OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Jul 15, 2016
Feature Article
How The Internet May Evolve
Stephen Downes, Jul 12, 2016.
The Pew Research Center is inviting a select group of people to participate in a survey that asks people to answer five questions about how internet may evolve – about the tone of social discourse online, education innovation for future skills, the opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things and algorithm-based everything, and trust in online interaction. If you would like to share your knowledge, please access the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PD6772K These are my responses.
Metaknowledge
George Musser, Aeon, 2016/07/15
This essay makes one good point and a bunch of bad points. The good point is that the 'wisdom' in the wisdom of crowds isn't going to be taken merely by counting votes or taking averages. There's plenty of evidence that this is the case. The bad points are made around the idea that "some people’s judgments deserve greater weight than others," based on what the author calls "metaknowledge". The mistake being made here is in assuming that the purpose of the crowd is to 'select' some 'right answer' from a range of possibilities put forward by its members. But the wisdom of the crowd isn't in doing things like predicting winners of elections, counting jelly beans or even guessing correct scientific theories. The crowd has different knowledge from an individual's knowledge; it isn't just a reification some one smart person's point of view.
Want a Deep Dive on How Silicon Valley's Best Will Fix Education? Here's The Full Interview With Max Ventilla, CEO and Founder, AltSchool
John Battelle, LinkedIn, 2016/07/15
That moment when things go off the rails: "There was a little bit of an 'Aha' moment, that wait a moment, this thing that I want personally actually calls out for the kind of solution, like a platform solution, a systemic solution, a network solution, that I kind of know how to build, that I’ve built many times and this team has built many times before." Thanks, Norm.
MIL-CRED
Advanced Distributed Learning, 2016/07/15
"Imagine how helpful a fully vetted, fully automated, personally controlled digital resume would be for both the individual as well as potential hiring managers in military, academic, and corporate organizations," says the invitation to this webinar (register here). This work is very similar to the personal learning records project we were running. "Rhe Military Micro-Credentials (MIL-CRED) project aims at designing, developing, and testing a standardized micro-credential model that facilitates transition of military personnel to civilian careers and educational opportunities. MIL-CRED features multi-level granularity and relational nesting of macro-credentials, tracking of in-progress credential requirements, and a taxonomy of links to facilitate competency equivalency across domains. This work will produce a fully vetted, fully automated, personally controlled digital resume."
Guidelines for Quality Assurance and Accreditation of MOOCs
Allison Littlejohn, Nina Hood, Commonwealth of Learning, 2016/07/15
Report (36 page PDF) providing "a set of guidelines designed to support decision making about the sorts of quality measures that are appropriate in different contexts." The report includes input from a 2016 experts meeting, in which I took part. Importantly, "The starting point for MOOC QA is to consider the purpose of a MOOC." MOOCs are not simply replacements for existing courses; "they are viewed by governments across the Commonwealth as a way to extend access to higher education." Others may view them as a way to provide practice, a way to spread a message, or a way to publicize an institution or an issue. So different stakeholders view the question of quality in MOOCs from different perspectives.
Bridge International Academies
Bridge International Academies, 2016/07/15
This appears to be a prospectus (11 page PDF) for Bridge International Academies, a global education company specializing in offering low-cost learning to impoverished children. It operates in Kenya ("total of 359 academies and over 100,000 pupils!") and Uganda with plans to expand into Nigeria and India. It is not without its critics, including Graham-Brown Martin: "We wouldn’t accept a healthcare system where 'Big Pharma' also owned the hospitals and employed all the doctors but that’s exactly the kind of closed loop system that’s happening with 'Big Edu'." The model is essentially based on 'scripted schooling', "asystem in which every step of the learning process is remotely dictated." Public investment in the agency has been criticized. "'Aid is being used as a tool to convince, cajole and compel the majority of the world to undertake policies which help big business, but which undermine public services emerging or thriving,' Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said in criticism of the World Bank’s $10m investment in Bridge."
Empirical proof that Terms of Service are "the biggest lie on the Internet"
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, 2016/07/14
This article makes the oft-made point that few people read terms-of-service. And that's why they are called "the biggest lie on the Internet" - "they are based on the idea that the people who trade their privacy and rights in exchange for a service are making a bargain that they understand and agree to." But suppose people took the hour or so required to read the terms-of-service for these web services. What would change? Could they ever enforce any of their own rights in these terms? If ey are accused of violating a term, could they ever defend themselves in court? Of course not. The "lie" in terms and service agreements is that this is any sort of contract at all. No enforcement means no contract. People know that companies are just going to do whatever they want, and that's why they don't bother reading the terms.
Memory Machines: Learning, Knowing, and Technological Change
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/07/14
Good post from Audrey Watters representing a step forward in her thinking (as we write more, these steps become smaller and less frequent, and harder to take). She talks about the fragility of memory, even in the age of information, and challenges the assumption that new inventions are being more and more quickly adopted. From my perspective, being long in the tooth, the future seems to move forward at an agonizingly slow pace. I was ten years old, five decades ago, when we first stepped on the moon. The major incurable diseases of my childhood are the ones that loom over me today. Most of the information I have ever created was created, and stored, in my own brain, and it goes when I go. So much of my own digital legacy is already lost (it's absurd to say that the internet is a permanent record!). But - publishing isn't memory, and memory isn't knowledge.
Authenticity and Co-Opting Voices of Color without Permission
Rafranz Davis, 2016/07/14
I think there's some pretty good advice in this post, and it goes well beyond the warning in the title. It's this: "Do the work. Do it with complete and total commitment which means truly facing your truths through time, discussion and effort. You need to find your own voices…not ours." The same point should be applied to educators in general. As an educator, your only voice is your own voice, not that of your students. You can't 'give' them an education. They have to create their own education, and find their own voice, for themselves. Doing it for them disempowers them, and makes their own efforts less legitimate.
Are those hearts strings connected? – the power of fleeting connections in a digital pedagogy
Peter Bryant, digital stranger, 2016/07/14
Good post looking at the concept of 'fleeting connections' in some detail. As suggested by VTE Live, one of the purposes of a MOOC, as opposed to a community of practice, is to create short-term low risk temporary networks where people can benefit from the diversity and interaction without making a lifelong commitment. As well, temporary networks are less intimidating to join, because they haven't developed in-groups, jargon and norms of practice yet. Peter Bryant says "t is in the fleeting connections that you are exposed to the ‘something different’ that are these newer, brighter contexts. They represent a sense of randomness, uniqueness and sometimes disquiet and discomfort that challenge the constructed reality of knowledge handed down through the generations."
Sketching a Process for Sharing / Getting Feedback on Certification Drafts
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/07/14
I am not even remotely convinced that creating a 'Creative Commons Certification' is a good idea either as a means of education or promotion, but it's not my call and of course the organization can do what it wants. Of more interest to me here is the process of getting people worldwide to collaborate on the creation of the certification draft (which is, as nearly as I can judge, the content of the certification curriculum - "a structure of 'modules' each of which has a series of Performance Objectives"). The document itself can be edited by the team, but what about input? Commenting could get messy after more than a small number of participants. Feedback forms? What about GitHub? "Just saying GitHub, much less showing anyone the interface, is enough to send most people running back to their parchments." But here's what it looks like. I tried out the system, and yes it works, but my comment (collected by GitHub as an issue) basically disappears.
I've actually thought about this problem quite a bit. Not with respect to this particular document, but with sharing and feedback mechanisms generally. It will come as no surprise to readers that I think a centralized system (eg., with primary author(s) and comments) is inherently flawed, because you can't make sense of more than a few hundred comments. Additionally, the centralized 'consensus document' model (like, say, a Wikipedia page) is also flawed, because there will not be consensus on anything once you have more than a few contributors. The only thing that is viable in the long term, in my mind, would be a system in which each person gets their own version. The final version is then created by a (semantically neutral) algorithm from the hundred (or million) individual versions. Levine's article was also posted at Get CC Certified (see it there).
Goods: organizing Google’s datasets
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/07/13
This is in my mind the correct way to manage data. Rather than define your data models ahead of time (and then require that every system and every person comply with the data model) you simply allow people to define and store data however they want, and then collect it and organize it after the fact. That is, after all, what Google does with the world wide web. This article summarizes a paper describing a system that does that. 'Goods' is a system that organizes the documents used inside Google. "Goods crawls datasets from all over Google, extracts as much metadata as possible from them, joins this with metadata inferred from other sources (e.g. logs, source code and so on) and makes this catalog available to all of Google’s engineers." Did it work? "Goods quickly became indispensable." Yeah, it would. Tell me again why you have to design your models ahead of time? "Because Goods explicitly identifies and analyzes datasets in a post-hoc and non-invasive manner, it is often impossible to determine all types of metadata with complete certainty."
Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers
Noah Berlatsky, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016/07/13
OK, it's true that most academics write badly, if I am to judge by the volumes of academic writing that I've read. It's not political or philosophical, writes Noah Berlatsky. Contra Pinker, he argues "Academics don’t need to be elitist, careerist, or corrupted by postmodernism to write badly." It's because writing well is difficult, and most academics don't have the skill, he says. True enough, but hardly an excuse. Most people aren't physicists, and physics is certainly hard, but most journal publications are not instances of bad physics. And in the disciplines that actually study writing, such as most of the social sciences and humanities, bad writing is actually evidence that authors do not understand the subject being discussed, much unable to discuss it properly themselves. True, clarity of expression does not mean you are correct (Pinker is an obvious counterexample) but you cannot be correct without clarity.
Why Higher Ed Must Resist the ‘Platform Revolution’
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/07/13
"Where the authors of Platform Revolution get themselves in trouble," writes Joshua Kim, "is when they claim that higher education is ripe for transformation by platform." The authors write, "the fundamental product being sold by schools, colleges, and universities is information of various kinds." Of course this isn't true, and it's a misstake to think of learning as some sort of information search problem. "If information is what we 'sold' in postsecondary institutions," writes Kim, "then we would quickly be out of business." That doesn't mean platforms are worth nothing, but they need to be combines with cooperation, community and creation.
Personalized Learning Versus Dungeons and Dragons
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2016/07/13
This is a good analogy for the distinction I've been drawing between personal and personalized learning, though Matt Crosslin uses it mostly to criticize personalized learning in favour of an unnamed alternative. "Many prominent personalized learning programs/tools are a modern educational version of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series from the 1908s," he writes, "But let’s face it – the true 'Choose Your Own Adventure' scenarios in the 1980s were really role playing games. And few were as personalizable as Dungeons and Dragons." Quite right. And if you study the D&D manuals (confession: I did) you find that the whole idea is to provide resources and support for the games, not the game design itself. That was up to the players. This, and not some naive 'learning pathways' idea, is what should characterize future education technology.
Virtual Reality on the Horizon
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/07/13
The original title of this item was "Despite the hype, virtual reality still years away from making a difference in higher ed." This seems right. We're still in the early adopter phase, where proponents " imagine a future in which students go on field trips around the world from the comfort of the VR lab, joined by tour guides who connect to the class remotely." But several thinks hold the technology back. Cost is one; headsets are still expensive. Movement is another, particularly when combined with oft-experienced "virtual reality sickness". But this, according to the article, is the time to get involved with the new technology. "It seems like a crucial time to jump on it, mold it, direct it and fashion it in a way we think serves our mission," says Anthony F. Guest-Scott.
U.S. Publishing Industry’s Annual Survey Reveals Nearly $28 Billion in Revenue in 2015
Marisa Bluestone, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2016/07/12
Some people look at this as a TAM (Total Addressable Market) to chase after with new technology. I look at this as an opportunity to reduce billions of dollars of social costs associated with learning and development. The figure includes spending on eBooks, paperback books, and hardcover books (which grew in 2015). It also includes downloaded audio, which through doubling to about $500 million is a tiny fraction of the overall amount. Average prices (by my calculation) were $6.44 for audio, $6.70 for eBooks, $4.31 for paperback and $9.36 for hardcover. Considering you can't even resell your electronic works, they appear vastly overpriced, which explains why both paperback and hardcover revenues were up in 2015. Still. Given that the per unit reproduction cost is near zero, there seems to be little reason why eBooks should cost an average of $6.70 each. I'm thinking more like 6 or 7 cents.
Will AI Companies Make Any Money?
Thomas H. Davenport, Harvard Business Review, 2016/07/12
I've tried to say this before but it's tough to make the case stick when you're talking to AI researchers. Will artificial intelligence (AI) companies make any money? asks Thomas H. Davenport. He answers, " it’s going to be difficult to make a good living just by selling cognitive software... in general, this type of software will mostly be abundant and free. If your company knows what it does, how to use it, and how to integrate it into your business, you’re golden. If you’re planning to sell it, not so much."
Social Media in Research: From 'Big Data' to 'Wide Data'
Axel Bruns, Snurblog, 2016/07/12
Snurblog has been summarizing talks at the Social Media and Society conference in London, starting with this one. "As a community, we haven't been helped by the hype around 'big data' that social media data have come to be caught up in. Social media data have been falsely seen as a telescope with which we can observe large-scale patterns, but this view fails to recognise that these data are not naturally occurring: they are not 'raw' data, but are both framed by and framing other contexts. We must work to better understand these contexts – and one key such context is the social media platforms in which the data are being produced." So far we also have big social data research, the U.S. election on Twitter, and drug use on social media.
Time Ontology in OWL Draft Published
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2016/07/12
For future reference, the latest version of the World Wide Web Consortium's time ontology, now supporting multiple calendars (and not just the Gregorian calendar).
International Organizations and Educational Reform
Louis Volante, CEA Education Canada, 2016/07/13
Amid all the calls in Canada for a "national education policy" about this or that it is rare to see celebrated our provincial divisions. But that is the case in the last paragraph of this article: "our provincial autonomy is an important characteristic in helping our vast nation successfully address external international pressures in a manner that is respectful of and consistent with our regional culture, history, and geography." This is a contrast, say, with the "soft law" tactics of the European Union "that seeks to undermine traditional constitutional doctrines and values that support a limited view of Social Europe." This discussion is found in the context of a wider look at international organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, UNESCO and the EU, on global education development and policy. I would probably have wanted to look at other international organizations such as global foundations (Shuttleworth, Hewlett) and multinational corporations (especially Microsoft, Google, Apple and Pearson).
The Alberta Public Charter School System
Dianne Gereluk, Eugene G. Kowch, Merlin B. Thompson, CEA Education Canada, 2016/07/12
Normally we think of a charter school as a privately owned and run institution doing whatever it likes and competing with the regular system for better students and instructional resources. This article paints a somewhat different picture of the Alberta Public Charter School system. Located in western Canada, this system creates the dimension of choice often sought by parents within the bounds of the public education system. While schools set their own area of focus and govern their own teaching process, they are still held accountable, and are still a part of, public education in Canada. This has created stresses, because charter school teachers are only associate members of the provincial teachers' association, and space and resource limitations have created resource constraints. Readers from outside Canada might find this model an interesting comparison with, say, the charter school model employed in the United States.
Ed-Fi Alliance and IMS Global Learning Consortium Announce Next Steps
Ed-Fi, 2016/07/12
More details of emerging learning technology standards initiatives have been announced. Here's the information (all quoted): "the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Data Conference, the nonprofits Ed-Fi Alliance and IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) announced... Earlier this year, the two standards bodies announced their intent to implement a single, unified approach for:
- Rostering: Support for exporting data in OneRoster format from the Ed-Fi ODS / API v2.1 is currently in development... to be released through the Ed-Fi Exchange later this summer.
- Assessment: joint support for both the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) and Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) specifications... as well as Ed-Fi Assessment specifications
- Outcomes: The collaboration will establish working group activities to pursue alignment around grade, gradebook and outcomes domains."
That's all. I'm sure there are stories behind the scenes about how these two organizations got together and found common ground on these specifications.
White Boy Privilege
Royce Mann, YouTube, 2016/07/11
"I get that change can be scary but equality shouldn't be."
Personalized Learning Explainer: Teaching to the Back Row
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/07/11
The best thing I have to say about this video to Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill is that it's short. It should be shorter. It's not simply that the video "feels like a commercial that could have been produced by a textbook publisher" (inexplicably, that was the objective!) but that the characterization of "personalized learning" is so narrow as to be obnoxious. "Teaching to the back row"? FYI the back row is where the socially unpopular sit, not where the students who have difficulty learning sit (he says as a former straight-A back row student). "Personalization is just a collection of methods of reclaiming some quality time..."? I know that the people at e-Literate have always focused on traditional in-class university teaching, but to suppose this perspective defines a broad concept like "personalized learning" is utterly ridiculous. I know it's only a two-minute video, but it would have been more accurate without the latter 1:59.
Learn by doing: Why work-integrated learning works
Anne Sado, Tom Jenkins, Elizabeth Cannon, iPolitics, 2016/07/12
Certainly I am in support of the idea that work and learning ought to be more closely linked. So I am in general supportive of the idea that "post-secondary students should have access to some form of work-integrated learning." But I believe the push should come in the opposite direction from that proposed by these authors from the Business/Higher Education Roundtable, particularly with respect to the role of business. They should be trying to find more ways provide access to education to people who are already employed or who are seeking employment, rather than access to work for people who are enrolled in higher education. Why? because this is where the most need is, and this is where business especially has been sorely lacking in willingness to invest. As for the higher education students, I would emphasize workplace less and practical experience more - student-initiated social development projects, for example, are equally viable. And as one commenter notes, this should not become some sort of intern program exploiting students.
A Design-Based Approach To Teachers’ Professional Learning
Sharon Friesen, Michele Jacobsen, CEA Blog, 2016/07/12
in this short article Sharon Friesen and Michele Jacobsen quote Carl Bereiter in support of design-based research and learning. "'Best practice, evidence-based practice, and reflective practice all refer to ways of making optimum use of know-how' however, while necessary, these are insufficient for creating new insights into practice, or 'know-why' directed towards advancing practice." They recommend learning that "employs research processes and methods to create and study innovation in authentic learning contexts." Image: Sharon Friesen, I hold in my hand a bird.
The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People's Problems
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, 2016/07/12
"Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving the right problem," writes Ethan Zuckermaan in this excellent article. "If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change." This is the characteristic result when technologists see a social problem as an engineering problem. "The problem with the solutionist critique, though, is that it tends to remove technological innovation from the problem-solver’s toolkit." As I've long said, the best use for a technology is one people select for themselves, and designing a solution to a problem is exactly the wrong way to design technology (none of my colleagues at NRC agree with this). Recommended via Gerald Ardito. Related: UNICEF principles for digital development.
Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Way it Seems?
Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University, 2016/07/11
Useful paper from Daniel Dennett summarizing some of his major arguments about consciousness. What he says about the origin of consciousness seems right to me: "the rich and complex interplay between neurons, hundreds of neuromodulators, and hormones." Crucially, there isn't some sort of internal 'viewing screen', there isn't some 'viewer', and these basic elements of perception ('qualia') are not used as 'raw materials' by some other sort of cognition, but are cognition itself. Everything we thing cognition does is actually happening in the interplay between neurons, hundreds of neuromodulators, and hormones. Because as Dennett says, where else would it be happening? The later stages of the paper are more challenging and less well supported by evidence, in my view, but constitute essentially the view that this interplay is moderated not only by our experiences of the world, but also of others' experiences of us. Consciousness is, in other words, a community phenomenon, and not merely an individual phenomenon. It becomes something like a lingua franca that enables us to interact effectively.
Pokémon GO
Nintendo, 2016/07/11
The newly released Pokemon Go is an instant hit, though the technology has been growing for a while. What's interesting about it is that it creates virtual entities that inhabit the real world. More, you can interact with them by capturing them, training them, and pitting them in combat against each other. It's funny that Google ran this as an April Fools prank a couple of years ago. The Wikipedia article is a good overview. There will no doubt now be a slew of articles from the usual suspects about the impact of Pokemon Go in the classroom, the dangers of interacting with strangers, and the problem of people being too involved in playing the Pokemon game.
Effects of Group Awareness and Self-Regulation Level on Online Learning Behaviors
Jian-Wei Lin, Yu-Chin Szu, Ching-Neng La, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2016/07/11
Group awareness and self-regulation separately influence student learning, write the authors, but how well do they work together? Specifically, how do they influence assessment, participation and peer interaction? That's the focus of this study. In a nutshell, the two working together increase task completion and requests for help, but not whether people respond, which seems to be governed solely by group awareness, and not influenced by self-regulation. But of course all sorts of other things might have played a role, as they admit in their conclusion; for example, the quality of the requests for help may have mattered. As usual, I caution that the numbers involved are so small that no generalizations can be drawn from this data; the paper is relevant only for the questions it asks and the experimental design. More from the current issue of IRRODL.
Coursera president: bursting the Moocs bubble a boon for us
Chris Havergal, Times Higher Education, 2016/07/11
The publicity - for and against - MOOCs did not hurt Coursera a bit. Rather, it gave it the exposure it needed, and served to help them refine their business model. So says Daphne Koller: “It’s impossible to learn quickly enough and iterate enough to make massive improvements, [but online courses change that] because of the number of students that engage and because a new cohort starts every two weeks, so you tweak something and a couple of weeks later you already know if it’s working." P.S. I notice the Time Higher Education has a new policy that limits the number of articles you can view, and an aannoying lock icon that follows you as you read. A response to recent events in Britain? As always, subscription fees smack of desperation.
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