Loading...
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes[Home] [Top] [Archives] [About] [Options]
by Stephen Downes
Sept 22, 2017
Clickbait and impact: how academia has been hacked
Portia Roelofs, Max Gallien, LSE Impact Blog, 2017/09/22
I am sometimes challenged to distinguish between networks and marketplaces, and in particular, to explain why advocacy of networks isn't the same as advocacy of libertarianism. My response points to cases of network failure, showing that scale should not dominate, but rather, should be limited, so that other principles prevail. I reference two cases here where this applies. The first is a Washington Post article showing how libertarianism is distinct from meritocracy. Libertarianism enables prejudices, such as preferences for race, pretty people, or relatives, to prevail. The second, from the London School of economics, shows how academic merit has been 'hacked': "When academia is... framed as a confrontation, it favours confrontational people. This has gendered and racialised effects." The marketplace is defined by mass; the laws of supply and demand are laws of mass. But mass fails. Merit and impact are not determined by mass effects. They are determined by relationships. Both items via Daily Nous.
When College Students Don’t Understand the Concept of Free Speech
Chester E. Finn, Education Next, 2017/09/22
Americans can govern themselves however they want, of course, but they like to export ideas like 'freedom of speech', and when the content of this export is pernicious, it becomes necessary to respond. This is the case here with Chester E. Finn. He takes pains to make it clear that "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…" and then argues that students don't understand this principle. In particular, he finds it offensive that the majority of the students find it acceptable that "a student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker." The freedom of speech does not require that I sit quietly and listen to attestations of hate. It entitles me to rise up and shout against it. And common decency requires that I do so.
franchise
2017/09/22
This is similar to the Jupyter Notebook, except for data. Also, the open source notebook is available online as a no-signing way to play with your data. "If your data is in a CSV, JSON, or XLSX file, loading it is as simple as dropping the file into Franchise. We run a version of the SQLite engine in your browser, so all processing happens locally." I really like this. This item and the next via O'Reilly,
Distributed deep neural networks over the cloud, the edge, and end devices
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2017/09/22
The next step: "DDNNs partition networks between mobile/embedded devices, cloud (and edge)... What’s new and very interesting here though is the ability to aggregate inputs from multiple devices (e.g., with local sensors) in a single model, and the ability to short-circuit classification at lower levels in the model." Eacj of these two things is equally important. The network is distributed, and the objects described by the network are not the same as the objects escribed by individual members of the network. This article goes into a lot of detail about how they're built and how they function. "By combining multiple viewpoints we can increase the classification accuracy at both the local and cloud level by a substantial margin when compared to the individual accuracy of any device." Original paper (12 page PDF).
Why Books Will Always Matter
Lisa Lucas, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/09/22
It's no surprise to me that the Executive Director for the National Book Foundation would offer a spirited defense of books. “They connect us to one another," she says. "They make people who are not like us more human.” But I find it ironic that this short video would give me more of a glimpse into who Lisa Lucas is and what she's like than any book she's ever written. New media gives us a reach books never did - both as readers and writers.
10 Current and Emerging Trends in Adult Learning
Tom Vander Ark, Education Next, 2017/09/22
We are given two sets of ten: first, ten trends in adult learning, which are dated and not worth the effort to read. And more interestingly, ten future trends. It cites the 2017 New Horizon higher education report, but doesn't repeat the predictions. Especially interesting is the prediction of the rise of national service universities citing a presentation from ASU president Michael Crow from last May. "Putting knowledge at the core, Crow described five realms of learning, think of them as developmental phases that HigherEd is going through. Most of HigherEd is migrating from Realm 1 to Realm 2 with experiments in Realm 3 (think MOOCs)." Realm 5 is "infinitely scalable learning".
Losing out on learning: Action to ensure refugee children get an education
Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, World Education Blog, 2017/09/21
According to this article, "More than half of all the refugee children in the world – 3.5 million – are not in school. In the last year alone refugee children have missed more than 700 million days of school, with this figure increasing by 1.9 million days every day." I have two views that have become more firm over the last few years: first, we should use the means at our disposal, including digital media, to ensure refugees do not miss out on an education; and second, we should not use refugee populations to experiment on or to promote our favourite learning theories.
Educators Should Steal Google’s Secret About Creativity
Matt Presser, Education Week, 2017/09/21
"When we give our students real responsibility to tackle problems connected to their interests, they flourish." So says Matt Presser in this article. I think he maybe should have said "authority" instead of "responsibility" (students are quite used to being held responsible for the failures of those in authority). But the point is clear enough, and the substance of a valuable idea (which has been asserted many times in these pages and elsewhere) shines through. I can't be as enthusiastic about the rest of the article. I'm not sure schools should be learning lessons from Google - at least, not until the antitrust and discrimination lawsuits are settled. And while "a young men’s fraternity" at a high school may well have been inspired by Google, I'm not sure it's either innovative for forward-looking. Nor are, say, field trips. Oh, and Google ended the 20% program cited here back in 2013. Matt Presser seems to be working for the right things, but there's that whole "I'm from Google/Yale/Harvard and I've figured it out" attitude that can at times strike readers as really tone-deaf. As in this instance.
26 Innovation Breakthroughs at the World's Open Universities
Contact North, 2017/09/21
This is a short post (6 page PDF) with one-paragraph descriptions of innovations at open universities around the world. Together, the set provides others with a sort of menu of options they can follow. Most usefully, each one has a link you can follow. Some of the items aren't eactly innovations (such as the Switching from Moodle to Azure item). Others are more aspirational than innovative (such as the Use of Blockchain in credentials). It's hard to describe closing support centres (as at OU) as an innovation. One institution (Open Universities Australia, the former Open Learning Agency) simply names itself as an innovation, which seems a bit over the top. But in areas like libraries, accessibility, loyalty, mobile learning, assessment and community there are some genuine innovations.
[Comment]
W3C Approves Encrypted Media Extensions as Web Standard
Bill Rosenblatt, Copyright and Technology, 2017/09/21
Bill Rosenblatt returns a lukewarm review of the the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) recommendation issued Monday. "It’s not really a standard DRM scheme," he writes. "It has turned out to be a way to compromise the interoperability of web browsers by using CDMs to tie browsers to specific DRM clients; in other words, to use DRM as a way of bringing walled gardens into browser environments that are supposed to be interoperable via HTML." It's like a narrow version of Flash or Silverlight. More. The W3C's decision to side with content providers against the open web last led some to suggest that this may be beginning of the end - that we will no longer have a single World Wide Web.
WebRoom - Free Online Conferencing With Virtual Whiteboard
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2017/09/21
WebRoom appears to be a loss leader for iteach.world, a service that offers (very) limited free hosting and commercial online learning services for business and individual teachers. It's based on WebRTC, which "provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs." Here's the code on GitHub. What's interesting about WebRTC is that it enables connections without an internediary server, however this may create issues in intranets, where services such as STUN and TURN are used to find a browser's real internet address in real time. However, this may be seen as a security issue, so extensions exist to disable WebRTC in your browser, and your network provider may also have disabled it.
A Decade of Remake Learning
Remake Learning Blog, 2017/09/21
Centered in Pittsburgh, Remake Learning has spent the last ten years reaching out into the community to build a model of learning based on engagement. "Gone is the notion of a student passively receiving knowledge while seated in a classroom. Today, learning is an active, anytime, anyplace, lifelong experience that challenges both learners and educators to fulfill their potential," they write in their blog. To mark the ten years they have released two publications: the first is an eBook (29 page PDF) that "eports on the impact Remake Learning has made during its first decade, sharing examples of learning remade and tallying up what the network and its members have accomplished;" and second, a revised mission and values (8 page PDF) that redefines it as "a network that ignites engaging, relevant, and equitable learning practices in support of young people navigating rapid social and technological change." Via DML Central.
Opening Up Higher Education against the Policy Backdrop of the ‘Knowledge Economy’ – Navigating the Conflicting Discourses
Gabi Witthaus, SlideShare, 2017/09/20
Once again I find myself wishing people would record their conference sessions - even an audio recording would be far better than slides, padlet and an outline. And this looks like an interesting one. While I don't believe counting words will lead us to a deep understanding of the discourse, it nonetheless points us in some interesting directions, and that's what happens here with this discussion of the discourse around open education. The paper asks, "to what extent does the Discourse of groups arguing for a market-driven approach to higher education overlap with, or diverge from, that of groups who are seeking to open up education?" It's a question I wrestle with. Market principles are very similar to network principles, and yet market principles are subject to failures where the poor and vulnerable are most impacted. So the way we talk about open education is an important indicator of whether or not we think this is a problem. I do - I think it's the problem.
Learning as Artifact Creation
George Siemens, elearnspace, 2017/09/20
"One aspect of connectivism that has great potential for development is the role of the artifact in learning," writes George Siemens. "he web had its velveteen rabbit moment and became real to people who had previously been unable to easy share their creative artifacts. Eventually we were blessed with the ugly stepchildren of this movement (Twitter, Facebook) that enabled flow of creative artifacts but in themselves where not primarily generative technologies." Quite so. This has been one of the aspects oif the internet that has always fascinated me. It represents an explosion of creativity. We haven't seen the end yet. "Change is happening, often under the radar of enthusiasts because it’s harder to sell a technology product or draw clicks to a website when being nuanced and contextual."
The Open Faculty Patchbook
Terry Greene, et.al., PressBooks, 2017/09/20
I like the idea of a 'patchbook', which draws on the idea of a quilt, in which each contribution is distinct, as opposed to a wili, where the contributions are melded into a single whole. In this patchbook 26 authors create "a quasi-textbook about pedagogy for teaching & learning in college. Each patch of the quilt/chapter of the book will focus on one pedagogical skill and be completed and published by an individual faculty member." There are some good momements, for example, George Fogarasi saying "friends don't grade friends" or Katrina Van Osch-Saxon pleading "for educators to re-think the need for students to memorize all of the pertinent basic knowledge in a course."
Why the State of Surveillance in Schools Might Lead to the Next Equifax Disaster
Jenny Abamu, EdSurge, 2017/09/20
The reference to Equifax is just a little priming for the search engines; this story has nothing to do with data leaks (there's a well-worn strategy called 'streaming' in blog writing where you follow in the wake of popular stories to catch a little of the search traffic; I'm not a fan). The article tracks a fictitious student through a surveilled school. Every movement is tracked, every interaction is logged. The question is, what will we do with this data? "You are making predictions like, ‘Johnny has a 95 percent chance that he is going to commit plagiarism. He hasn’t done it yet, but we will go in there and intervene now.’"
A mathematician is like a naturalist
Temitope Ajileye, Medium, 2017/09/20
This is a great short article, and you won't need to understand any math (or biology) to comprehend the significance. Even more important, the core questions asked by mathematician-naturalists are also core questions in knowledge and learning:
How similar can something be to a tiger, before it is a tiger? How much of a tiger do I have to see before I can say 'There is a tiger’ ?In the article this is depicted as a question of classification and categories (and by implication, set theory and the foundations of logic) but when I look at these questions I see them as being about rcognition. We in the fields of knowledge and education ask, "what creates the concept of 'tiger' in people", and "how do they know when they're seen one?"
2nd World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress
2017/09/20
This is video from the 2nd World OER Congress, now in progress, subtitled, "OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education: From Commitment to Action." As Indrajit Banerjee opens the 'Ljubljana OER Action Plan' session: "For a knowledge society to become reality, there should be shared information." As Cathy Casserely summarizes, there are two key dimensions: equalizing access to informatiuon across the world, and improving teaching and learning. These days, there's more of an emphasis on the second, which makes sense given the institutional focus. I'm still more interested in the first. See also, from the OER Knowledge Cloud, the five regional consultations on OER leading to summit: Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East & North Africa.
Photos of the Sky
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2017/09/19
Like Tim Bray, I've been playing No Man's Sky. The recent update is much improved over what was released last year, and updates have been added since (I turned it on yesterday to discover the mechanics of flying the space ship had changed). It's a simulation in which you fly from planet to planet, explore the planet, collect resources, and complete quests. The most recent version allows players to build based and recruit aliens (I have several working for me). As Bray says, it's easy, and that's a part of its attraction; it's very relaxing. But I'm also playing with an eye to the future. It's a fully generated environment, which means it's essentially endless, and it has the potential to be an immersive environment. It will also support interactivity between players. I can imagine playing it with a virtual reality viewer. That's when No Man's Sky makes the transition to something that's interesting to something that everyone's playing.
63 easy steps to digital literacy
Doug Peterson, 2017/09/19
I don't think that there are 63 "easy steps" to anything, much less digital literacy. And some of these steps require 100-league boots. One, for example, is to "distinguish fact from opinion, and know the importance of each" - a task that has eluded philosophers for millenia. Even more difficult, there's "how to identify what’s worth understanding." My own work is ties up in "how to remix, mash, reimagine, tweak, hack, and repurpose media in credible, compelling, and legal ways." Maybe not always legal. ;) Also: "when it is socially-acceptable to check messages, update statuses, check scores, and so on" (answer: always). Other difficult tasks: "how to identify and fully participate in critical familial and social citizenships," including your own. And finally, "passive-aggressiveness, snark, arrogance, unjustified brazenness, cyberbullying-without-being-obvious-about-it, blocking-for-dramatic-effect, ignoring people, and other digital habits." Doug Peterson writes, "This is highly recommended reading and an opportunity to start planning lessons that address the issues on an ongoing basis." Which takes us back to the first item.
Here are 9 email newsletters about data… I think you’ll like at least 4 of them
Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog, 2017/09/19
This list is focused mostly on data journalism, but it also overlaps into open data, and this is of significant interest here because one of the applications of open data is (or will be eventually) to feed directly into personal learning resources such as simulations, discussion rooms, and personal learning. Among the other resources, I would point in particular to the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), which as the author reports "has been working in the field of open data for some time, and their newsletter taps into a global network of partners and projects to provide updates on events, initiatives, reports and tools."
We've failed: Pirate black open access is trumping green and gold and we must change our approach
Toby Green, Learned Publishing, 2017/09/19
This is another article on Sci-Hub (beyond the one cited here) asserting essentially that illegal open access is succeeding because legal open access is failing. The author points to a recent OpenAire report (77 page PDF) identifying six roadblocks to open access what all need to be addressed: these include author and publisher incentives, transparency, pluralism, and infrastructure. The key reform needed, he argues, is unbundling. "If everyone could read all scholarly content for free, is there sufficient value in additional services to generate the revenues needed to fund both a read-only service and for those other elements of the scholarly communication process that, once unbundled, survive exposure to market forces?" The argument is that there is, if there is a larger readership, and this larger readership can come into existence only if there is access at no cost.
Subscription Learning as Performance Support Coaching
Will Thalheimer, Subscription Learning, 2017/09/19
Will Thalheimer describes an interesting performance support application called Trek. "Using employee's smartphones’ sensors (camera, audio and video recorder, and GPS)... employees captured evidence of their critical actions at each step in their learning path. This evidence was submitted through TREK to each person's designated manager-coach. As each step was completed, managers were notified and were prompted to review their direct reports' submissions. Managers provided brief feedback--either written or in a recorded audio nugget--and this feedback was presented to the learners." The managers, meanwhile, are proivided with libraries of support materials and curricula to support their coaching. Thye employment of human managers in this role is probably just a stepping-stone to generate acceptance; the same task could be performed in the future by an analytics engine and/or AI.
World Wide Web Consortium abandons consensus, standardizes DRM with 58.4% support, EFF resigns
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, 2017/09/19
Should digital rights management (DRM) be a world wide web standard? It's a tough question and so it's not surprising that the WWW Consortium (W3C) split almost down the middle on it. Now I've done work in DRM; I even have a patent in the area. But I have also argued consistently that DRM should be enforced in the resource, not the network. This decision violates that principle, and if implemented, would have the effect of converting the web from a public resource to a private network. Combine this with upload filters and there is end-to-end lockdown. This is what publishers want, and it's why they won't compromise. Their position should have been rejected. Their private interest does not outweigh public good.
Canada needs a national overhaul of university IP policies
Bart De Baere, Elicia Maine , University Affairs, 2017/09/19
According to the authors, young scientists and innovators have difficulty obtaining funding. This could be addressed by revising institutional intellectual [property (IP) rules to that they have full ownership of anything they create, even if they're working at a university (or government research lab?), which would attract investors and given them incentive to commercialize their innovations. In such a scenario, university technology transfer offices (TTO) could act like venture capitalists, providing the marketing and business development researchers often lack, in exchange for a stake in the innovation.An example of this is the University of Waterloo’s IP rights policy. Sitting where I sit, I see both sides of the argument. It would be nice to see government investments flow toward innovators, rather than to major corporations, as is currently the case. On the other hand, why should government investments end up in the hands of private enterprise at all?
Open Recognition and Its Enemies
Serge Ravet, Learning Futures, 2017/09/18
This five-part series has one of the worst opening paragraphs ever, and is quite loosely written throughout. Ultimately it addresses the issue of formal recognition of open badges. It's a frustrating read (stick to the point Serge!) but the author makes some good arguments worthy of consideration. Here are the parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five. Serge Ravet (who should consider putting his name on his blog somewhere) points to the tension in the idea of open badges conferring formal recognition on informal learning. The idea of formal recognition should be contrasted with informal recognition. Only the latter captures the intent of informal learning. Formal recognition, by contrast, leads to such things as quality standards for badges, which ultimately would limit the cadre of badge issuers to a small set of recognized institutions. But instead of formally accrediting badge issuers, Ravet argues that issuers should be endorsed informally. The core question here is: what does it mean to formally recognize informal learning, and can this be done without undermining inform al learning, or casting it (and evaluating it) by the standards of formal learning?
Timebomb: How The University Cartel is Failing Britain’s Students
Richard Tice, Tariq Al-Humaidhi, UK2020, 2017/09/18
The premise of this report (157 page PDF) is that British students are getting a poor return for their tuition fees, this largely because the entrenched interests of a university cartel limiting the potential benefits of a competitive system. The authors have no issues with the higher fees, but feel students should get more stuff for their money: "The more lectures, tutorials, laboratory sessions and seminars they receive, in general the happier they are with the value for money of their course." In response, the authors recommend the promotion of two-year degrees, more summer teaching, and a more flexible credit transfer system. This seems to be an extreme reform for what is in fact a fairly mild discontent; across 160 universities no satisfaction rating is less than 71 percent, and only the bottom 8 are below 80 percent. (p.31) That sounds like pretty good grades to me. The problem isn't the education. It's the fees. Via Jim Ellis. P.S. readers will notice that this report contains a great deal of white space - thre's an extra-wide left margin, and numerous pages are blank. I think that UK2020 could get a lot more value for money by removing the white space and offering the same report at half the length.
[Comment]
Science, open access… and Sci-Hub
Enrique Dans, Medium, 2017/09/18
As I write, Sci-Hub remains active and accessible, despite an American court awarding damages against it. I'm still of the opinion that there is no particular reason why American law should prevail in international disputes. Sci-Hub is based in Russia, and if the action should be filed and heard there. It's probably too late to stop Sci-Hub in any case. Even if the site is shut down like Napster was, the closed-access articles are out there, and the Sci-Hub database will continue to exist in one form or another. "This is the beginning of the end for subscription scholarly publishing," said biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein (here's their research) . "I think it is at this point inevitable that the subscription model is going to fail and more open models will be necessitated."
Member States to Commission: We don’t trust your claims that censorship filters are in line with EU law
Communia, 2017/09/18
Communia is a IP policy organization based in Europe. It advocates for limits to copyright and fairer terms for users. For example, Communia recommends that "any false or misleading attempt to misappropriate Public Domain material must be declared unlawful." In the current instance it is expressing concern about what it calls "censorship filters", aka "upload filters". These require that content hosting sites prevent the actual uploading of copyright material before it ever appears on the open web. It reports that the EU Council is expressing support for this idea. And it reports that member states don't trust such laws to respect existing laws protecting individual privacy and security. I am in agreement with Communia on this one. More from CopyBuzz. Via Open Policy Network.
This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.
Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.
Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.Loading...
Loading...