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OLWeekly
by Stephen Downes
Dec 23, 2016
Icts In Higher Education Systems Of Arab States: Promises
And Effective Practices - A Summary Report
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Dec 19, 2016
The Regional Forum on ICTs in Higher Education Systems of
Arab States was held in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 7 and
8, 2016, with the objective to provide conceptual
clarification with respect to the usage of ICTs in Higher
Education, to take stock of existing initiatives in the
Arab Region, and to contribute to enhancing cooperation and
synergies among stakeholders. This report summarizes these
discussions, first with respect to some specific topics,
and second, with respect to overall themes and concepts.
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Principles
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While I agree that it is important to understand the values
and principles that guide your life, I am cautious about
formalizing them into rules, and I warn against
self-serving rationalization. We see both in this article
by Ray Dalio. At the core of his value set are two
principles (one of which is stated explicitly): first, the
value of seeking the truth, and second, the value of
focused hard work. But is is equally an error to suppose
that you have found the truth, and that your success is
specifically due to hard work. I'm sure he believes
"reality + dreams + determination = a successful life" but
it also helps to get a job as a caddy at age 12 and to fill
your summers as an intern on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange. For me, empathy is as important as truth,
and happiness is as important as hard work.
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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
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This is one of the better things I've read in a while, and
I also like the way it's presented. The point of departure
is the concern, expressed by many, that artificial
intelligence might exceed humanity and ultimately wipe us
out. Maciej Cegłowski has very clearly thought about this
in some depth, and the argument he lays out against
superintelligence is a nimble application of demonstration
and reason. The talk ventures into some interesting
territory as well, including the foundational crisis in
mathematics, and the surprising story of the great
Australian Emu War. And there are some searing comments
about the AI community that spawned the argument in the
first place, "like nine year olds camped out in the
backyard, playing with flashlights in their tent. They
project their own shadows on the sides of the tent and get
scared that it’s a monster. Really it's a distorted
image of themselves that they're reacting to." Awesome.
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Simplicity
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Keep it simple. Yes, that excellent advice - but what
exactly do we mean by "simplicity". As this article notes,
on the one hand there's ontological simplicity, in which
the fewest number of objects possible is contemplated. But
there's also syntactic simplicity, in which the shortest
formal principles are employed. And what about causal
simplicity, which prefers the fewest number of causes for
each event? This raises the question of why we would prefer
simplicity at all. I face that a lot - education is filled
with simply explanations and principles that are probably
wrong.
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Knovation Integration Services Simplifies Access to OER
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This is an entrant into the single-signon arena, and it
does so by offering easier access to open educational
resources (why anyone would need to sign on to access open
educational resources is not explained). And it's not clear
to me how all if this is "simplified". "Knovation
http://www.knovationlearning.com/" target="_blank maintains
a collection of thousands of online lessons and learning
objects for use by teachers, which are maintained in its
Content Collection
http://www.knovationlearning.com/solutions/content-collection/"
target="_blank, searchable via netTrekker
http://www.knovationlearning.com/solutions/nettrekker/"
target="_blank and organized and shared with icurio
http://www.knovationlearning.com/solutions/icurio/"
target="_blank." Related: ISKME partners
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with Clever Linkwhich offers - you
guessed it - single sign-on for OERs.
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The DigitalLearningification of Museums
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Wouldn't it be interesting if libraries and museums took
over the bulk of the educational responsibilities we
currently assign to schools? That's not exactly what Barry
Joseph is suggesting here, but it seems like a logical
consequence. He does make the case that "that museums are
unique and influential informal learning institutions that
can be powerful spaces for young people to learn, connect
and create digital media." Why then would you also need
schools and lessons and such. Oh sure, there's a scheduling
and management problem, but young people could explore
different fields of interest at different facilities over
time.
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Death of the Textbook, Really
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the use of digital textbooks in academia has faced two
related problems: first, the textbooks are still more
expensive that other options, such as buying and reselling
physical textbooks, and second, students are in increasing
numbers simply not buying the required texts. While Ryan
Petersen and Jared Pearlman suggest that this may herald a
new model for textbook publishing, it's not clear the
solution they describe will be greeted with open arms. The
model, called "Inclusive Access" offers a radical solution:
force everybody to buy the digital materials, and add the
cost to their course fees. Its a model only a publisher
would love, and does nothing to address the core issues.
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Top 100 - Innovaciones educativas
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This resource (169 page PDF
https://publiadmin.fundaciontelefonica.com/index.php/publicaciones/add_descargas?tipo_fichero=pdf&idioma_fichero=es_es&title=Top+100+-+Innovaciones+educativas&code=541&lang=es&file=TOP_100_online.pdf&_ga=1.42747682.686589012.1481998993)
is in Spanish. Don't let that deter you. The actual list
starts on page 43 and in the pages following there's a lot
to explore. If you do read some Spanish it's also worth
looking at the first 27 pages where they offer major themes
and the lay of the land in educational technology. "Estamos
seguros de que los resultados de este esfuerzo serán
una herramienta que permitirá difundir un
conocimiento que consideramos de gran valor para toda la
comunidad educativa y la sociedad en general."
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Next Generation Science Standards-Based Assessments Are
Coming. How Should Teachers Prepare?
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This no doubt will attract criticism from the usual
sources. "Rather than asking that students simply 'know'
the science of reproduction, the NGSS requires that they
'develop models to describe' its processes." It's a
constructivist approach; rather than simply being given
models, students need to build them for themselves. The
reason (in my mind) is that each student's cognitive
environment is unique, and models developed from this
environment - you can't simply impose it from above.
Aligned with this, the NGSS creates "three dimensional
learning" (3D learning). "in 3-LS1-1, the basic Core Idea
is reproduction, the SEP is use of models, and the CCC is
patterns of change."
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CRTC rules high-speed Internet a basic service, sets
targets
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This is a pretty basic issue in our household. The targets
set by the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission - at least 50 megabits per
second and upload speeds of at least 10 Mbps - are five
time download (and 10 times upload) what we are currently
able to reach here in Casselman, a rural community roughly
half way between Montreal and Ottawa. There's no excuse for
it, not when telecommunications companies made $8
billion in profit
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last year. Related: Michael Geist column
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Top Ten Makerspace Favorites of 2016
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Fun toys: a list. I like the one where you saw your own
balsa wood planks and build stuff. "We noticed an important
shift in Maker Education. Once driven by STEM and
makerspace in a box types of kits, we are seeing much more
of an emphasis on open-ended exploration and stocking
makerspaces with materials that foster that. "
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What is design thinking?
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Design thinking is to a large degree what I do. “It's
not as simple as [just] identifying a problem. ‘Yay!
We found something that customers are frustrated with.'"
You need to do more; you need to engage people and consider
a wider set of possibilities. "Traditional business
thinking methods can overemphasize analysis and
deliberation, making it difficult for organizations to
react quickly. In contrast, design thinking emphasizes
learning by doing and agile, iterative solutions that can
have startlingly effective results."
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Districts Realize the Personalized Learning Vision, See its
Future
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Obviously the messaging coming out of the US Department of
Education will be in a state of flux. But one thing
unlikely to change much is the emphasis on personalized
learning. And as always, teachers have to experience it
before they will teach it. "Kettle Moraine School District
in Wisconsin, Superintendent Patricia Deklotz found that
they 'had to give teachers the opportunity to experience
personalized learning' for themselves. This was an
effective professional development model and cultivated
buy-in from teachers."
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Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher
Education
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Here's some nice year-end reading for you. This collection
of essays covers a range of perspectives on open learning
around the world. The authors range froam a consideration
of open learning as emancipation
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to an analysis of open education users
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to open assessment
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As David Wiley says in his Preface
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of openness in education is only now beginning to be
appreciated, and I hope this volume can increase the pace
of its spread. This volume contains stories of people and
institutions around the world acting in accordance with the
value of openness, and relates the amazing results that
come from those actions."
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Online learning in 2016: a personal review
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The inimitable Tony Bates offers his personal restrspective
on 2016. Normally I don't post end-of-year stuff, but it's
Tony Bates. And I really like that he begins with the
Global Peace Index. He notes, " blended learning is not
only gaining ground in Canadian post-secondary
education at a much faster rate than I had anticipated, but
is raising critical questions about what is best done
online and what face-to-face, and how to prepare
institutions and instructors for what is essentially a
revolution in teaching."
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Making Change
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This is interesting for a number of reasons. Probably my
best practical learning in mathematics came while working
at the concession stands in the local football stadium; I
had to make change a lot. Here's how you do it: leave what
they paid you easily video (so they don't later say "but
didn't I give you a twenty?). Start with the amount owed.
"That'll be $2.21." Count small change to even the number
(in this case 4 cents to reach $2.25), large change to add
up to an even dollar ("50... 75... 3 dollars), dollars to
all to the total (5 dollars, 10 dollars, thank you). It's
the opposite of the 'greedy' algorithm described by Miles
Berry, and is what you actually do in practice.
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Follow the chain
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One of the hallmarks of the copyright industry is the use
of the @copy; symbol, and later on, the Creative Commons
badges. The latter offers a link back to the license
itself, while both reinforce the concept of copy
protection. The Attribution Engine, desc rived in this
post, does the same thing, but is linked to a mechanism
giving credit to the original artist. Nice, right? Well no
- in reality, they're no different from the Pinterest or
Flickr logos that appear over embedded photos - they use
the photo as advertising for some service, which in turn
reaps the benefit of the traffic and exposure. Look at how
MediaChain's Attribution Engine
Linkawards credit. Fully two thirds
of the visible credit belongs to themselves and Creative
Commons. What would really give credit is a link back to
the source of the image (like this: Image by Ryan Hafey
https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-union-pacific-house-111193/"
target="_blank). I believe in attribution, not in unearned
advertising for third parties.
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Ria #38: Dr. Katie Linder On Podcasting In Higher Education
(Conference Panel)
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On this episode of the Research in Action podcast, Dr.
Katie Linder shares the audio recording of a podcasting
panel at the Online Learning Consortium Accelerate
Conference that took place in Orlando, Florida in November
2016.
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The SAP platform and digital transformation
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This is a good but almost impenetrable article reporting on
the fundamental shift in digital technology taking place
today. If you want the two-line version it is this: the
digital world is shifting from self-managed centralized
services to distributed cloud services, but the weight of
the platform is such that only a few very large vendors are
competitive in this market. I think both observations are
correct. As Hinchcliffe notes, "Amazon now offers over 50
separate categories of enterprise-class cloud services
http://www.zdnet.com/article/as-cloud-computing-matures-a-closer-look-at-why-amazon-dominates/"
target="_blank across the technology spectrum. Competitive
offerings have to be literally stunningly rich in features
to effectively compete in today's sophisticated and nuanced
technology landscape." Who can set up that sort of
infrastructure?
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Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?
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"Which information literacy do we need?" asks Michael
Caulfield. "Do we need more RADCAB Link
Do we need more CRAAP
http://libguides.library.ncat.edu/content.php?pid=53820&sid=394505?"
We can certainly agree that critical thinking has to go
beyond simplistic five-step rubrics. But here Caulfield
steers off a cliff. We need to know the background, he
argues, in order to differentiate between legitimate news
and conspiracy theorists. "Abstract skills aren’t
enough," he maintains. For example, "When I saw that big
'W' circled in that red field of a flag, for instance, my
Nazi alarm bells went off." He explains, "My point is that
recognizing any one of these things as an indicator —
FEMA, related sites, gold seizures, typography —
would have allowed students to approach this site with a
starting hypothesis." Well, yes. But how do students learn
which indicators to recognize? By being told? We know that
this is a non-starter. No, they need to learn deep and
authentic critical thinking skills. More: my essay On
Teaching Critical Thinking
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Model for the transformation of higher education in Africa
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I have my questions about former MIT Chancellor Phillip L
Clay's proposal to renew African education, but the report
he refers to is neither named nor hyperlinked, so all we
have is this column. In it, he proposes what amounts to a
recreation of the elite university system for Africans, on
condition that "governments would promise that students
from their country would receive the resources that would
otherwise be available for the best opportunities in their
countries." Also, "by closely fitting education with
industrial development, and by aggressively leveraging
global sourcing of knowledge and resources to build
first-class institutions" and "enrolments would be sized to
foster excellence (ie., small)." No mass education for
Africa. Clay should make this paper available online and be
held to account for his policy positions and advocacy.
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What Can We Learn From Countries That Effectively Teach
Math?
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This report
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accords with my own sense of the matter. "In every country,
the memorizers turned out to be the lowest achievers, and
countries with high numbers of them—the U.S. was in
the top third—also had the highest proportion of
teens doing poorly on the PISA math assessment." By turning
math lessons into rote exercises, administrators not only
weaken math scores, they also effectively increase
inequality.
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My Workflow
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I was thinking about working openly recently and decided to
document my workflow, such as it is. As you can see I need
to devise a way to make my projects and courses more
transparent. There's also a PowerPoint version of the image
with working links. No HTML version, sorry.
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Decentralized, P2P Chat in 100 lines of code
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I spent several hours this morning messing around with this
and actually created my own peer-to-peer discussion
board
Link43110/14rdv3mb7Z4vXbh5sgSxi2Mj8BEFndhhSv
as described in the article - it works, but I'm not sure
people can access it as the port is closed. You won't be
able to access it by clicking on your own browser - the
link points to a location on your own computer, and if you
need to have ZeroNet installed to read it. Ah, but ZeroNet
is an easy install, open source and free - download from
here Linkextract into a directory, and
then (on windows at least) run zeronet.cmd by
double-clicking on it in the directory. It will open in
your browser and you're on the distributed internet. What
you've done is to load a Python interpreter and personal
web server (which only you access). Here are the full
ZeroNet documents Link
I like this a lot.
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Wiley'S Misguided Advocacy
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David Wiley once again launches into advocacy for the CC-by
license. We've been through this many times, so I'll keep
it relatively brief. His text is italicized.
> There is a growing consensus among those who work
in open education that the Creative Commons Attribution
(BY) License is our preferred license.
No there isn't. The list of organizations hasn't grown over
the years, and the number people from this list remains
stable.
> Since the first release of the Creative Commons
licenses, newcomers to the field have been attracted to
licenses containing the non-commercial (NC) condition.
There's a whole paragraph devoted to depicting advocates of
the Non-Commercial license (NC) as "newcomers". As if I am
a newcomer. As if MIT's OpenCourseWare is a newcomer.
> The BY license best reflects our values of
eliminating friction, maximizing interoperability, and
promoting unanticipated and innovative uses of OER.
>No one knows what the NC license condition means,
including Creative Commons. The license language is so
vague that the only way to determine definitively whether
a use is commercial or not is to go to court and have a
judge decide.
This vagueness is cited by proponents of CC-by but hasn't
actually been a problem. There are some good rules-of-thumb
which can guide you:
- if you have to ask whether your use is a commercial use,
it probably is
- if someone has to pay to access your resource, it
probably is
> Example – I want to use some NC-licensed
content in my course, but students can only attend my
course if they pay tuition. Is that a commercial use?
It's a commercial use if the only way people can access the
resource is to pay you tuition. But if the resource is free
to access for everyone, it doesn't matter whether your
students use it also.
> For would-be authors of NC-licensed content, the
only way to resolve the confusion arising from someone
using your content in a way that you think is commercial
but they think is non-commercial is to lawyer up and send
a cease and desist letter.
This isn't unique to the NC condition. It applies to all
CC-licensed content. In practice, I find that there has
been more of a problem enforcing the attribution condition.
But nobody has suggested removing it on these grounds.
> The primary thing you gain by choosing a license
that includes the NC condition ...
The primary benefit is that you prevent people from turning
it into a commercial product and selling it. There are
numerous reasons why you may want to do this.
> Why would someone go to all the cost and effort
involved in selling copies of your CC BY licensed material
(e.g., paying for ads to drive traffic to the site where
they’re selling it) when every copy will include
instructions on where people can get the same material for
free instead?
Because this access is often theoretical. Should the
original ever disappear (or in the case of OpenStax, should
the URL ever change) there is no resourse; the user must
pay for the resource.
Saying things like "there would be very little
incentive..." creates a nice hypothetical, but we have no
way of knowing that there won't be an incentive. We've seen
that large businesses can be created out of very marginal
returns, soour "very little incentive" is someone else's
business plan.
> The CC BY language gives you practical protection
from newcomers’ concern that some interloper is going to
make a million dollars from their work (even if it does
not offer protection against all theoretical
possibilities).... This is why you don’t see Pearson,
McGraw, or other major publishers reselling copies of CC
BY textbooks.
If we limit the example to textbooks, the statement is
possibly true. However, publishers have made millions
selling out-of-copyright works, such as the classics of
literature. Walt Disney made a fortune by appropriating
folklore and fairy stories and marketing them as Disney
property.
> The only counterexample I can offer to this line
of argument, and it’s not a direct one, is the CC BY
simulations created by PhET. As I understand it, at least
one major publisher includes PhET simulations in their
offerings. The publisher doesn’t sell the simulations as
a product – I don’t think they could sell the
simulations this way for the reasons I’ve described
above. But they do include the simulations as a “free
extra†to make their textbooks or courseware more
attractive than those offered by other publishers.
This sounds like exactly the sort of situation I would like
to avoid.
And it's not nearly as rare as described here. Consider,
for example, companies like ResearchGate, which have
slurped up all the open access publications they can find,
and then require that readers log in to read them, thus
creating data they sell to advertisers and publishers.
> On the one hand, the faculty member you speak to
may feel like this possibility represents a lost
opportunity to make some money.
I don't actually think this is what motivates supporters of
NC. Mostly, people don't want their work to become part of
a commercial product that people would have to pay money to
access.
> Personally, for the OER that I create, I want
every learner in the world to use them – regardless of
which major resource (commercial or open textbook) their
faculty have decided to adopt. If publishers decide to
throw my OER in as free extras with their textbooks or
courseware, that just decreases the amount of search
engine optimization and other work I have to do to make
sure people know about the OER I’ve created. It’s free
advertising for my OER.
It's the existence of commercial content that makes SEO and
advertising a requirement. This alone should be a reason to
discourage CC-by. It shouldn't be necessary for us to have
to advertise open access content. It's a requirement only
because commercial publishers want to make sure readers
cannot find the free content.
Most of us do not want to become entrepreneurs or
publishers or whatever. We simply want to share the work
we've created. It's the commercial publishing system that
makes that hard.
As always, I argue that people should adopt whatever
license best suits their interests. I continue to fail to
understand why David Wiley doesn't respect that choice.
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Learning Design Principles
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Michael Feldstein points
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to this report on learning design principles from Pearson.
The report (102 page PDF
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is called "Objective Design and Instructional Alignment,"
which gives you a sense of their perspective. The
recommendations are (quoted):
Explicitly specify observable knowledge, skills, or
attributes a learner will achieve in the learning
experience in objective statements.
Derive these from relevant standards.
Align all assessments and content to objectives to create
aligned learning experiences, which are essential to
effective learning experiences and Pearson's efficacy
goals.
The report itself steps through a series of design
principles, ranging from 'assessments' to 'learning object
design' to 'critical thinking', and accompanies each with a
set of rubrics for evaluating the concordant design. I like
the structure of the document, though I think the authors
could have been more discriminating in their selection of
subjects - 'grit', in particular, doesn't really belong.
There's also a blog post
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providing more background on the project.
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Copyright 2016 Stephen Downes
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