSS).
Today: 2 Total: 389 How to Use Flipgrid - A 2017 Favorite
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2018/01/01
If you find your way through the advertisements you'll enjoy this article and video describing Fripgrid, a service that allows users to post their own video responses on your course or website. Richard Byrne writes, "Back in November Caroline Schaab was kind enough to author a guest post in which she shared four ways to use Flipgrid in fourth grade."
Today: 3 Total: 235 The Stories We Were Told in 2017 about Education Technology
2018/01/01
This is Audrey Watters's final wrap-up for 2017, consisting of 11 major articles plus a variety of other stories and studies. My only criticism is that she is too U.S.-focused. But this pales in comparison to the scale of the effort here - it's essentially a full book (whch she could probably compile and sell on Learnpub). Her studies of "who's funding whom" are especially welcome, as the education technology market is now big money and the players don't always have the needs of students, schools and society at the top of their lists of priorities
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