Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily: Recent Episodes
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Jill Barshay, FutureEd, Sept 13, 2023
This title notwithstanding, this article is mostly a review of a math teaching tool called ASSISTments, first developed in 2003 and chugging along since then. It reference some recent in-house studies like this one suggesting "the 3,000 students who had used ASSISTments in seventh grade outperformed 3,000 peers who hadn't." This, of course, is far from proof of the value of one-size-fits-all instruction. But the main appeal seems to be this, in any case: "One-size-fits-all instruction may not be perfect, but it keeps the humans in the picture."
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Campus Technology, Sept 13, 2023
The resource - located here - "includes prompt ideas, how ChatGPT works and its limitations, ChatGPT effectiveness, and issues of bias." I love 'prompt D' in the Guide: "Create an AI tutor". It begins, "You are an upbeat, encouraging tutor who helps students understand concepts by explaining ideas and asking students questions. Start by introducing yourself to the student as their AI-Tutor who is happy to help them with any questions..."
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Metafilter, Sept 13, 2023
Once again we are seeing an object lesson on why it's unwise to build your product on someone else's proprietary technology. As described by the Verge, "Developers will be charged a flat rate based on how many times their game is installed, no matter if that install is attached to a sale." Kotaku notes "The news was met with fear, anger, and disgust from the game development community. The primary complaint is that these changes would be particularly harmful to solo, indie, marginalized, and mobile developers." Unity is one of two major virtual reality (VR) platforms (Unreal is the other) and is widely used in game development. More from Axios, Ars Technica,
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Isobel Bowditch, JISC, Sept 12, 2023
This page references and lists the sources for a really useful resource produced by Jisc, a PowerPoint document organized so you can really quickly access assessment ideas for an AI-infused world. Click (ctl-click) on a major category, click on a subtopic, and you're taken to a page with very specific advice for your situation. For example, select 'Quizzes and In-class Tests' from Slide 7 (which is the main menu), then select 'Live Analysis' from the next slide, and you're taken to side 40, which describes a set of possible activities, what they assess, possible formats, and some ratings.
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Patrick Donovan, Udacity, Sept 12, 2023
Udacity is now offering an 'all-access' subscription for its online courses. However, the monthly cost of $249 makes me gasp (I would have pegged the market rate for this at about $40). The library is composed of "80+ Nanodegree programs, 350+ courses, 370+ real-world projects, and 2,500+ skills" (not sure why they would use a '+' instead of exact numbers).
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Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive, Sept 12, 2023
The online program management (OPM) company 2U has traditionally offered its services in exchange for a (large) percentage of tuition revenue. This worked well until the pandemic hit, forcing most programs to move online, and colleges and universities relying on 2U to lose a large chunk of their income. Now (somewhat after the fact) 2U is offering a flat fee model. This may be more in response to legal challenges than to economics, as despite an exception for companies like 2U, there are laws designed to prevent companies from earning commissions on student enrollments.
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Benj Edwards, Ars Technica, Sept 12, 2023
According to this announcement, "if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft's Copilots or the output they generate, we (Microsoft) will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlement." In this report and others this claim is extended to the company's other products, but I read it as being limited to Co-pilot. Still, it's a move that will be welcomed by developers (though many, like me, still write code the old fashioned way: by looking at someone else's code to see how to do something).
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Miguel Guhlin, TechNotes Blog, Sept 12, 2023
This fits right in with my longstanding interest in critical thinking and literacies. Miguel Guhlin rounds up a host of CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) CER resources. I would have quibbles (for example: why not use the word 'because'? and why not say 'we know' instead of 'in science we know'?). The resources are mostly focused on science classes but the method is sound and can be used much more broadly - in any subject, really. It focuses reasoning on what we know, rather than merely what we believe or what we hope, and this can be applied anywhere.
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Bryan Alexander, Bryan's Substack, Sept 11, 2023
We read, "The vast majority of colleges had no formal policy on the use of AI tools in the spring, according to a survey by Tyton Partners… Colleges seem to be deferring to faculty members to set their own classroom policies on appropriate use." Of course we can't view the "very thoughtful article on how AI might play out in academia for the rest of 2024" because the Chronicle is behind a paywall, though as Bryan Alexander comments here, "We're already in the academic year, so changing up class offerings or introducing new automation is challenging. Rethinking class fundamentals - assessment, curriculum - is similarly difficult in mid-stream."
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Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, Sept 11, 2023
With the arrival of any new technology we see a host of newly minted experts in 'education and that technology' emerge. Just so with generative AI. Here Daniel Christian provides a list of people to follow (mostly via their LinkedIn pages). Are they really experts? I couldn't say. What is it to be an expert in generative AI (now about 8 months old) and education? Based on this list, it would seem that presenting yourself as one on LinkedIn is a minimum requirement.
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Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, Sept 11, 2023
Dave Cormier offers this useful checklist of questions to ask as you prepare to teach your course in this new AI era, including such questions as "have I made ethical decisions about student data such that the assignments and activities in my class?" and "have I reviewed how my field is being affected by the web and AI generation?" I can't imagine questions like this haven't been asked by instructors, but this lick organizes them and ensures nothing important is left out. Each question also includes some discussion and links to relevant resources. Image: CSU.
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Government of Canada, Sept 11, 2023
This is a guide released a few days ago by the Government of Canada. From the intro: "This document provides preliminary guidance to federal institutions on their use of generative AI tools. This includes instances where these tools are deployed by federal institutions. It provides an overview of generative AI, identifies challenges and concerns relating to its use, puts forward principles for using it responsibly, and offers policy considerations and best practices." It's a pretty good set of best practices and would be useful as a template for institutions considering their own sets of guidelines.
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Rory McGreal, International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, Sept 11, 2023
Relatively short article describing blockchain and its use to record microcredentials. Most of the article is a straightforward outline of the technology and its uses. The most useful bit for me was the 'state of the art' section outlining a number of recent and current initiatives, including Stacks, formerly Blockstack, which adopted the Proof of Transfer Protocol (PoX). "Blockchain can also ensure the sustainability and accessibility of official credentials," writes Rory McGreal. "All the records are secured and permanent. This can become very important if an institution changes its name or even disappears." Image: PWD, via Rogers.
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Maximilian Schreiner, THE DECODER, Sept 11, 2023
This post summarizes what is quite a good paper (17 page PDF) by Max Tegmark and Steve Omohundro called "Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI'. As the authors note, a strong approach is needed not because AI is inherently dangerous but because potential misuse by humans will likely override less secure safeguards. But there's an approach that can be followed: "Before worrying about how to formally specify complex requirements such as 'don't drive humanity extinct', it's worth noting that there's a large suite of unsolved yet easier and very well-specified challenges" such as provable cybersecurity, a secure blockchain, secure privacy, and secure critical infrastructure. The approach (as I read it) focuses less on the AI itself and more on the AI's output,for example, by creating a specification that generated code must satisfy and then generating a proof that the generated code meets the specification. Via Martin Dougiamas.
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Tim DeRoche, The 74, Sept 11, 2023
This is a classic case of 'whataboutism', which "denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question." The question, in this case, concerns Harvard's legacy admissions (here represented simply as 'selective admission') and the retort addresses the way public schools "operate under an archaic and discriminatory assignment system that sorts kids into schools based on government-drawn maps." Now I agree: it's ridiculous that living in the wrong district can mean attending a vastly inferior school. But at least more than 3% of people get into public schools, and you can change your address in a way that you can change your non-legacy parents. But still: there should be equity in public school funding and institutional quality. We agree. And that underlines why there should also be equity in university funding and institutional quality. It's not about the 'opening' of elite institutions to more people. It's about whether elite institutions should exist at all, draining as they do the much needed resources that could be spend providing a quality education for everyone, even if they live on the wrong side of the tracks.
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Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, Jul 04, 2023
I've never liked the use of the word 'tribe' to refer to social groupings on online society. Maybe it's because I've never felt like a member of one. But it's mostly it's because the phenomenon of tribalism often works against the wider interests of society. As George Packer wrote, "Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They're badges of identity, not of thought." They create a sense of "us vs. them". Sure, I get the sense of belonging being appealed to here. But learning is one thing; belonging to some special in-group is another. We need to be precise in our characterization, especially when it comes to talking about what traits of cooperation we value in learning.
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Helen Packer, The PIE News, Jul 04, 2023
The U.K.'s Russell Group of universities has released a set of guidelines for the use of AI. "It is important that all students and staff understand the opportunities, limitations and ethical issues associated with the use of these tools and can apply what they have learned as the capabilities of generative AI develop," they write. The wording could use some editing; for example, they write "while ethics codes exist, they may not be embedded within all generative AI tools," which in a descriptive sense probably means "they might not be embedded" but in a statement of principles (which this is) would have the sense of "they must not be embedded". Similarly, when I read "Our universities will develop resources and training opportunities," I wonder whether this is meant is a predictive sense, or a normative sense.
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Joseph Pugh, CBC, Jul 04, 2023
A technique once used to ensure ink did not drip off your quill is of little to no value today. It became useless as soon as we had ball point pens. Some time in high school I decided I would never write in cursive again. It seemed to me pointless to go to that effort only to make my nice neat architectual lettering harder to read. Yet the subject keeps coming up again as the myths about it flow anew. This Metaverse post links to an article from 2016 making what would be my case: "the grip that cursive exerts on much of teaching practice is sustained only by a disturbing blend of traditionalism, institutional inertia, folklore, prejudice, and bribery. It suggests that what teachers 'know' about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they're immersed than a result of research and data."
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Clark, Learnlets, Jul 04, 2023
Clark Quinn weighs in on the question of awareness courses, suggesting that part of the problem with them "is a legacy belief that we're formal logical reasoning beings and so new information will change our behavior. (NOT!) It can also be because the client just doesn't know any better, nor have any greater insight than 'if they know it, it is good'." But, he says, we can infer to what people would do if they had that information (at least in the mind of the client) and design around that. "We need to give learners practice in dealing with the situations that use the information. I think we can work from platitudes to pragmatics, and should." I suppose. But it feels like a pretty light response. Image: wilderness and bear awareness.
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Dane Williams, LeoFinance, Jul 04, 2023
The latest from Twitter is that you have to be logged in to view tweets, though as I discovered, the blockade isn't totally effective. And even if you're logged in, you can only view a limited number of tweets. This has resulted in another wave of defections; Mastodon saw traffic soar to new heights, while BlueSky halted signups (I'm still on the waitlist so I don't know what that even means). Meanwhile, the search for alternatives continues. Meta's Threads is set to launch Thursday. And this article brings you Hive, which is essentially a blockchain-based social network, "an ecosystem of over a hundred apps, communities & projects and is home to some of the most-used Web3 apps in the world, such as Splinterlands, PeakD and HiveBlog." I tried it but it was a spectacular failure; I'll try again in a day or two (I did learn a lot about recent changes to cryptocurrency law in Canada).
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Wen Huang, Candace Walkington, Mitchell J. Nathan, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Jul 03, 2023
This paper (39 page PDF) explores collaboration in virtual environments. "New forms of VR enable multiple learners to manipulate the same mathematical shapes presented as dynamic objects projected in a joint 3D collaborative space, using intuitive hand gestures." Though positioned as a research paper, it's really a conceptual overview, given that the 'subjects' were "groups of in-service teachers" in different physical locations. That said, it's very comprehensive and provides a really good overview of the subject. The paper itself is a broad survey of different instructional approaches, tracking and measurement, and implications for theories such as embodied cognition.
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Andy Jett, EdD, and Mary Jane Pearson, PhD, Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning, Jul 03, 2023
This shortish article is framed around a framework of six guiding principles for a faculty online community. One of the key benefits such a community," writes the author, "is that faculty are given the opportunity to collaborate and share their knowledge and expertise." That explains why the principles - including such things as "a clear purpose" and "a commitment to high standards" - appear to the professionalism of faculty. But if we ask what sort of things work, then in addition iin addition to usable tools and effective moderation you need things like engagement and animation. Unless the community actually presents itself to faculty where they live, it will sit unnoticed.
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Sonia Martins Felix, Education Sciences, Jul 03, 2023
This article combines critical thinking, education for sustainable development (ESD), and positioning theory (that is, the perspective from which you undertake some activity). Two themes emerge from the discussion. First, critical thinking involves more than skills; it also involve's one's dispositions; "Teachers' dispositions related to ESD influence not only the types of critical thinking skills students learn but also the critical thinking dispositions they acquire." And second, these dispositions are revealed through positioning theory as indicators of care; "Teachers' positions (the micro level of CDA via PT) indicated CT dispositions as a prevalent tendency to care about others' needs." The authors weave a nice tapestry, full of interesting strands, but I'm not sure it would stretch far beyond its original Norwegian context. Image: Michael Hogan.
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Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch, Jul 03, 2023
As Twitter limits the number of tweets users can view, this story reports that, "powered by Black founders who formerly worked at Twitter, Spill is opening the waitlist today for its upcoming social media app." I've signed up for the waitlist, though honestly, my patience with social media (even the good ones, like Mastodon) is wearing thin. Sure, some people post interesting things, but a sizable number simply post links to commercial media paywalls. It's lazy and unthinking and I think characterizes most posts from most people. It's why in OLDaily I prefer to accompany a link with an opinion (and, of course, to never link to paywalls). Taking time and care is less popular these days (maybe that's always been true) but that's how I like my media.
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Tim Bray, ongoing by Tim Bray, Jul 03, 2023
It's useful to contrast how decisions are made in the fediverse with how they are made in commercial social media and how they are made on school, college or university platforms. In this post, Tim Bray outlines how the fediverse works, including especially Mastodon, and describes as a case study a key image facing it: whether to allow Meta (aka Facebook) to create a service (called 'Threads") that interoperates with it. What's important here is not what different sites decide, but how they go about making the decision. Unlike most other services, fediverse instances consult their members. "Who wasn't involved? Venture capitalists. Entrepreneurs. Advertisers. Private-equity people. Billionaires." As it should be.
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Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab, Jun 30, 2023
Educators need to learn from media, I think, that presenting 'just the facts', isn't sufficient. "But we know now that people's brains don't have an on/off switch that gets flipped by a well-made factcheck. People's beliefs are driven by a huge number of psychological and social factors, far beyond whether they follow PolitiFact on Instagram. Knowledge alone doesn't knock out beliefs held for deeper reasons — and sometimes, it entrenches them more deeply."
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Bron Maher, PressGazette, Jun 30, 2023
The Canadian law, intended to protect (large, commercial, billionaire-owned) news media in Canada, could end up wrecking it. Most of the coverage around Canada's new media pay-for-links law is saying that Google and Meta are "blocking" access to Canadian news media. They are doing no such thing, no more than I am when I also decide not to link to CTV or the Globe and Mail. They are simply withdrawing a free service being offered to publishers, a service Google notes is valued at $250 million a year. If Google directed a fraction of that traffic my way, I could retire. What I wouldn't do is take Google to court asking for more. Because if we accept the principle that we have to pay for links, that would also wreck the internet. Instead, I would, you know, offer better digital products and services designed for the information age.
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David Pierce, The Verge, Jun 30, 2023
RSS has been my go-to technology since 1998 when I became the feed number 31 supplying content to Netscape's NetCenter. It's still how I find most things today, and is the essential tool in my distribution network (email services get blocked or fail, social media algorithms demote content to obscurity, but RSS just keeps chugging along). Ten years ago, Google Reader had become a staple of the RSS world. Then they killed it, right around the same time they were launching their colossal failure, Google+. This post describes how and why Reader was killed, from the perspective of a Google insider. I would't believe everything it says (like the bit where 30 million users is too small a customer base for a google tool). But it's still enlightening.
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Tahu Kukutai, et al., Te Kāhui Raraunga, Jun 30, 2023
There's a ton of useful ideas and concepts in this document (45 page PDF) describing data governance and ethics from a Maori perspective. It hinges on this idea: "Data is often described as the world's most valuable resource – a commodity to be extracted, used and reused. By contrast, Maori data is a taonga tuku iho – an ancestral gift – which requires active protection and careful nurturing for the benefit of individuals and collectives, now and in the future." This resistance to an extractive model of data governance is also essential to the The Canadian First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP) of First Nations data, which the report cites. It means, in essence, a separate sphere of Indigenous data management outside the sphere - and jurisdiction - of the crown. This model - indigenous data sovereignty - is something that might usefully be considered for cultures and societies generally.
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What's New in Publishing, Jun 30, 2023
"Come for the storytelling, stay for the community." This item describes "A new business model emerging of selling bundles and what that means, getting people to come for the storytelling, for the journalism, but they stay for the community." It's funny, but this approach made me think of the article Akan folklore as a philosophical framework for education in Ghana. "It is through storytelling that African elders endeavoured to inculcate in the younger generation virtues such as good behaviour, manners, hard work, fairness and respectful submission to authority." In journalism, it may be AI that plays the role of the elder. "For many of you may be the last train in digital. We missed the social train, we missed the mobile train. Some people missed the search train. Let's not miss this train." Sure, there are risks to having AI create our stories for us, but on the other hand, it's probably better than developing our cultural values through watching the Marvel Cimematic Universe.
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Miguel Guhlin, TechNotes Blog, Jun 30, 2023
This is a fun post with good insights you can dig into. The surface-level question asks how to motivate teachers to use interactive touch screens that are being promoted by the administration. Miguel Guhlin agrees it's a tough sell, and lists a number of objections a sceptical teacher might raise. Then, in the linchpin of this post, he suggests shifting attention away from the technology and toward effective evidence-based teaching strategies (he quotes Hattie and impact.wales here). "There's more energy on tap for improving student achievement than there is for replacing a pencil," he says. The impact.wales diagram (pictured) is itself worthy of a good look, as it describes what they (incorrectly) call "deep learning" but what but what I'll call "cognitive connectivism" - "the more you 'think' about something, the more connections you make, the better your 'learning'".
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Uri Gal, The Conversation, Jun 29, 2023
For now, my job as a human curator and reviewer of news in our field remains pretty important. This is especially the case as AI is increasingly being used to replace humans in media. As a leaked memo to employees at Axel Sprnger's Bild magazine says, they will "unfortunately part with colleagues who have tasks that will be replaced by AI and/or processes in the digital world. The functions of editorial directors, page editors, proofreaders, secretaries, and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today." Using the AI may make it easier for the company to enforce its political perspective, but it arguably will not support fairness and accuracy in journalism; as this article argues, "Unlike a human editor, AI cannot explain their decisions or reasoning in a meaningful way. This can be a problem in a field where accountability and transparency are important." Maybe. But what happens when the AIs inevitable become good. Will we still need people like me as a human curator and reviewer of news? Arguably not.
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Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, Jun 29, 2023
This post made me think of this article in the Guardian on the two types of anti-racism: "The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes.... The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups." Changing attitudes and beliefs may feel worthwhile, but only changing actions, structures and institutions will create real change. It also makes me think of the 'awareness campaigns' being run by, say, Creative Commons, which again to my mind don't actually put open educational resources into the hands of people. So to the present article: Doug Belshaw approaches the question by outlining the concept of 'supererogation', which is the idea that an action might be good, but is not required. That's what the liberal tradition buys you. "Once you see people putting in the minimum effort of 'awareness raising'," he writes, "you start seeing it everywhere. It's particularly prevalent on social media, where it takes a single tap to reshare news and make others aware of something you've just seen." Quite so.
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Apereo, Jun 29, 2023
So in coversation recently the subject of single-sign on (SSO) for distributed services came up, and I was led to this site. Apereo's Central Authentication Service (CAS) "is an enterprise multilingual single sign-on solution and identity provider for the web and attempts to be a comprehensive platform for your authentication and authorization needs." What's important is that "CAS is an open and well-documented authentication protocol." The site links to an open source Java implementation. I think this is an area that will assume an increasing importance as we move into decentralized networks, and I suspect that identity technology will continue to evolve.
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Vicky Butterby, ALTC Blog, Jun 29, 2023
This is a good set of reflections on how we use chat in online learning and especially about some of the more focused thinking around the subject that happened in the light of the pandemic. This post addresses specifically the idea of addressing a participant's reluctance to contribute, either for fear of criticism over spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG) or the learner's inability to comprehend every aspect of the chat and course content, and recommends ways of granting a form of 'permission' to help them overcome these barriers. This is especially assisted by an online teaching assistant or through team teaching, where one person can focus on leading the instruction, while the other can manage ad support the chat function.
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Charles Whalley, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jun 29, 2023
"PLOS staff are unionizing," reports this article. "How its leadership responds is a test of its vision for inclusive publishing." I suppose it's possible to support open access publishing while being opposed to unionization, as the current PLoS leadership seems to be, as reported here. But I find the two hard to separate. As Charles Whalley writes, "Arguably the true measure of inclusion is not whether an organization is willing to give a voice, but whether it is willing to give power. As a democratic complement to managerial hierarchies, trade unions are the only legally empowered mechanism for employee participation in their workplaces." More to the point, if this is the attitude of PLoS leadership, one wonders how far away we are from the organization hitting that commercial social media moment where they attempt to monetize their open content by charging fees for API access.
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WonkHe, Jun 29, 2023
When I was the president of the Graduate Students' Association of the University of Alberta I campaigned hard for improved teaching assistant and sessional (aka adjunct) instructors proposer pay. The precarious working conditions for these employees is well understood. We negotiated hard over stipends and fees, we sued (and won) for almost a million dollars of illegal excess fees, and we attempted to unionize with CUPE. My successor converted the back room lounge into a busy and very necessary food bank. At every point, the university resisted us, and this experience still informs my views of academic institutions many years later. So I agree with Katherine Chapman that "As vital civic institutions, there is a moral case for universities ensuring at least the real living wage." And I'm not prepared to accept the university as any sort of moral authority until they decide to do this.
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Natalie Samson, University Affairs, Jun 28, 2023
Photos and research go hand in hand. That's why I've often paired my photos with my presentation materials. As this story notes, "Photo contests are gaining in popularity as a powerful way to share and promote research." But I don't think this article quite captures the relationship. I don't just mean the competitive aspect when they say "photo contests are gaining in popularity as a powerful way to share and promote research." Lots of photographers enter contests, even me, though I don't win. No, it's this: "faculty, students, staff and alumni are invited to submit images depicting university-affiliated research." When you reduce the photo to depicting - that is, representing something else - then much of the expressive capacity of the photo is lost. If it were me, I would ask for photos associated with research, thus allowing the photo to be of something else entirely, but saying something consonant with the research being described. Then the 120-word caption can describe the research, and the photo can speak for itself.
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Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, Substack, Jun 28, 2023
The main argument here is that "what large language models do with language - or with the digital textual traces of language - is far removed from what students do with language in purposeful, developmental assignments." Helen Beetham makes a good point when she argues that the purpose of writing assignments is to help students learn how to think and how to communicate. This article takes the easy way out, treating AI as a writing aid which should be used critically. But it needs to be, I think, clearer about what the AI is doing differently from the student. It's a good effort, especially in describing what the AI does when it composes. But it is less clear about what the human does, focusing on the purposes of the writing rather than the cognitive mechanism that produces it. Is it so different from the AI? Are we training students to be like the AI (but with more facts)? Does this inform how we should teach writing?
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Economist Impact | Perspectives, Jun 28, 2023
Usually the Economist puts their stuff behind a paywall, but I'm hoping this advertorial content remains available, if only so we can continue to access the report (30 page PDF) co-authored with Meta and read Matthew Ball's comprehensive definition of the metaverse:
"a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds and environments. These can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications and payments."
Yes, the word '3D' is in there, but notice how small a part it plays when compared with core concepts like decentralization, persistence, identity and presence. This is where the real work is being done; the virtual environment is just one of many presentation layers.
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Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, Lens, Jun 28, 2023
This post explores "the soft power of Google Doc publishing." The title is a play on the term 'the dark web', which refers to the web beyond the reach of search engines and hidden behind barriers or paywalls, Google Docs and similar services (Google isn't alone in this) aren't quite dark, but they are not exactly open either. I make extensive use of them; view here. This post presents a series of 'axioms' about such services. The core is a series of examples (axiom 5, 'A doc is a distinct, shareable object'). I think there are a lot of insights here, and the subject is worth greater exploration. Via dogtrax. Related: Richard Byrne on how to publish Google Slides presentations.
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Damian Allen, ProVideo Coalition, Jun 28, 2023
Daniel Christian points to this post describing many of the basic elements needed for video and virtual reality production. It starts by listing major workflow elements and concepts and eventually becomes a glossary of major terms and concept. Most of the focus is on large scale VR production, but contents will be interesting even to those experimenting with smaller scale systems. Game players will enjoy the connection with in-game terms like 'nanite' and 'nerf'.
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Sekinat Motunrayo Ojeniyi, Samriddhi Sakunia, Rest of World, Jun 27, 2023
In retrospect, the fact that Nigerian engineering students are turning to YouTube tutorials from Indian teachers is not surprising. But what should be noted is that these tutorials are an important part of these students' education. "During my days as an engineering undergraduate, what was taught to us in classes did not do enough to help students have a deeper understanding of our courses. Indian YouTubers helped bridge that gap and made a difference," electronics engineer Fasominu Oluwafemi, who studied at the Bells University of Technology in Ogun, told Rest of World. At a certain point, you would have to expect the economics to shift, with the videos forming the primary part of the education, and the in-person instruction employed only on an as-needed basis.
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James Vincent, The Verge, Jun 27, 2023
From the early days of the semantic web and web services the sales pitch featured the promise of services 'orchestration' along the lines of "plan me a seven-day vacation." So here it is again, this request that most of us will use once a year, if that. And this I think forms the basis of what may be more push-back than Google expects for its new AI-assisted search service. It wants to replace the "the 10 blue links," you see, or at least, those search results left over after the deluge of advertising, and it plans to replace them with an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs summarizing the result, three links to sites with information that 'corroborates' what's in the summary and a 'bear claw' icon that when clicked splits the summary "sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence." But this idea - "producing cheap content based on others' work" - could "damage whole swathes of the web that most of us find useful — from product reviews to recipe blogs, hobbyist homepages, news outlets, and wikis." And it's not clear we want the 10 blue links replaced.
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Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, Jun 26, 2023
Donald Clark is sure to raise hackles with this: "All too often we latch on to a noun in the learning world without thinking much about what it actually means, what experts in the field say about it and bandy it about as though it were a certain truth. But trying to induce emotion in the teaching and design process may not be not that relevant or only relevant to the degree that mimicing emotion may be enough." Indeed. But he is not wrong. His argument is essentially that appeals to emotion are based on "loose language" standing in for proper attention to data and signaling, which may well be as effetcively done by an AI as a human. It's also, I think, a short cut to argue that computers cannot be teachers because they lack emotion - this becomes clear when we ask just what it is, exactly, that they lack. Must they have the same feelings as a human? Or just the same response.
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Miguel Guhlin, TechNotes Blog, Jun 26, 2023
This is what to watch for in edtech: small focused tools with a lot of power. Miguel comments, "it's clear Google wants to improve," writes Miguel Guhlin. "Whether it has achieved that goal in its latest offering, you will need to decide.... their product appears limited to Android and home use." For a school-friendly (his term) tool, he points to Microsoft. " Reading Progress "assists educators in checking student reading fluency." And Reading Coach helps students review unfamiliar words, use text-to-speech, and define unfamiliar words.
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Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, Jun 26, 2023
Daniel Christian compiles some articles on AI and education in law, including AI-driven Legal Apprenticeships by Josh Kubicki: "Here are three scenarios that might illustrate what such a combination could look like: Scenario One – Personalized Curriculum Development; Scenario Two – On-Demand Tutoring and Mentoring; Scenario Three – AI-assisted Peer Networks and Collaborative Learning." Also, AI and lawyer training from Reuters, and 3 ways AI supports the evolution of legal ops from Lexology.
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Bank of Canada, Jun 26, 2023
Not directly related to edtech but I'm sure it wouldhave an impact: The Bank of Canada is "exploring the possibility of issuing a digital form of the Canadian dollar, also known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC)." There was a consultation on the idea last month. This page describes the concept, outlines the research they're doing, and links to social media () where you can follow developments. They add, "For a deep dive into digital currency, have a look at these resources: Understanding money in the 21st century—what money does and how we're handling it in the digital age; and The road to digital money—how you might pay for things in the future." I haven't really handled actual currency for several years (in Holland I did not touch a single actual Euro) so it doesn't seem like a big jump to me. Though: would you have the same privacy as when you use cash? They make promises - but we also say the government very quietly ask Shopify for all its transaction records for the last six years, so maybe not.
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Leon Furze,
Jun 26, 2023
Overall I thought this was a pretty good set of resources, though I would be inclined to call it 'Topics in AI Ethics', since despite wrapping things up pretty well in the final section on Power, the series really is a grab-bag of the most-often discussed issues in the field. And it's more of a curriculum than a course. Each of the nine parts provides an overview of the topic, links to some resources, and suggets some learning activities. What it doesn't do, to my mind, is to get deep into what we mean by ethics, and how our ethical presumptions shape what we think is important and what we accept as outcomes of the use of AI. Even an introductory course needs to talk about this. But if this doesn't bother, this is a good resource to use to introduce people to AI ethics.
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Sara Hennessy, EdArXiv, Jun 26, 2023
This article is not written with clarity in mind, but it's a comprehensive background and description of the Tech-SEDA (Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis) framewowrk for studying the use of artifacts in online dialogue, where "dialogue here refers to interaction characterised by building cumulatively on others' ideas to jointly construct knowledge and critically but respectfully challenging and evaluating multiple perspectives and reasons." Be prepared to spend a lot of time with this article; it's densely packed and readers would benefit from expanding it into their own notes on the subject (at least, that's what I do). Hennessy is now develop resources around the framework, including the Toolkit for Systematic Educational Dialogue Analysis to "make classroom dialogue more visible, developing critical awareness that supports pedagogical change and enhances student participation."
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Digital Governance Council, Jun 26, 2023
This specification is proposed by the Digital Governance Council, a Canadian organization that lists several government departments along with banks, tech companies (including edtech), cloud services and other important companies as members. It's 'free' for non-commercial use though it will take you through a spamwall if you want to download it (it can be read without a download on the website (this link to the 29 page PDF might work)). It mostly lists a set of requirements for compliance and makes suggestions for external specifications, such as the W3C's DID. In the appendix, where the real work is done, it defines a 'credential' as "an assertion of identity, qualification, competence, authority, rights, privileges, permissions, status, eligibility, or asset ownership (or a combination of these)," identifies two types of information in the credential (information about the credential (including credential proofs), and assertions about the person holding the credential), and types of credentials.
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Chrissi Nerantzi, Sandra Abbeglen, Marianna Karatsiori, Antonio Martínez-Arboleda , Zenodo, Jun 23, 2023
From the intro: "This open crowdsourced collection (131 page PDF) by #creativeHE presents a rich tapestry of our collective thinking in the first months of 2023 stitching together potential alternative uses and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could make a difference and create new learning, development, teaching and assessment opportunities." They are good suggestions, including things like "generating feedback poetry", "persona-generating program for student researchers", and "AI-generated case studies". Each idea is written up and most contain links to more information or ideas.
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Jayne Baker, Tyler Evans-Tokaryk, Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Jun 23, 2023
My interest in this paper (21 page PDF) stems from my interest in research methods. Essentially the authors argue that focused tutorial support and writing instruction helps students write better research questions. It's one of these things I would have thought of as obvious, but research, I guess, is about not making assumptions. Anyhow, where I go from this is to ask whether such a clear dependence on writing skills shapes research questions, and therefore, the nature of our research. Or to put it another way, would we research differently if we did not have language, and if so, in what way?
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InfoQ, Jun 23, 2023
Angular is a platform for building mobile and desktop web applications. It has been around for a while and readers would be forgiven for forgetting that it exists. This InfoQ Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. "You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication." New to me is the discussion of Spring Boot, a framework for building REST APIs. If I find time (hah!) I'll consider working my way through this. Meanwhile, I'll not it here. It's a free ebook (200 page PDF) though you may be faced with a spamwall.
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Kris Holt, Engadget, Jun 23, 2023
The latest web browser from Opera, Opera One, is now available for general access. I've been playing with the development version a bit - what it does is combine a number of services, including music players, social discussion, and chatGPT, into the browser interface. The idea is to leverage these into creating a better, more integrated, browser experience (compared to right now where I'm running Discord, Amazon Music, and Firefox in separate application, and apps like Feedly and NextCloud in separate windows. Does it do everything I need? No. Is it cool and innovative? Yes. The browser prompted Mark Oehlert to ponder on LinkedIn, "what if this is how you get a new LMS...? Then 'launch day' is just as easy for the end user, as opening your browser and going to work. No more separate systems and the real difference could be that new system will be learning how to help you better as it learns from everyone else using it."
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Michael Geist,
Jun 23, 2023
"In less than two months," writes Michael Geist, "the government has reshaped the Internet in Canada with Bills C-11 and C-18 leading to streaming services that may block Canadian users and platforms that may block news sharing... with Canada emerging as a model for how things can go badly wrong." Well - it's not a model yet, since the bills have just come into effect. And frankly, I have no love for any side in this dispute, not the social media companies (and their AI cousins) who mine and monetize the open internet, and not the publishing and media companies who have been working as hard as they can to close the internet and to re-establish the news and media monopolies they used to enjoy. With luck, they'll all lose. I liked the model of the internet where we each paid for our own computers and bandwidth and then shared whatever we wanted with each other, for free, without anyone trying to close it down or monetize the interaction.
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Jon Dron, AU Press, Jun 22, 2023
By 'education' in this new and open access text Jon Dron means "the systematic transformation of people's skills, knowledge, and values", and as you may guess from that definition, it works by being a system. We (teachers) are "just one tiny part of a massively complex and only partially designed mechanism, a piece of a rich, entangled ecosystem filled with ways to support and engender learning."
But what lessons do we draw from that? We get a sense in the interesting chapter on elephants (as in 'in the room). Most of 'what works' in education doesn't work, and even though people are always learning, in educatoon we have to force them to learn. Why? Technologies are "complex entangled assemblies." And "it is too easy to focus on one part of this entangled assembly—a computer, say, or a pedagogical method—and to treat it as a synecdoche for the whole."
So much more to say about this work. I love the section on what technologies are. "To describe education as a technological system is anything but an attempt to reduce it to a set of mechanical rules." I think we could have conversations about how technology works, bantering about boundaries and path dependencies. I'm more interested in the patterns than the metaphor of soft and hard. That's enough to get us started, I think.
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Matt Zumwalt, GitBooks, Jun 22, 2023
This guide doesn't seem to have a proper home page, which I guess makes it hard to find and link to. It's also unfinished. But the content is essential reading for anyone thinking about the emchanic s of decentralized networks. Topics include content addressing, Merkle trees, directed acyclic graphs (DAG), IPFS, and more. Don't start at the beginning; start with The Power of Content Addressing, finish that section, and then work back to the start.
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Ryan Baker,
Jun 22, 2023
This is the 7th edition for the 10th anniversary of this open textbook. It should be understood that the focus is on machine learning, which is what we would study before advancing to today's neural network algorithms, deep learning, and generative AI. The course is offered as a series of videos along with Power Point presentations.
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Kate Felton, Education Matters Magazine, Jun 22, 2023
This article feels like it blends the technologies of the 21st century with the ideas of the 20th century. Admittedly, the images may be influencing my perception. But so does text that talks about "a diverse range of education-focused technologies centred around the idea of 'the virtual classroom' such as e-learning platforms that present learning materials in the form of smartboards, downloads, videos, virtual messaging and virtual reality, or online classroom environments."
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Rick Merritt, NVIDIA Blog, Jun 22, 2023
As this article reports, "foundation models are AI neural networks trained on massive unlabeled datasets to handle a wide variety of jobs from translating text to analyzing medical images." Because the data is unlabled, foundation models are not steered in any particular direction by developers; they identify patterns in the data wherever they may appear. After training, these models can be applied to more specific and directed tasks, such as answering questions, object recognition, or sentiment analysis. Hence we see in the development of systems like chatGPT a two-part process: first, the development of a foundation model, and then second, the application of that model to a specific task. For more, see this, um, foundational paper from 2021: On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models (214 page PDF).
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Quentin Dufour, David Pontille, Didier Torny, HAL open science, Jun 22, 2023
Ages ago I wrote an article for OECD called Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. This article has a similar feel, though it's a lot longer and more detailed. The core of it is in section 2, where four direct funding models are listed based on "a continuum ranging from predictability to uncertainty, with the model increasingly coupled to the published yields": a 'white list', a 'threshold' model, tranches, and a yield model. The article also considers publishing processes (resolved into a list of '26 acts' divided into certification, production and dissemination acts), monetization in general, and how funding would work in an ideal world.
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Mark Coddington, Seth Lewis, Nieman Lab, Jun 21, 2023
I have a saying to the effect that "democracy dies behind a paywall". It's obviously a play on the Washington Post's "democracy dies in darkness", and the implication, of course, is that paywalls are a form of darkness, and as such, are deeply anti-democratic. This article examines (in too small a survey) attitudes toward paywalls, and reports three findings explaining why people oppose paywalls (not one of which is "I expect to get all my news for free"): first, a "lack of exclusivity, including the feeling that similar content could be found elsewhere for free"; second, "subscriptions are too time-consuming... subscriptions feel like "a draining chore"; third, "reluctance to commit to a single news source in the wider context of subscription fatigue of so many choices and requirements across sites." All three, taken together, reflect to my mind a media environment (and content environment generally, including education) where providers are far more concerned about their own interests than those of the readers or of wider society in general.
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Fixie.ai, Jun 21, 2023
Pretty soon AI will be deeply integrated into applications, so much so you won't be able to tell where the application code ends and the AI begins. This is a case in point. "AI.JSX is a framework for building AI applications using JSX (a syntax extension for JavaScript that lets you write HTML-like markup inside a JavaScript file)... designed to look and feel very similar while also integrating seamlessly with React-based projects. You don't just use JSX to describe what your UI should look like, you also use it to describe how Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, should integrate into the rest of your application." This is a full library available on GitHub, along with a tutorial, that you can download and work with on your own computer or on a website.
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Matt Bornstein, Rajko Radovanovic, Andreessen Horowitz, Jun 21, 2023
This is, according to the website, "a reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies." Basically it breaks down into a four-part structure: data, prompt/examples, query, and output. I think this is just an early stack, and I expect a lot more to be added over time at the top and the bottom. A note about process: this item came into my inbox as part of a larger item from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). I hesitated to link to it, because of comments I've read critical of the venture capitalist company. But then I saw an Alan Levine post linking to the item, and I changed my mind. It's a lesson to me about the need to be aware of the different factors swaying whether or not I include an item in this newsletter. My initial instinct, I think, was wrong, and I need to be careful about who influences me and why.
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Michel Carton, Christine Hofmann, NORRAG, Jun 21, 2023
I don't know whether there's a way to access articles individually (I couldn't find one) in this special issue on The Education-Training-Work Continuums, but I think people would like to at least give the table of contents in this journal (125 page PDF) a look and maybe pick and choose from among the articles. Certainly the introductory article is worth reading, as the authors propose to "explore the possibilities of challenging and undermining these discontinuities between education, training and work by implementing different contextualized types of continuums." Part of the motivation for this is that "existing discontinuities between these three fields create and reinforce exclusions and inequalities for already marginalised groups." The articles are global in their perspective, draw from historical and present trends, and look at topics ranging from credentials to governance to sustainability. Image: Connected community career services approach, p. 81.
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Boris Mann, CoSocial News, Jun 20, 2023
This is a discussion thread on CoSocial News (running on Lemmy, which can be thought of as a federated version of Reddit). The topic concerns what Facebook (ie., Meta) is planning to do to join the network of federated sites on ActivityPub (the decentralized network Mastodon and Lemmy are a part of). I would say the effect will be similar to what happened when users of the closed America Online (AOL) service joined the internet for the first time - a flood of new users with no real understand on what they've joined, why it's different from AOL, and what strange terms like 'website' mean. It's trick. Do existing instances (like, say CoSocial News) federate wit Meta - that is, do they allow interoperability between their site and Facebook's? Will other federated sites (like, say, Mastodon.social) block them if they do? What happens when WordPress and Tumblr and most other sites (but not sites like Reddit and Twitter) join the fediverse? Mastodon.social would go from being the largest instance in the fediverse to a tiny fraction of a percent of the fediverse. But wouldn't it be nice to finally have open social networks?
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Beate Krickel, Leon de Bruin, Linda Douw, PhilPapers, Jun 20, 2023
"In recent years," begins this article (28 page PDF), "the idea that neuroscientists give mechanistic explanations has become increasingly popular." These explanations contrast with the sort of taxonomies and systems analyses offered by educators and psychologists. "Contrary to mechanistic explanation, network analysis seems to abstract away from concrete parts and activities to instead focus on the topological properties of connectivity patterns, with the aim of explaining how they determine the behavioral dynamics of the systems exhibiting those patterns." Obviously both have a role to play in 'explaining' what exactly a neural network or AI is doing (I put 'explaining' in quotes because it's the definition of this term that's in question here). The argument considered in this paper considers "under which conditions topological explanations are indeed mechanistic explanations." This becomes the case in multilayer networks when a pattern in one layer becomes an activation in the next, a phenomenon I have classified under the heading 'recognition'. Anyhow, tons of detailed argument here, for purists who want to know exactly what we mean when we ask for, say, 'explainability' (and are not satisfied with counterfactual or dispositional accounts).
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Sam Lau, Philip J. Guo, UC San Diego, Jun 20, 2023
The title of this paper - one of the longest in the history of OLDaily - pretty much summarizes the contents (16 page PDF). As Philip Guo reports, "Our study findings capture a rare snapshot in time in early 2023 as computing instructors are just starting to form opinions about this fast-growing phenomenon but have not yet converged to any consensus about best practices." So the jury is still out on whether computer science instructors want to embrace, extinguish or extend the use of AI in their students' work. The paper has a nice section describing exactly what AI can do to help students, and this, rather more than the findings from the interviews, represents its greater value.
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Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, Jun 20, 2023
"A dumb rich kid is more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor one and traditional teaching has not solved the problem of gaps in attainment," writes Donald Clark. However, he says, "we now have a solution that has been around for some time," albeit one that is firmly resisted by just about every human educator out there. It is, of course, AI-based learning support. "It will enable every student in the United States, and eventually on the planet, to effectively have a world-class personal tutor" says Salman Khan, thus effective solving what Benjamin Bloom called the two-sigma problem. Clark is not wrong, and while there is certainly potential for misuse and mis-application, we can nonetheless see (through the detailed list provided in this article) the many ways AI can be applied to improve learning, and more importantly, access to learning. Sure, it's not a scarce credential, like a Harvard diploma, and thus doesn't confer an immediate social advantage on everyone who gets an AI-assisted education. But if we're lucky, it will render the scarcity and prestige of a Harvard education meaningless. That's a problem for dumb rich kids, but for the rest of us, it's the future. If we want it. Image: Scientific American.
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Daniela Dib, Rest of World, Jun 20, 2023
Interesting article about Hotmart, a company that gives creators the tools to sell courses on their own site. Unlike social media sites like YouTube, "Hotmart's goal is to grow your sales, not your number of followers." It does this by helping authors create low-effort videos that channel people toward their courses, and by providing ways to monetize courses not available on social media sites. This includes accepting payments from a wide range of services, not just a few selected options often not available everywhere in the world.
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Davinia Hernández-Leo, et al., IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Jun 20, 2023
Today we look at the term 'Smart Learning Environments' (SLE). These are defined as "learning ecologies where students engage in learning activities, or where teachers facilitate such activities with the support of tools and technology." This editorial (4 page PDF) provides a quick overview; unfortunately, most of the articles in Transactions on Learning Technologies are paywalled (IEEE is still living in the dark ages), though two are available.Readers wanting more on the topic might look at Smart Learning Environments, a fully open access journal from Springer. There's also an International Association of Smart Learning Environments. Image: UDLEAR course on smart learning environments.
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Karen Kilroy, O'Reilly, Jun 20, 2023
I was just talking about this with a colleague here, and it relates directly to some of what I've said about AI and the blockchain, but with a nice twist. The twist (to me, at least) is in the use of the phrase 'supply chain' to describe the mechanism or process through which an AI such as a large language model (LLM) gets its input. This input, at its core, is data. To date, the data used by LLMs to produce such services as chatGPT has been very low quality. But at a certain point, the quality of the input data will matter, which means there will need to be a way of establishing the provenance of that data, which involvs the technologies found in blockchain networks. Calling it a 'supply chain' for AI is a nice way of making the concept more intuitive. This article cites a book co-authored by the author, O'Reilly book I co-authored, Blockchain Tethered AI, describing four blockchain controls for AI: pre-establishing identity and workflow criteria; distributing tamper-evident verification; governing, instructing, and inhibiting intelligent agents; and showing authenticity through user-viewable provenance. That's a nice well-thought out list.
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Anna Mills, Maha Bali, Lance Eaton, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, Jun 19, 2023
The authors argue (15 page PDF) that "a set of open educational practices (OEP), inspired by both the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement and digital collaboration practices popularized in the pandemic, can help educators cope and perhaps thrive in an era of rapidly evolving AI." Diverse communities, sharing and openness, crowdsourcing, and cooperation - all these foster a robust and resilient response to the challenges posed by the new technologies, acting as a 'shock absorber', if you will. The bulk of the paper is composed of the three authors' responses to rapid change though the mechanisms of OEP, and while there's a satisfying "how I did it" aspect to these, the resulting discussion tends to the superficial rather than an developing an understanding of why OEP produce this result (a question examined in parts in today's newsletter as a whole), referencing only the PICRAT "technology integration model" and the idea of "entangled pedagogy". Image: New America.
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Richard Hall, Richard Hall's Space, Jun 19, 2023
We haven't heard much from Richard Hall recently, but this is as poignant as anything he has written. "For whom do we write as the world burns?" he asks. For as we write in environments where "subjects and institutions discipline us epistemologically, ontologically and methodologically to perform in particular ways, we might ask whether our being, doing, knowing and writing are simply reproducing, in and through the text, a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable." It's a question I wrestle with myself a lot. Like anyone else working in an institution, I am expected to present certain types of work, in certain ways. These are expectations I have mostly resisted, but how successfully? And what are the long-term costs of such expectations, depending as they do on unsustainable models of society, commerce and governance?
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Stephen Downes,
Jun 19, 2023
My conversation with an AI that looked into the issue of ethics for AI systems. We considered the idea of an AI having its own ethical system, the question of where it would come from, and the risk of it being a corporate or legalistic rules-based system.
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Ian Linkletter, GoFundMe, Jun 19, 2023
Ian Linkletter is taking his case against Proctorio to the Supreme Court, asking three key questions:
- Is sharing a link to a video hosted on a video-sharing website copyright infringement?
- Can it be a breach of confidence to share information that is widely available via a simple Google or YouTube search?
- Can a lawsuit with absolutely no evidence of harm survive an anti-SLAPP application?
The answer to all three of these should, of course, be 'no', for any other answer, as Linkletter argues, changes some fundamental tenets of Canadian internet and copyright law. Anyhow, he'll need more money to take his case forward.
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Ben Dickson, TechTalks, Jun 19, 2023
As this article reports, "Machine learning models trained on content created by generative AI will suffer from model collapse, according to a new study" (18 page PDF). Specifically, "What happens when the internet becomes flooded with AI-generated content? That content will eventually be collected and used to train the next iterations of generative models." The article describes in detail how the re-use of AI-generated content corrupts the data. Basically, probable events are over-estimated, and improbable events are underestimated. But if everybody agrees that this is a bad idea (as they appear to) then why would they do it? But also: isn't this what happens with human networks as well: when people just talk among each other, without any new evidence being introduced, they abstract more and more until they end up with just a few polarized points of view? Without openness, networks tend toward model collapse.
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Big Think, Jun 19, 2023
This is a very superficial presentation of a very deep idea that can be summarized with a simple (though misleading) catchphrase: there is no self. I would be inclines to say that there is a self, but that it is very different from this idea of self as 'pilot' or 'executive function' that prevails in western folk psychology. To me, it is evident that there is no such self because the idea of such a self is incoherent. There is no 'view from nowhere' from which we can look at our experiences as though our experiences are not us. What there is, though, is an inner voice that lies to us. This article's discussion of that voice should remind us of chatGPT - when it doesn't know why, say, we stood up, our inner voice makes up an explanation. But this voice isn't the 'self', it's only an experience. "We have mistaken the process of thinking as a genuine thing." Similarly (as I've argued elsewhere), our consciousness is simply a process, not a 'thing' that 'is conscious'.
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Jun 17, 2023
The colour scheme I've chosen for my website is not accidental. Oh sure, I could follow 'the blue and the green' standard used by websites everywhere, but according to WhoCanUse my website colours score much better for accessibility (interestingly, I followed a link to the site (via Alan Levine) and there were my selections, still there from the last time I visited it, ages ago). Image: what bot design and mullets have in common, in honour of Jakob Nielsen.
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D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman, PhD, Jun 17, 2023
This article (and also this one from Luke Waltzer) reflects the "energy online about bringing the old web back, or bringing the humanity back to the web, or just trying to make some art, dammit." I don't want to be the one who says "I told you so", but I've never seen the wisdom of converting my entire online presence to social media, never joined the cool kids in teir witty quips and comebacks, and thus have been blogging and making art all along as my contribution to "the non-corporate, non-monetized, non-advertised, non-user-tracked, human-scale online experience." To be clear, though, this has meant that my readership has dropped steadily over that time, so it's a good thing that I don't depend on likes, follows or subscriptions to make a living. One of the major challenges for decentialized media will be how to replace the affordances (ie., fame and fortune) that centralized media promise to (at least a small privileged subset of) its users. Image: also D'Arcy Norman.
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Bloonface, Café Lob-On, Jun 17, 2023
What we have here is someone who has been on Mastodon for about eight months declaring that the "migration" from Twitter has "failed" because Mastodon is too hard to understand and use, because people don't are about "features" like decentralization and non-corporate ownership, and because purists are too stringent in their demands for the "right" sort of use. As usual with a post like this, there's a grain of truth to each point that is made. And I don't actually think Mastodon as such will be the long-term future of decentralized media; it' not intended to be that. I think the whole idea of a "migration" from Twitter to Mastodon - from one mass medium to another - is misguided. Perhaps better is to think of it as a diaspora. The future (ideally) will be where there is no one place where everybody goes, but a diversity of places, each with a different focus or emphasis, and all with the capacity (but not the obligation) to interoperate wit each other.
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Jay Peters, The Verge, Jun 17, 2023
The ongoing battle between Reddit management and community moderators continues apace over the issue of whether the company should start charging for access to its API. These charges would kill many of the tools moderators use. While many communities have blocked access by going 'private', my favourite protest was r/pics, which now posts only 'sexy John Oliver' pictures. You can find the back-and-forth on the r/ModCoord subreddit, which reports how the company is planning to replace moderators and force the communities (called 'subreddits') to open again. "The important takeaway here," write the moderators of r/antiwork, "is Reddit does not care about this community and Reddit does not care about you." Ultimately this will be true of any for-profit company and its users, something educators should very much take into account when making technology or service provision decisions. But the members care. As EFF writes, "It's the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren't there for the services, they're there for the community. Building barriers to access is a war of attrition."
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Jun 17, 2023
This resource (159 page PDF) offers 19 case studies of innovative practices in rural schools. The topic is especially interesting to me because my own education took place in a small rural school. As the report notes, "two major and interconnected issues emerge when considering small and rural schools: the efficiency problem, and the inequality of the provision of education." They often deal with lower socio-economic status students. Or students who need to work on the farm. What the case studies have in common is that they are each embedded in their own context; universal prescriptions don't apply here. In one case, the school is like a 'school on wheels' because everybody drives to it; in another, the the school takes advantage of a natural setting to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Some suffer from staff turnover, some are working to create collaboration networks with similar schools around them. There's an executive summary if you prefer.
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Mike Elgan, Computerworld, Jun 17, 2023
Readers will know of my frustration with my employer's 'back to the office' dictate. Decades from now, this sort of resistance to remote working will seem silly and unreasonable. The putative purpose was to increase sociability and culture, but the actual environment is empty and culturally void, lacking even a cafeteria or employee commons. The real reason (to my mind) is to fill Ottawa's office buildings again, which I suppose would help local businesses. But it makes no sense! Ottawa has a housing problem, and half-empty office buildings staff must be coerced into using. The city is also suffering from a dysfunctional transportation infrastructure. Why not convert the offices to housing, thereby revitalizing downtown (especially at night), easing traffic, and letting people work where they work best?
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Network Impact, Jun 17, 2023
Oh, I really like these guides. They're based on the recognition that people are "organizing strategic networks—rather than relying on conventional, centralized organizations—to have a positive impact on a pressing social challenge." The series of six medium-length guides (downloads here) identify and explain key network organization principles. The advice is solid and well-founded, clear and easy to follow, and supported with examples and worksheets you can use with your own networks. To get a sense, have a look at the Starter Guide (28 page PDF) or Mapping Networks (26 page PDF) resources.
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THE Journal, Jun 13, 2023
AR and VR will make a comeback. It always makes a comback. So the present state of panic can be ignored. "In 2022, AR/VR headset manufacturers shipped 8.8 million units in all of 2022, down 20.9% over the previous year. Now, in the first quarter, shipments fell even further — 54.4% compared with the same period last year." yawn
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John Danaher, Philosophical Disquisitions, Jun 13, 2023
John Danaher writes "The goal of this paper (authored by himself and Henrik Skaug Sætra) is to bring some order to existing discussions by proposing a taxonomy of mechanisms of techno-moral change. We argue that there are six primary mechanisms through which technology can alter moral beliefs and practices and that these slot into three main categories (decisional, relational, perceptual)." I think this is useful work, first, by acknowledging that technical change is often followed by ethical change, and second, in trying to identify some of the relevant ways this works.
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Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Phil Reid, Claude Bruderlein,
Jun 13, 2023
This book (241 page PDF) is the latest release from the authority on communities of practice. From the back cover: "What does it take to launch and sustain a community of practice initiative? This book helps guide individuals, teams, and organizations through the process... It is for organizational leaders creating a conducive environment, community leaders launching and sustaining their communities, people in various roles facilitating meetings, activities, and the use of technology, and evaluators accounting for the value communities create." Haven't read it but would be remiss if I didn't pass this along.
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Jingfeng Yang, GitHub, Jun 13, 2023
What attracted me to this practical guide was the image near the top summarizing the evolution of various large language models (LLM). In addition to summarizing the different systems, the article also collects lists of resources on topics (such as pretraining or fine-tuning data), types of tasks, and issues such as efficiency and trustworthiness.
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Audrey Watters, Second Breakfast, Jun 13, 2023
Everyone will be interested in Audrey Watter's new writing project. Here it is, " a new writing project on food and fitness technologies, on the 'optimization' and 'data-fication' of the body — or at least of my grieving and aging and traumatized body. " As we get more and more computer-based and AI-based assessment in learning, the connection with this subject will be lear.
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Bjö, rn Brembs, Adrian Lenardic, Peter Murray-Rust, Leslie Chan, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Zenodo, Jun 09, 2023
'Mammon' is defined in Google as "wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion." The word originates as the Hebrew expression for 'money'. In this paper the authors argue that "scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity ... of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover." Could a federated approach to scholarly publishing succeed, or do we need an entity like CORE to aggregate publications centrally? Back in the eduSource days I argued strenuously for aggregators; today I'm less certain. I will say that in today's debates a lot of old issues surface - for example, how do you support discovery across a decentralized network without overwhelming small instances? How can third party apps add value to these searches? But by contrast: how can you have a centralized network without the commercial interests and advertisers turning the gold into dross? It doesn't seem possible.
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Apple, YouTube, Jun 09, 2023
It would be irresponsible to pass over this 9-minute promotional video without comment. And I have to say, it's an impressive presentation, and though I can't imagine being one of the scuba people at the grocery store (to borrow a phrase) I can imagine wanting for video games and entertainment. Still - there's plenty to criticize. As Rusty Foster says, "Tim Apple introduced the most technologically advanced product ever created for viewing and annotating PDF documents." And as Alex Dobrenko says, "they at Apple R Us fundamentally misunderstand what, idk, being human is?" How? Well, like this: "'Your eyes are a critical indicator of connection and emotion,' Apple said. 'So Vision Pro displays your eyes when someone is nearby.' ... There is no less human way to say 'eye contact is clutch' than (read in robot voice) 'your eyes are a critical indicator of connection and emotion.'" So, maybe Apple Vision Pro is another Google Glass. But sooner or later, someone will get this right.
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Petr Knoth, et al., Scientific Data, Jun 09, 2023
I've mentioned CORE before (most recently, here and here). This is a publication providing a formal presentation of the service. "CORE aggregates open access research papers from thousands of data providers from all over the world including institutional and subject repositories, open access (OA) and hybrid journals," hence making it, according to the article, "the largest collection of OA literature" and "provides a number of ways for accessing its data for both users and machines, including a free API and a complete dump of its data." The paper lists a number of challenges to OA aggregation from so many diverse sources, and offers as it's key innovation "the improvement of the process of aggregating research literature." Code for most of CORE is available but not this ingestion module. The paper goes to great lengths to compare itself to other open content aggregation services, and reads a bit like an investment prospectus, which maybe it is.
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Corbin Davenport, How-To Geek, Jun 09, 2023
Previously: Reddit announced that it will prevent commercial AI services from accessing its APIs. At that time, "it wasn't clear if third-party clients like Apollo for Reddit, Sync for Reddit, rif is fun, and other apps would be allowed to stay in their current form." Now, it looks like maybe not. And Reddit moderators, like those on Stack Overflow, are fuming. As a result, a number of discussion threads (known as 'subreddits') will be blocked in protest. "Many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free (so) On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy." Some advocated a migration to Lemmy, a federated messaging service similar to Mastodon; Reddit responded by briefly blocking references to Lemmy.
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Alek Tarkowski, Aleksandra Janus, Zuzanna Warso, Open Future, Jun 08, 2023
This is quite an interesting report and readers will get a lot out of it, though I can't help but feel it was skewed a bit. The objective was to understand the state of 'open' on the web - where it is and where it's going - and the researchers evaluated this through "interviews with digital activists and open movement leaders." This has them depicting 'open' as a form of activism rather than a set of practices, and a depiction of it as a political movement rather than a social or cultural trend. That's why we see calls for greater coordination, collaboration and shared vision - all things an 'open' internet doesn't need. I also felt the authors struggled to find words to express what they're describing. The 'paradox of open', for example, is that "the 'open revolution' that many within the open movement imagined and hoped for turned out not to be the path that the development of the internet followed, especially in the last decade." That's disappointing, but it's not what the word 'paradox' means.
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Doug Peterson, doug -- off the record, Jun 08, 2023
Doug Peterson points to Miguel Guhlin, who as we know has moved to Mastodon and established a presence there. In particular, he points to a list of EduTooters created by Guhlin. If you want, you can a dd yourself here. " Many of the cool kids have indeed moved over to Mastodon," says Peterson.
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Mark Liberman, Language Log, Jun 08, 2023
This is a nice little bit of discussion on the origin of some of Wittgenstein's foundational ideas in the Investigations. It focuses on the contributions of Piero Sraffa, who convinced Wittgenstein that "language and reality do not necessarily have a common logical form." When we look at a picture, say, and ask, "What is the logical form of that?" sometimes there are no words. This is a pretty important turn in the history of philosophy, and preoccupied Wittgenstein for the rest of his life. Meaning, he eventually concludes, doesn't represent or 'picture' reality; it has more to do with 'use' and 'form of life'. This is really important. We may ask students to memorize 'facts', but what we're really demanding from student is a performance of a certain kind. Image: Wikipedia.
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Carmen Vallis, Stephanie Wilson, Daniel Gozman, John Buchanan, Postdigital Science and Education, Jun 07, 2023
There's the overt messaging in this article and then there's the more interesting subtext. The overt messaging is that the authors created an AI avatar to present content in a business ethics course and then asked studets what they thought. It being business ethics, students were unsurprisingly find with it. The subtext was based around the idea that course authors and institutions are already using a lot of AI in course design and delivery, but that it's hidden behind the scenes, and that the use of an AI avatar makes it overtly clear that the course in managed in large part by an AI. So - in such a case - is it more ethical to use the AI? It's not exactly what the authors were studying, but it does come up as a topic of discussion.
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Qwiklabs, Google, Jun 07, 2023
As the website says, "This learning path guides you through a curated collection of content on generative AI products and technologies, from the fundamentals of Large Language Models to how to create and deploy generative AI solutions on Google Cloud." I haven't tried it so I can't vouch for it either way, but if I get a change I'll run through some of the modules. It all appears to be free.
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Jun 07, 2023
This is a best-practices guide for GPT. It's something we could probably have used last fall, before any of this hit the internet. It might have tempered expectations somewhat. For example, this should have bee posted very clearly everywhere GPT is used (including chatGPT): " GPTs can confidently invent fake answers, especially when asked about esoteric topics or for citations and URLs." sigh See also this Hacker News thread on the best-practices guide.
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Samara Linton, People of Color in Tech, Jun 07, 2023
Here's the argument: "More and more prominent tech figures are voicing concerns about superintelligent AI and risks to the future of humanity. But as leading AI ethicist Timnit Gebru and researcher Émile P Torres point out, these ideologies have deeply racist foundations." The concept of TESCREAL stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. "These overlapping emergent belief systems all trace their lineage back to the first-wave Anglo-American eugenics tradition, and underlying all is a kind of techno-utopianism and a sense that one is genuinely saving the world." What it means in practice, they argue, is that on this view, some lives are worth more than others, some cultures deserve more protection than others. It's important, argues Linton, "that the fantasies of the (white male) tech elite, which are built on racist foundations, don't eclipse the need for transparency, accountability, and preventing harm to actual present-day people."
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Bryan Ollendyke, et al.,
Jun 06, 2023
I saw this at the Reclaim Open conference (online) today, and while I thought it was a good idea, the presentation and documentation were almost impenetrable. As nearly as I can judge, HAX is a system for authoring web components and inserting them into NPM, Drupal and WordPress websites (among others). What are web components? "Web components are a set of web platform APIs that allow you to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps." How do we use them? "Using a custom element is as simple as importing it, and using the new tags in an HTML document." Ack... they said 'simple'. Run away, run away. Seriously, the trick is in importing them. You create some Javascript code (that's what HAX does) that produces some HTML code, and then it just works in a browser. What makes HAX different (again, as nearly as I can tell) is that it integrates these into various content management systems. Anyhow, this isn't the presentation from the conference but a more useful presentation explaining how to install it on Reclaim Cloud.
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Hong Zhou, Sylvia Izzo Hunter, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jun 06, 2023
While most people are running around in a panic about AI in education, fewer, it seems to me, are writing about how AI will open access to people. The authors write, "More than 1 billion people around the world have some type of disability (including visual, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility, and other disabilities) that affects how they access digital content. Digital transformation can (turn) it into an inclusive place for people with and without disabilities, with accessibility powered by artificial intelligence. This post provides an overview of how AI can improve accessibility in different ways, illustrated with real-world applications and examples." There's the ubiquitous warning that "creating accessible content and systems requires a collaborative effort that includes publishers, product, tech, design, and other teams," because this is the Scholarly Kitchen, a mouthpiece for publishers, but the rest of the article is on point.
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Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz, Jun 06, 2023
This article (though undated) came out today, and it's interesting reading. I wouldn't say I agree with it about everything (and especially the discussion of AI Risk #4, which is just wrong-headed), but there's a lot of overlap with my own thinking. Especially this: "Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture." And this: "Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups." I don't agree that "there should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever" - that would be stupid; it should be illegal to use AI for the things that are already illegal. But the sort of thing Apple pulled this week - more than 5,000 patents for the Vision Pro - should not be allowed in AI either.
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Clark Quinn, Learnlets, Jun 06, 2023
Clark Quinn argues there are two things learning and development ahould be doing: measuring results, and "looking at going beyond courses. Not just performance support, but here I'm talking about informal and social learning, e.g. innovation." So, first, I guess people have been saying these things since forever, though the go-to is still the page-turner online course (my employer just throws these at me like confetti). But more significant are the deeper questions Quinn doesn't touch: what should be measured? How are informal and social learning best supported? How do you get from the point where the company is stuffing mandatory training into employees' brains to the sort of learning that is self-motivated, ongoing, and productive? For people who go on and on about 'myths' there's certainly a lack of soul-searching in the corporate e-learning community.
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Meta Stack Exchange, Jun 05, 2023
As of today, "a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network are initiating a general moderation strike." The move is in response partially to the way management at the company treats these volunteer contributors as a commodity, and not the core of the service they offer, and partially in response to the the way management effectively allowed AI-generated responses to be submitted to the service. I use Stack Overflow a lot and would hate to see the service turned into some sort of commercial garbage (I could use Cory Doctorow's phrase, but I won't). The story also teaches us some important lessons about community, which Laura Hilliger draws out for us.
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Shashank Sonkar, Lucy Liu, Debshila Basu Mallick, Richard G. Baraniuk, GitHub, Jun 05, 2023
Subtitled: "CLASS Meet SPOCK: An Education Tutoring Chatbot based on Learning Science Principles." As the paper (21 page PDF) reports, "To train the chatbot, we create a synthetic dataset of mock conversations between a student and a tutor based on learning science principles like scaffolding. We employed a specialized prompt to generate these mock conversations using OpenAI's GPT-4 APIs." Interesting experiment? Absolutely. Should it be used at this stage of development? Don't be foolish.
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Alex Passett, IoT Evolution, Jun 05, 2023
We can see both sides of this, right? "FlySense 286 sensors detect the chemical signature of vaping pen emissions, enabling automated alerts for appropriate personnel. The sensors also monitor ambient noise levels without the invasion of student or faculty privacy, and they send alerts when noise patterns change in ways indicative of conflict or outright bullying." A lot of people will raise privacy issues, but as one who suffered at the hands of bullies, I would ask, should they have the right to bully in private? (Ralph James taught me how to box, which saved me, and I'll be forever grateful, but I'd rather just have done without the beatings.)
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Erin Kissane,
Jun 05, 2023
Some really good thinking here: "in my work life, I'm trying to sharpen my sense of how and why the patterns we build on the internet shape the behaviors we enact inside them. But I keep getting sidetracked into the opposite formulation - how repeated behavior shapes our spaces, how rituals turn to hauntings, how buried things keep erupting into the present." I love especially the story about the fan.
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Bryan Hancock, Bill Schaninger, Lareina Yee, McKinsey & Company, Jun 05, 2023
When I read something like this I realize how much some writers want AI to be doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same people as people do today: " But what if I, as the employee, can query, 'who are five success models with my strengths and weaknesses, and what have they gone on to do? How can I visualize my career development? How can I continue to work on it?'" If I had an AI that powerful at hand, that's not even remotely the sort of question I'm asking it.
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Stephen Downes,
Jun 05, 2023
Suchith Anand poses some interesting questions on the OPENED SIG mailing list, and though I am not the British government agency to which the questions are addressed, I have thoughts...
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Josh Bersin,
Jun 01, 2023
There's a ton of stuff and I can only scratch the surface with this excerpt: "the introduction of a Copilot for Microsoft Windows (making AI available to a billion PC users), a Copilot for PowerBI (essentially making data analysis an out of the box exercise), a new Microsoft Fabric big data lake, and a set of tools to help developers build their own Copilots and add plug-ins from third party systems... And to build on this strength in tools, SuccessFactors, the largest HR platform in the world (by users), just introduced Copilots into their suite and a deeper integration with Azure AI." It seems to me that the objections of the sceptics are simply overwhelmed by what this software can do. Bersin also writes, "We have built our own Josh Bersin Copilot (come see the preview at Irresistible 2023) and in only a few weeks we now have full conversational access to more than 20 years of research, more than 600 blogs and articles, our 100+ podcasts, and soon the Josh Bersin Academy." If I had the time, staff and resources, I'd do the same with my work. Related: Ben Dickson in TechTalks, How to create a private ChatGPT that interacts with your local documents.
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Curtis J. Bonk, encore+, Jun 01, 2023
From the web page: "Armed with the podcast title: 'Pondering the Future of OER and Open Education', ENCORE+ team members Mark Brown (DCU) and Juliane Granly (ICDE), together with the hosts, reflects on the broader, impactful mission of open education and on the OER ecosystem today. The episode can be watched on YouTube." Related: DIY degree? Why universities should make online educational materials free for all, by Richard F. Heller.
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David Ress, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jun 01, 2023
This one comes in via Bryan Alexander, who keeps an eye on these things. "Virginia will eliminate degree requirements and preferences for nearly 90% of classified jobs — salaried positions subject to the Virginia Personnel Act — in line with a growing private sector trend that looks at experience and other training as well as degrees when hiring." Now there are two possibilities here - looking at experience and other training in addition to degrees (which is how the private sector trend seems to be described), or experience and other training instead of degree requirements, which is what the headline suggests. "The reform will give equal consideration to applicants who have an equivalent combination and level of training, knowledge, skills, certifications and experience as college graduates." As always with stuff like this, seeing (and only seeing) is believing.
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Junhong Xiao, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, Jun 01, 2023
I've collaborated with Junhong Xiao for many years and we've discussed in passing some of the issues raised in this paper. As a long-time editor and reviewer of academic papers in the field, he's in an excellent position to make these observations. And I agree with much of what he's written here (16 page PDF). For example: "researchers need to resist the temptation of instant benefits brought about by one-off, short-duration studies." Also, "studies must be further scaled up and generalized to maximize their relevance." More, "it is ODE researchers' moral and social responsibility" to include underprivileged and disadvantaged populations as subjects of their research. We don't need more studies of psychology students in elite US and UK universities! There's more, but as the author points out, "studies pertaining to the above issues usually do not bring immediate benefits to the researchers." Image: Distance Education.
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Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, Jun 01, 2023
So our Fediverse Spring is going to come to a sad end from the unlikeliest of sources: WordPress. There are two items of importance mentioned in this article. The first and most obvious: WordPress paid newsletters. The second has been covered previously but shows up again here: "parent company Automattic recently acquired an ActivityPub plugin that blog owners could use to join the Fediverse, posting their updates directly to Mastodon." It will never be as bad as the platform social media, but it can be pretty bad, with Fediverse spam rivaled only by the email variety. It should go without saying that no WordPress link requiring a subscription will be found in this newsletter.
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Katie Langin, Science, Dec 02, 2022 As recently as 2017 only one U.S. university eschewed the GRE for graduate admission to PhD programs. But it's a trend now. "The COVID-19 pandemic, unease about whether the test puts students from less privileged backgrounds at a disadvantage, and doubts about how well GRE scores predict grad school success all helped drive the changes." The stories contains sceptical comments from places like Purdue and Dartmouth. But as the test "unfairly privileges certain groups—white men in particular" we can't really be surprised. Related: colleges are abandoning the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which it should be noted classify test-based achievement along with low acceptance rates and exclusivity favourably in the standings.
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[Slides][Audio] My objectives are to:
- offer clear and understandable descriptions of three current technologies (metaverse, blockchain, artificial intelligence)
- discuss how they will impact the traditional role and function of universities
- describe the application of the conference themes (inclusion, sustainability, ethics) to these technologies with respect to these roles
Video with translation into Catalan
1r Congres Internacional de la SCP-IEC, Lleida, Spain () Dec 02, 2022 [Link][Slides][Audio] [Video] [Transcript]
Kristina Bravo, dist://ed, Dec 01, 2022I've done some work learning Mozilla Hubs, but there's a lot to learn (so be prepared to put in the time). That said, you can do a lot with it: "Create an art gallery, a portfolio, meet new people, teach a class or learn new skills with Mozilla Hubs. When NASA's Webb Space Telescope team and artist Ashley Zelinskie wanted to bring space exploration to everyone, they chose Mozilla Hubs." Hubs works both with a browser and with a VR viewer, so it's more accessible than heavy VR produced by systems like Unreal or Unity. Learn more and join the Hubs community here.
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Mpine Makoe, Open Praxis, Dec 01, 2022 "The aim of this study," writes Mpine Makoe, "is to evaluate the extent to which open, and distance education universities are fulfilling their stated purpose as higher education institutions in Sub-Saharan countries." Statements from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, Mauritius and Botswana are studied. "It makes sense that mission statements of open and distance universities should be guided by open principles of accessibility, equity, flexibility, quality, lifelong learning, student centredness," writes Makoe, however, "many mission statements were silent on access, equity and student-centredness."
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Dec 01, 2022 Today's Mastodon/Twitter update is a mixed bag. There are warnings to not use Hive Social as a Twitter alternative due to data breaches. Also, Marcus Hutchins writes that while he thought moderation would become impossible, he was wrong. "Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement." Indeed, Mastodon isn't just a replacement for Twitter, write Nathan Schneider and Amy Hasinoff. It scales in a different way - not through automation, but by distributing workload (I would note that this is also the basic difference between the xMOOC, which is like Twitter, and the cMOOC, which is like the fediverse). Tim Bray says, "let's stop saying 'No algorithms!' because that's just wrong, and figure out how to get nice algorithms built." Ben Werdmuller reminds us of the link between the fediverse and the indieweb (which, trust me, isn't forgotten in the pages of OLDaily). But it's a blend: "instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate," he writes. Laura Hazard Owen writes about how Post plans to use micropaymnts as a business model. And a thing on partially visualizing the fediverse.
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Maren Deepwell, Dec 01, 2022 Maren Deepwell's book 'Leading Virtual Teams' has been released. I haven't read it yet (it just came out!) but I am sure people would like to know about it. "This book provides practical advice and case studies as a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection for virtual teams and their leaders. From recruitment and induction to establishing effective and sustainable ways of working in the virtual workplace. Leading Virtual Teams explores the highs and lows of what it means to work from home long-term in a small or medium sized organisation and sets out a vision for a new kind of professionalism for virtual teams."
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Nick Kelly, Kelli McGraw, EduResearch Matters, Dec 01, 2022 This is a landmark in auto-generated learning resources. "AI-generated lesson plans are already better than many people realise," write the authors. "Here's an example generated through the GPT-3 deep learning language model." What follows is a very plausible lesson plan on the topic of 'juxtaposition' within the context of Romeo and Juliet. Could you do better? Maybe. Is the AI's lesson plan good enough? Probably. And it would have taken a few seconds to produce.
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Government of Alberta, Dec 01, 2022 This is a press release reporting on an agreement reached between the Alberta government and the Athabasca University Board of Governors (members of which are appointed by the Alberta government). The agreement stipulates the number of executive and staff that would be required to live in the town of Athabasca. As D'Arcy Norman points out, there's no comment quoted from the Athabasca University president.
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Grace Kim-Shin, Fulcrum, Dec 01, 2022 The University of Ottawa student newspaper reports on Z-Library, "recently taken offline by the FBI, was a free, online shadow library that offered students relief from (textbook) expenses." It's unclear who is the wrongdoer here, writes Grace Kim-Shin. "It's unfair to deprive people of compensation for their work — especially small up-and-coming authors. But, do the large-scale publishers that have a monopoly over the textbook market deserve the same level of sympathy? ... what is the real crime — copyright theft, or the deprivation of knowledge? The gatekeeping of academic material is robbing people of knowledge which should be accessible and free." Via Geoff Cain.
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Erin Alexis Owen Shepherd, ~erin/blog, Nov 30, 2022
We're so focused on avoiding the failure of Twitter we forget that ActivityPub - the standard behind fediverse applications such as Mastodon - must also avoid the core failure of email: spam. And it isn't there yet. And blocklists are not sufficient. As the author writes, "The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn'€™t that it doesn'€™t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn't and they just disappear." And in the case of email, in my view, this trust has been abused, and made it essentially impossible to host our own email service, forcing us into the hands of a few large email providers. Exactly the same thing will happen if we rely on blocks and blocklists in the federation. The suggestion here, and in a related proposal here, under the heading of object capabilities (ocaps), is that we allow people into our personal feed if (and only if?) they are already in the feed of someone we're linked to.
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John Scalzi, Whatever, Nov 30, 2022
John Scalzi's version of ethical is this: "In all other circumstances, and especially when there'™s a commercial intent or application, or when I would otherwise hire an artist, I will seek out artists and commission art from them." Why would this be the most ethical approach? Do we purchase only hand-crafted furniture, meals created by our personal chef, or books written by hand? Of course not. The role of ethics in addressing the replacement of work by artificial intelligence is to ensure that the wealth and benefits produced by the AI are shared equally across society, so that being out of work for the artist isn't equivalent to being sentenced to poverty.
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George Siemens, EduResearch Matters, Nov 29, 2022
The talk delivered here by George Siemens feels very similar to what I want to say this week in Lleida. It requires truly coming to grips with Artificial Intelligence. "AI presents humanity with a unique challenge that we have not faced before: an agent with intelligence that rivals our own in a growing range of domains," he says. "The accrual of inefficiencies – doing the things afforded by previous philosophies and technologies – is confronting education. How should we teach when AI is better at many cognitive tasks than we are? What should we teach when we can find and access the world's information from our phone?" Ah, but we need answers to these questions.
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Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, Nov 29, 2022
The answer to this question is "yes", or at least, "it's complicated". Every job will be impacted, and a lot of work will disappear entirely. But the point of this article is to deny deny deny. "Whoa, now. Time for a reality check," writes Matt Crosslin. "There is still an element to creativity that involves blending those influences into something else that transcends being strictly derivative of existing styles." Quite so. But why would anyone suppose AI is limited to being strictly derivative of existing styles? Techniques such as transfer learning allow an AI to combine input from any number of sources, as illustrated, just as a human does.
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Charles Rusnell, The Tyee, Nov 29, 2022
I don't know what the point would be of wrecking Athabasca University, but this seems to be the plan, at least as seen from the outside. Says one observer, "I cannot think of another situation where government is mandating where employees live." It would likely result in a loss of staff, not merely senior executive, leaving the university. The real loss would be of faculty and staff, without whom the university could not operate.
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Jane McFadyen, Laura Parker, Rachel Malic, Design in government, Nov 29, 2022
This is a poster, along with background information, provided by the U.K. Home Office. "Dyscalculia (Dis - Cal - Coo - Lia) is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers. It makes it hard for someone to read, understand and work with numbers." (As a Canadian, I would pronounce it Dis - Cal - Q - Lia). The core recommendations are to "remove unnecessary numbers... leave lots of space... (and) involve people who struggle with numbers in the design process." The poster is available to download in accessible formats from the DWP Accessibility Manual.
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Murni Sianturi, Riska Suliantin, Hariani Fitrianti, Journal of Learning for Development, Nov 29, 2022
I have lots of questions about this article (17 page PDF), and in particular the tiny sample size (which is not resolved by the assertion that the topic must be studied qualitatively), but at the same time it highlights to me the need to consider cognitive styles (or learning styles) in an environmental or cultural context. In the current case, the context is three different groups of Indigenous West Papuan (New Guinea) students. "Higher education students' cognitive styles significantly influenced their learning outcomes," write the authors. "This may occur because of the way teachers deliver mathematics material that is not relevant to the students' environment. Yunkaporta (2009) argues that educators often focus on linear viewpoints, a part of Western-oriented pedagogy, within school practices, which further marginalizes Indigenous students by preventing them from reconstructing their own knowledge." Learning styles scepticism, it seems to me, erases the possibility of culturally specific learning needs, which seems wrong.
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Clive Thompson, UX Collective, Nov 29, 2022
There was no issue yesterday because of travel, so today's Mastodon/Twitter update is a bonus double-sized edition. I'm sure the news will slow eventually... but today is not that day.
Clive Thompson begins our coverage with a good explanation of how Mastodon is designed to be anti-viral, creating necessary friction in a world-wide social network. Also: Andy Piper with a way to test Maston embeds in html content like web pages. Also, "NodeInfo is an effort to create a standardized way of exposing metadata about a server running one of the distributed social networks." Alan Levine gizmos the Daily Create on Mastodon. And bloggers should discard their Twitter meta tags, says Wouter Groeneveld.
Chris Aldrich on crediting your WordPress website when syndicating to Mastodon. Why host a Mastodon instance, asks Miguel Guhlin: "shouldn't folks ask why when someone else does something without apparent gain or benefit to themselves?" Geoff Cain on moving to Mastodon. Tim Bray on moving to Mastodon.
Something just for me: a new instance for Ottawa (maybe we'll see many more place-based instances?). Or maybe I could join CoSocial.ca, an all Canadian Mastodon co‑operative. Something about platform co-ops on Nora Young's CBC Spark podcast.
Yanis Varoufakis discusses how Elon Musk is attempting to become a digital landlord; "The pertinent question is whether it will grant its new owner secure membership in the new techno-feudal ruling class." Another Twitter alternative, Post, tries to recreate the Twitter experience for journalists. But critics say we should not use services like Post that hate the internet (green on black text, yikes). More criticisms (naturally on a Twitter thread, so probably misinformation). Image: Xataka en español.
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John Danaher, Philosophical Disquisitions, Nov 29, 2022
This article is not only a really good summary of the considerations for and against meritocracy, it is a textbook case of how to approach an issue of this sort. And that, to me, is its real value. What it does not do is offer a one-sided argument for or against meritocracy. Readers can decide for themselves. A requirement of a presentation of this sort is a principle called the 'principle of charity' - that is, the obligation to provide the best possible case for each side. Only in this way do you appreciate the genuine merits (heh) of each point of view. The trick in journalism (including my own) is to preserve the principle of charity while still having a point of view.
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Center for Digital Dannelse, Nov 23, 2022
This is a self-assessment tool based on the The European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators. I think a lot of people will find it useful (though note that as a self-assessment tool it requires honesty). It will ask for your email address after about 50 questions. I found the scale very opinionated and very focused on traditional in-class teaching environments. I answered it; you can see my results, which reflect my disinclination toward assessment and unwillingness to prescribe specific approaches to 'students' (who, for the same of discussion, I took to be OLDaily readers, though of course the tool can't conceive of teaching via email newsletter). Via Nadav Kavalerchik.
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Gwen Nguyen, BCcampus, Nov 23, 2022
I'm doing my Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care workshop today, and this fits right in there. As Gwen Nguyen writes, "Starting with what personas are in teaching and learning, I discuss why and how we can build learner personas as the first step in designing for care, then finish with a few tips on how you can leverage personas to enhance teaching and learning programs." Nguyen also links to worksheets and posters as well as persona templates from Miro.
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We begin by looking at the applications of artificial intelligence and analytics in learning technology, describing in a structured way what decisions we actually make when we apply artificial intelligence, analytics, and neural networks to teaching and learning. We also survey the ethical issues that have arisen in the field, for example, bias in algorithms, justice and fairness, diversity and equity, bad actors and data manipulation, and a range of other concerns.
Some additional (big) resources:
- 1050 slides - pptx
- 1050 slides - pdf
- 997 page document
Online Educa Berlin 2022, Berlin, Germany (Workshop) Nov 23, 2022 [Link] [Slides]
Nov 23, 2022
Today's Mastodon/Twitter update. Matthias Ott explains how to convert your Twitter archive into something useful (including fixing all the links, which because they're t.co links in the archive, will break when Twitter fails. From Jisc's Steve Bailey, things to consider when setting up your Mastodon instance. Miguel Guhlin with some brief reflections on transitioning from 13K followers to zero. Fediverse.info explains the fediverse in a video with cats and dogs. The EFF asks whether Mastodon is private and secure. Mark Carrigan asks whether there's a future for the academic social capital (can you guess he's from the LSE?) held on Twitter. Ted Curran points to an excellent tutorial on how to self-verify your account on Mastodon (I've done this myself as well). No blue checks needed! A short post on content warnings on Mastodon. Finally, confronting the possibility of not being on social media.
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Nat Levy, Futurity, Nov 23, 2022
This post is presented in "gee whiz isn't that amazing?" style, but in fact people have been developing this sort of capability over time (and I've covered it here from time to time). This short article and video demonstrates (as the title suggests) people moving a wheelchair using thought alone. "In this case, three people with tetraplegia, the inability to move their arms and legs due to spinal injuries, operated the wheelchair in a cluttered, natural environment to varying degrees of success." No, it's not ready for the highway yet. But we can imagine a future in which this is possible. Here's the original press release from U of Texas and the formal publication.
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Greg Thompson, Kalervo Gulson, Teresa Swist, EduResearch Matters, Nov 22, 2022
So, artificial intelligence will be used in schools. And this introduces what the article calls "a sociotechnical controversy." I can understand the caution, of course, as there are twin challenges of making sure teachers are prepared and making sure the technology doesn't cause more harm than help. So, as the authors say, "From working with diverse stakeholders it became clear that the introduction of AES in education should always work to reprofessionalise teaching and must be informed by multiple stakeholder expertise." And that's fair enough. But I still felt as I read this article that management and control were the only real options. And I'm not so sure of that - I'm not sure it's possible, and I'm not sure it's desirable.
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Paul Kirschner, kirschner-ED, Nov 22, 2022
Paul Kirschner references an article in Cognitive Psychology (paywalled, naturally) where students describe extra effort in courses as "ineffective for learning" and hence wasted. The article describes this as a misconception on the part of students, "a misinterpreted-effort hypothesis in which the mental effort associated with many normatively effective learning strategies (desirable difficulties; Bjork & Bjork, 1992) leads learners to misinterpret them as ineffective for learning " Kirschner disagrees, representing the students' perception as an instance of "discipulus economicus, or as (s)he is pejoratively called: the calculating student. This is a student who carries out the minimum of effort for the maximum benefit; a far cry from no pain, no gain.... They call it supporting the misinterpreted-effort hypothesis. I tend to call it supporting the calculating student hypothesis."
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Ismael Nafria, The Audiencers, Nov 22, 2022
I've been publishing an email newsletter for more than 20 years and most of these points resonate well with me, especially the parts about having a personal tone and a consistent format. Interestingly, Ismael Nafria writes that "publishing newsletters is the second most performed activity by full-time creators, only behind publishing on social media and ahead of publishing articles/blog posts and creating short videos." Certainly many of my sources are email newsletters published by experts in other fields. Where the article does leave me is when it starts talking about business models and publishing platforms, though with a good day job and the skills to write my own platform, I may have a privileged point of view. Via Spiny via What's New in Publishing.
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Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, Nov 22, 2022
I always roll my eyes when I read about "a Group of MIT Professors" or some such thing. It's the way such pronouncements are treated with reverence in the media (and the current post is no exception). I mean, get this: "The MIT professors who authored the white paper tried to make clear that even though they'™re from an elite university, they do not have all the answers." I would like to advise readers that even though I live in rural Canada, I don't have all the answers either. In fact, as we read in this article, the impetus behind this initiative isn't the oversized brains of our intellectual masters at all; it's funding from Bruce Rauner, a businessman and philanthropist, and a former Republican governor of Illinois. And that might explain the interest in supporting higher education for the well-to-do. Not the elite institutions, of course - they're untouchable. But "the next rung down." I wish Jeffrey Young would be more critical of these initiatives - though I guess if he were, he wouldn't get to attend invitee-only events.
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Tim Bray,
Nov 22, 2022
Tim Bray expends an awful lot of words to say that blockchain is 'a solution looking for a problem, but they're such good words, he's done the work to learn about the technology, and he places it squarely into the context of goings-on behind the scenes at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which makes it doubly interesting. "I'm not prepared to say that no blockchain-based system will ever be useful for anything," he writes. "But I'm gonna stay negative until I see one actually at work doing something useful, without number-go-up greedheads clamped on its teats.And I'm glad AWS didn't make a big bet on it back then."
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Rober Dam, RoberDam.com, Nov 22, 2022
I don't quite understand Rober Dam's fascination with Chinese microphones, but his experiment following the release of whisper AI is a fascinating glimpse into the future. "Something magical is basically being able to perfectly relive everything I did that day, from trivial conversations and knowing their context, something that is lost in the ether today can remain available now." It enables the possibility of an AI coach, or an AI agent that learns what you would do and can respond on your behalf. The negative? "Exactly the same points, but in the hands of someone other than us." (I'm just guessing at the author's name, as it's not actually on the website anywhere).
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Nov 21, 2022
Here is a section from my bok-in-progress (which may never be completed, but I continue to toil away). Please read it keeping the following in mind:
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It should be thought of as a conversation. Sure, it's a conversation with you as a very patient and quiet partidipant, but this is me speaking, not writing. This is me reflecting on the concept. You don't have to agree with me (indeed, it's more interesting if you don't). The text contains observations I thought might be of value to you. If not - no hard feelings.
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Please keep in mind that this is an introduction and intended to highlight themes I want to explore. It's 9 pages out of a manuscript that currently sits at 998 pages. Yeah. So I know there are many people and points of view I should be covering here, and especially people like Carol Gilligan and bell hooks. They appear elsewhere. I haven't eft them out.
Enjoy.
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Matthew A. Kraft, Melissa Arnold Lyon, EdWorkingPapers, Nov 21, 2022
This paper reports on the changing levels of prestige and satisfaction in the teaching profession in the U.S., finding that it has sunk to the lowest levels in fifty years. Why? They look at eight hypotheses: "education funding levels, teacher compensation, outside labor market opportunities, teacher unionism, barriers to entry, working conditions, accountability/autonomy on the job, and school shootings." 68 page PDF.
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Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, Nov 21, 2022
"Flourishing would seem an obvious aim of education," writes Jenny Mackness. "To me it's an indictment of our times that Kristján Kristjánsson felt he needed to write a lengthy book to justify this." Maybe, but as the result of the article shows, it's not exactly clear what counts as 'flourishing'. It's more, for example, that mere happiness (or so we read here). Aristotle listed some factors, including good government, a full life, and even some physical beauty. Later in the article Mackness cites a suggestion that spirituality is necessary for flourishing. This all seems pretty culturally specific to me, and most of it has little to do with my own idea of flourishing.
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UTS Open, Nov 18, 2022
Interesting application, just launched by the University of Technology Sydney's UTS Open. "Here's how it works: Create an account; Map your current skills; Choose the areas you're most interested in; See your skills gaps and view the UTS courses that will help you fill them." They've chosen to focus on data careers to start, but obviously the idea could be extended. Additionally, the tool lists courses from only one university, but (and here's the real challenge) ideally it would list courses across the entire college and university system.
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Mark Brown, Mairéad Nic-Giolla-Mhichil, Culture and Education, Nov 18, 2022
Mostly I wish this paper (37 page PDF) went into more depth on the different dimensions of microcredentials in this literature review. The authors make the point that the concept is not new, because short courses and programs have been around for a long time. The renewed emphasis is new, though, but varies across cultures: in Europe, the focus is on lifelong learning, while in the Americas and Asia-Pacific, the focus is on employability. Questions also arise regarding the role of providers, and whether microcredentials are part of a movement to replace public education with private providers (I'm paraphrasing quite a bit here). The paper is presented in English and Spanish.
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Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, Nov 18, 2022
Today's Mastodon/Twitter update. The site fediverse.space came out a couple days ago with a nice interactive visualization of the network of Mastodon instances. In this post Miguel Guhlin points to a Mapstodon, from comeetie ("at the link, comeetie also shares the notebook behind the app if you are interested in the code"). In other Mastodon news, here's a toot bookmarklet you can use while browsing; also, your 'Twitter go bag' to make your escape; also, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," goes the saying, and as Michael Veale says, "right now, it feels like we're waiting to find out our product status." Though that said, "Even if you're paying for the product, you're the product," Cory Doctorow wrote on discovering Apple privacy violations. Meanwhile, Dave Truss reflects on fifteen years of Twitter. Finally, after a week on Mastodon Zoe Williams asks, "Could this be Twitter without the toxic slurry?"
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Renato Losio, InfoQ, Nov 18, 2022
The gist of the lawsuit is that Microsoft's use of open source code as input data for it's AI-powered 'Copilot' software authoring tool violates the open source licenses attached to the code. I think we can see pretty clearly how this line of reasoning would apply to other types of AI that use publicly available data such as user photos and images, comments and blog posts, classwork and test responses, and more. Can this line of reasoning work? It's really hard to say; it's a classic problem of composition: no one contribution is responsible for the final outcome, but the final outcome is not possible without all the contributions. There's also an argument by analogy that applies: as individual people, we are influenced by millions of data sources, including private conversations, public acts, and copyright content. Do those sources therefore have a claim on whatever we produce as output? Well, no - but as I've argued in the past, maybe we don't have the claim to originality and ownership over whatever we create that we thought. More: the Verge.
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Scott Nover, Quartz, Nov 18, 2022
I think that the main lesson to be drawn from the multi-billion dollar collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX isn't that blockchain is bad but rather than these companies need regulation. "FTX had no accounting department and reimbursements were processed with emoji," we read. John Ray III, who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy, comments of FTX, "never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here." Regulations aren't just 'red tape'. They're necessary protection against the automated excesses that can happen in any tech industry.
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Cindy Nebel, The Learning Scientists, Nov 18, 2022
This article points to two new meta-analyses analyzing growth mindset interventions. According to one of them, "This systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that, despite the popularity of growth mindset interventions in schools, positive results are rare and possibly spurious due to inadequately designed interventions, reporting flaws, and bias." The other review is more positive. But it does sound spurious to me, the idea that 'if you believe you can grow, you become better at learning'. Sort of like The Secret's 'thoughts become things'. Anyhow, there is a list of additional articles discussing the growth mindset theory, and as Cindy Nebel writes, "If you are a parent or educator, please do some careful reading before trying to implement an educational trend with students."
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Jonathan McQuarrie, HESA, Nov 18, 2022
A short post from Jonathan McQuarrie arguing that "for incredibly frustrating reasons, Canada has chosen to go the other way and deliberately put barriers in the way of making micro-credentials stackable into larger credentials." This feels like an Elon Musk sort of approach - we'll just force it to work this way because I say so. In fact, there are more subtleties to microcredentials. As Gavin Moodie says in a comment, "micro credentials are stackable into substantial credentials only by incorporating strong sequencing material and principles, which compromises their purported focus and flexibility." In other words (and this is my paraphrase, not his), if you force it (like Elon Musk) you break it (like Elon Musk). This, he says, is explained in his article Credentialing micro-credentials (14 page PDF).
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Kean Birch, NORRAG -, Nov 17, 2022
The question I ask, I guess, is how likely is this. Kean Birch points to an example where development is being stalled in central London because the infrastructure cannot supply any more power. But that's London. That's the UK. the same conditions don't apply elsewhere - do they? "As EdTech grows as a sector, it's going to come up against these energy limits too. It's likely that there simply won't be the energy infrastructure in place to enable them to exploit the data they've collected and turn it into useful products and services."
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University Affairs, Nov 17, 2022
It may feel intuitively right to connect mental health issues with online learning, but the research doesn't back that up. "The findings in this literature are mixed," write the authors, "and any assertions about a relationship between online learning and mental health are confounded by research quality and pandemic grief."
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Peter Scott, The Hub, Nov 16, 2022
This, frankly, is what all universities should aspire to be. Peter Scott: "our road sees teachers working with students wherever they may be, in urban centres or in remote and rural communities. It means accessibility, flexibility, and yes, changes which some will find disruptive and uncomfortable.AU students don'™t care where their professors, tutors, or support staff live or work. They are connected digitally, and by a shared desire to succeed in an online, open environment. If online is good, open is truly great."
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David J ohn Lemay, Tenzin Doleck, Christopher G. Brinton, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, Nov 01, 2022
This paper (30 page PDF) gets the prize for being one of the most complex papers to appear in IRRODL in recent memory, though (I think) reading closely makes it a little less complex than it first appears. The authors are assessing the efficiency of interaction networks with relation to knowledge-seeking and knowledge-demonstrating behaviour, and mapping this against subject-related talk and procedural talk. What do we find? "Courses with smaller enrollment numbers appear to struggle more with generating enough discussion and connecting knowledge seekers with knowledge disseminators (and) subject-related-talk-dominated discussion forums and procedural-talk-dominated discussion forums are significantly different in overall network efficiency and seeking tendency, but not in disseminating tendency."
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Sae Schatz, Defense Dossier, Nov 01, 2022
You'll have to scroll down through this newsletter (28 page PDF) to see the article, which begins on page 20. "Although the antecedents began nearly two decades ago," writes Sae Schatz, "DoD has reached a tipping point in terms of organizational support for reform and the external pressures necessitating it." Six key trends are identified:
- Increased use of online learning
- Integration of new technologies ("systematic organizational change and thoughtful implementation by experts skilled in learning science")
- An emphasis on outcomes—especially competencies
- Creative ways to estimate capability ("thanks to advancements in sensor technologies, AI, and interoperability")
- Acceptance of credentials and microcredentials
- Progress toward the "Learning Ecosystem" approach ("for an individuals' lifelong learning to be personalized across their everchanging contexts, goals, areas of study, and personal characteristics")
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Susan Crichton, Elizabeth Childs, Canadian eLearning Network, Nov 01, 2022
This is from February but I only became aware of it from the October Canadian eLearning Network (CANeLearn) News, which links it to the US National Standards for Quality Online Learning. It should be understood that this document (35 page PDF) doesn't describe how to design online learning, it states the conditions required in order to effectively design online learning, and is therefore framed as a set of 'educators require...' statements. The eight statements are very specific, perhaps too specific (in my view), but the purpose of the current document is to validate them through a survey of Canadian educators (we can see how they evolved from a set of similar principles evaluated by British Columbia teachers). I see a couple of problems with the methodology. First, merely confirming agreement with a list of statements does not sufficiently validate these statements. Second, asking only educators limits the range and perspectives of possible input.
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Lucia Cloonan,
Nov 01, 2022
This article (27 page PDF) investigates "the integration of a UDL approach into a brand management module using an ePortfolio, from a student perspective." It looks specifically at "multiple means of engagement and multiple means of action and expression." Not surprisingly, "92% of students had never heard of UDL before and only 2% agreed that they had some knowledge of ePortfolio" but the majority said "they would like a choice in the way they would be assessed." Different modes (text, audio, video, photos) were selected to complete each of four 'portfolio tasks'. I'm not sure this is exactly the way e-portfolios are supposed to be used - they're not simply an assignment drop-box, as appears to be the case here. But still, it's useful to enable students to use a number of different modalities in their submissions.
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Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive, Nov 01, 2022
I would say any of these three is exactly a trend, but here they are for your consideration (quoted):
- Hybrid learning models are still shaking out
- Technology could be one tool to address equity issues
- Colleges are prioritizing microcredentials
The first two are in the wrong modality to be a trend; a trend reports what is, not possibilities. The third just doesn't seem to be true; colleges are looking at microcredentials, but the vast bulk of their effort is still directed toward traditional degree programs. So this article, to my mind, reflects what the author (or sponsor) wants to happen, and not what is happening.
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Ben Werdmuller,
Oct 24, 2022
"There was no good way out. Twitter as we know it is sunsetting," writes Ben Werdmuller. "So where do we go next?" he asks. "The answer is almost certainly not one single place... The solution will be an ecosystem of loosely-joined communities, not a single software platform or website - and certainly not a service run by a single company." That sounds to me like a good thing, and while it raises its own set of issues, it solves the problem of a single platform broadcasting hate to society as a whole.
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Will Bedingfield, Wired, Oct 24, 2022
The use of AI to create deepfakes isn't just about misrepresenting what a person believes or says. "It's crucial to understand here that transferability isn't about authorizing uses of your identity for money, it's about ownership, your identity conceived of as a transferable property right, like patents or copyrights, able to be bought and sold."
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Reinette Biggs, et al.,
Oct 24, 2022
Open access reference book. According to the description, "Each chapter discusses the types of SES questions to which the particular methods are suited and the potential resources and skills required for their implementation... [The book also] contains a conceptual and practical introduction to SES research, a discussion of key gaps and frontiers in SES research methods, and a glossary of key terms in SES research. Contributions from 97 different authors, situated at SES research hubs in 16 countries around the world, including South Africa, Sweden, Germany and Australia, bring a wealth of expertise and experience to this book." P.S. this is the first gRSShopper lin k created using my new gRSShopper bookmarklet. :)
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[Slides][Audio] As a new generation of digital technologies evolves we are awash in new terms and concepts: the metaverse, the fediverse, blockchain, web3, acitivitypub, and more. This presentation untangles these concepts and presents them from the perspective of their impact on open learning.
Open Education Conference, Online, via Zoom (Lecture) Oct 19, 2022 [Link] [Slides] [Audio] [Video] [
Irving Wladawsky-Berger,
Oct 06, 2022
I hate the term 'human capital' because it represents a view of people as commodities. And the term is a lead-in to a lot of very bad economic theory. Like this: "The value of human capital can be approximated by an individual's lifetime earnings, and represents roughly two-thirds of their total wealth." Not true. A person's productivity far exceeds what they are paid. People by and large receive only a small fraction of the value of what they produce. But what the author is mainly trying to show is that (a) work experience generates a large part of 'human capital', and (b) workers should look for opportunities that produce the largest amount of work experience. Sure, maybe. But again, most of the value of this work experience will be retained by the employer. That's why people are mostly looking for better pay and work environments. See also this report from McKinsey.
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Mattia Peretti, What's New in Publishing, Oct 06, 2022
I would imagine journalists will feel a lot better after reading this article (just as educators will feel better after reading similar articles in their field in the months to come). It says things like "AI in journalism is... more similar to a spreadsheet than to any kind of robot." And "artificial intelligence is not nearly as intelligent as it would need to be to replace you." And "You may not need AI". But don't be lulled by this. These may be true today, but they won't be true for long. That's why you need to heed the second half of the ten points - things like "you need a space to experiment", "understand AI to report on it", and "we have a transformational opportunity."
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Melissa Robertson, eLearn Magazine, Oct 06, 2022
The title makes a lot of promises the article doesn't deliver. This is a very introductory article describing the learning management system (LMS) and while it offers a decent and brief overview, it doesn't really address the whole question of finding meaning. But that's OK; you don't need to find meaning in an LMS.
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Robert Harington, The Scholarly Kitchen, Oct 06, 2022
Publishers are twisting themselves in knots trying to explain why open access without an embargo is a bad idea. Here we have a representative from the American Mathematical Society (AMS), which publishes some 25 journals, 80 books per year. "(We) even have our own print shop and warehouse for our books and journals — print still being a vital part of mathematical culture," writes Robert Harington. "Publishing accounts for 70% of operational revenues." Now all that - from my perspective - is the problem, not something to be proud of. Anyhow, his main argument is that open access makes it hard for junior academics to publish, because of article processing fees (APC). Maybe. But expensive print publications make it a lot harder for them. Maybe it's time for the AMS to shut down its printing press and stop holding back the field and use that remaining 30% to offer fees-free open academic publications.
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World Education Blog, Oct 06, 2022
This blog post "contains a summary of responses from innovators who were asked by All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) to share how their EdTech solutions address challenges in relation to equity and inclusion." Four companies are featured, all of which offer reading resources to underserved populations: Little Thinking Minds and Integrated International's Qysas; SIL-LEAD's Bloom; Benetech's Bookshare India; and Curious Learning's Feed the Monster.
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Nicholas Humphrey, Aeon, Oct 06, 2022
This article begins with an assessment of a phenomenon called 'blindsight' and from there moves toward a more general response to the question of how animals (and especially humans) can learn to construct representations of the world. It's quite clever. "To discover 'what's happening to me', the animal has only to monitor 'what I'm doing about it'... the animal can begin to get a feel for the stimulus by accessing the information already implicit in its own response."
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Saeed Khan, Medium, Sept 30, 2022
A 'prioritization framework' is a mechanism whereby " Product Managers or product teams... score each feature or initiative on the factors in the framework, then plug those scores into a formula to come to an overall score for each feature." Instead of prioritizing features, Saeed Khan argues, "You should be focused on prioritizing problems and opportunities that are tied to higher level goals and strategies." Related: 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour.
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University of Ottawa, Sept 30, 2022
From the website: "The University of Ottawa used a participatory methodology to develop this institutional competency framework... By establishing a common vocabulary for the development of learning outcomes for all learning activities, we can help students better understand the competencies they can acquire throughout their academic career." The full presentation (14 page PDF) describes them in more detail. I've seen many such lists over the years (and contributed my own), and while this is a better-than-average example of the species, I doubt that it's the last word on the subject, making the idea of establishing a 'common vocabulary' a but overly ambitious.
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Jessica Martins, Cryptosaurus, Sept 30, 2022
This article highlights a tool launched by Holly Herndon called Holly+ "that enables other artists to create music using the AI-generated likeness of their voice. Works created using Holly+ are essentially outspoken deepfakes approved and encouraged by Herndon." Think of it like autotunes but for harmonization using Herndon's own voice. The point being argued here is that "instead of rejecting new technology, everyone from workers to businesses, to amateur creators, can learn to use these tools to make their lives easier or open up new creative avenues. By adopting AI, skeptics can help ensure that growing technology is used for good, not left to shape by ill-intentioned parties." The original article is from Business Insider and hidden behind a paywall.
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Blathnaid O’Dea, Silicon Republic, Sept 30, 2022
Given that video is no more than a series of related images, this isn't as big a leap as you might think, though it no doubt requires a lot more computing power (as video does generally). Still, it shows how rapidly AI is moving into the creative space. "Meta revealed its new text-to-video tool yesterday (29 September) with a cutesy clip of a teddy bear painting a self-portrait on a canvas. The text prompt used was 'a teddy bear painting a portrait'." Of course, this might all be a sham. Would we expect anything less from Facebook? "As The Verge pointed out, Meta is not currently allowing anyone access to the model."
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Government of Canada, Sept 30, 2022
Today we mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. "This page organizes a variety of resources into four sections: First Nations, Inuit, Métis and additional resources, to help you explore the history, languages, cultures, and experiences of Indigenous Peoples across Canada."
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I was a part of this panel along with other members of the Covid Education Alliance (CovidEA). This session explores the ways in which digital solutions are currently used in our learning systems and how their uses can be expanded upon. Panelists discuss the priorities and concrete actions needed to transition to effective, sustainable education systems that prepare students and learners for the future.
Digital With Purpose Summit 2022, Online, to Lisbon, Portugal () Sept 28, 2022 [Link] [Slides]
[Video]
Zoey Ziyi Li, Joseph K. Liu, Jiangshan Yu, Dragan Gasevic, 5th IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Sept 05, 2022
According to the authors, "none of the existing blockchain initiatives in educational credentialing seems to meet their original goal of global adoption." Based on an analysis of the industry workflow, the paper (8 page PDF) "identifies six practical problems in the industry, and proposes five desired attributes of ideal credentials infrastructure." The problems are: difficulty in getting credentials recognized, damaged or tampered credentials, the cost of screening for hiring, loss of confidence in traditional credentials, identity theft, and centralized credentials governance. The attributes are: learner control, verifiability, tamper-proofing, portability, and employability-driven. The suggestion is that, properly designed, blockchain can address these issues. They offer a four-layer model for developing such a system and recommend "users involvement strategies to improve social understanding and acceptance of blockchain technology."
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Dirk Van Damme, Doris Zahner, OECD, Sept 05, 2022
I am somewhat frustrated by this report which argues that there is a need for higher education to address the growing need for "critical thinking and problem solving" skills in the workplace with no real statement of what those are. Maybe there are parts missing from the online publication (the PDFs are locked behind a paywall - maybe organizations that call for "more transparency about the skills students acquire" and complain "this has not been a strength of most higher education systems" should rethink their pay-to-view policy). There's more information in cartoon form and in OECD's skills for 2030 document. It's interesting that universities resisted the OECD study with the result that this report only "reports on the work pursued between 2016 and 2021 to assess critical thinking and written communication, and associated skills in higher education institutions in six countries."
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Sept 02, 2022
This post about Jukka Aalho's publication may say more about the publisher's review process than it does about AI, but nonetheless the trend is clear: we may soon be able to compose large complex works more easily with AI than we can manually. I can imagine, for example, that I could just take my full set of clips from my bikepacking trip and have the AI professionally produce a nice set of videos (to be clear: that's not what I did). And the same with writing - I can imagine a time where I feed my 36,000 OLDaily posts into an AI and have it auto-generate some treatises representing my thoughts about knowledge, ethics and the future of technology (and with the right clips library and lots of voice samples, it could convert those into a series of accessible videos). If you aren't thinking along these lines, in my view, you aren't grasping the real potential of the technology ahead of us.
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Noel Brennan, 9News, Sept 02, 2022
Remember when people were saying that AI would never replace people employed in the creative industries? It feels like yesterday. Well, now people are saying "We're watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes — if creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete." This may be true, though it's something that will take decades to fully resolve. Meanwhile, we as educators have to think are about how we want people to prepare for a future where traditional employment becomes a thing of the past. Meanwhile, some of the reactions will be pretty, um, colourful. See also: Vice.
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Max G. Levy, Anima Anandkumar, Quanta Magazine, Sept 02, 2022
If you look into the mathematics of deep learning AI algorithms, you find that a lot of it is based on calculations using matrices (two dimensional grids of values). That's where the Stanford AI course began, for example. But this limits the complexity AI can comprehend, as Anima Anandkumar explains. "In practice, matrix methods in machine learning can't effectively capture higher-order relationships." Instead, "with their multiple dimensions and flexibility, tensors seem like a natural fit for higher-order problems in AI." But as capacity increases, the questions become more urgent. "It's always important to question how our work is going to impact the world... so much of the way we teach in universities is derived from military school. Engineering came from that background, and some of it lingers. Like thinking that scientists and engineers should focus on the technical stuff and let others take care of the rest. It's wrong. We all need humane thinking." See also: Building Neural Networks with Tensorflow.
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John Timmer, Ars Technica, Sept 02, 2022
As announced by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), "Starting in 2026 any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it's published." That's four years away and as we know a lot can happen in that time. But it's still good news and something I think will influence Canadian policy as well. "When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society."
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crdt.tech, Sept 02, 2022
Boris Mann referenced Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) in a post yesterday and while the specific presentation isn't available, it's worth mentioning this concept as part of the broader distributed network technology architecture. "CRDTs ensure that, no matter what data modifications are made on different replicas, the data can always be merged into a consistent state." See also Wikipedia and this Medium post by Nezih Yigitbasi in 2015.
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Jonathan Victor, NFT.Storage, Sept 02, 2022
An non-fungible token (NFT) is essentially a blockchain record that points to a digital resource. The point being made in this fairly technical post is that "your NFT should point at a thing, not point at a location." What that means, in practice, is that the record shouldn't point to a URL or an internet address, because these can (and often do) change. Instead, it should reference the digital hash of the resource, a content-based address produced using a cryptographic algorithm. Such resources can be uploaded and stored using a distributed network such as the interplanetary file system (IPFS). Via Boris Mann.
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Elizabeth Svoboda, OpenMind, Sept 01, 2022
The idea here is that by having young learners play games in which they learn how media can be manipulated they are able to consume media more critically in the future. "These games rest on a single, overarching premise: You can inoculate people against fake news by exposing them to small amounts of such content - much as low doses of live virus can vaccinate people against a disease." Though I suspect that anti-vaxxers would be opposed to this sort of treatment as well.
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Irving Wladawsky-Berger,
Sept 01, 2022
I've been getting email suggesting I be more critical of blockchain and web3 technologies, though I would observe, with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, that "in their early years, major new technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement, speculation and confusion, as people sort out what the technology might be about and how it's likely to evolve. Something important is going on out there, but it takes time and marketplace experience to sort things out." Still - and here is where I think most criticism comes in - I have zero interest in what is called here an 'internet of value'. While it may be true that "contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems," I don't think they should be, and there are many more important things in the world. But this isn't a problem with the technology, it's a problem with a world view that see things exclusively in terms of money, laws and power. Image: Tapscott, on Altoros.
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Andreina Parisi-Amon, Times Higher Education, Sept 01, 2022
Now that our institutions are rebounding back to 'the way things were' after the pandemic, we're seeing the first glimpses of people saying "no, no, I don't want to go back" in the media (though tbh the piece feels like a paid placement). This article (with a wonderfully puzzling illustration of online learning in which almost everything is completely analog) is an indicator of that. "We have a generation of young people who have grown up on personal devices that allow them to customise anything important to them: playlists, blogs, chats. They successfully communicate with friends, family and partners, expressing their passions and interests via remote devices. For the most part, they understand how to use those devices effectively for their needs. Why can't it be the same with learning?"
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Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand, Aaron Clauset, Nature Human Behavior, Sept 01, 2022
The authors write, "we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years." Not surprisingly, "Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction." It most also shapes their indifference to open educational resources, their disinclination to support broader access to learning, and ongoing resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion. It also, to my mind, makes a mash of the suggestion that faculty are left-learning. If they are, it is only in comparison with their socio-economic peers, and not society at large. Via Bryan Alexander.
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David Wiley, improving learning, Sept 01, 2022
To be honest, I think David Wiley is pursuing a straw man when he argues that open educational resources (OER) have no impact on improving student learning. Indeed, it feel like he is arguing mostly against his own past work. It has never been the purpose to OER to improve student learning; the objective is to improve access to learning for people who have none. That's why (as Wiley himself admits) studying the effectiveness of OER in existing university classes is like "the equivalent of measuring the effect of a pain relieving drug on a sample of people who are mostly not in pain." But to people without access, Wiley argues, OER is only a small part of the mix - after all, he says, only 27 percent of students surveyed indicate that they don't but the textbook. Sure. But nearly 100 percent of those without access to the university class don't buy the textbook. And it's true - these people can access the "billions of resources which are freely available on the public internet with the same result vis-à-vis the access hypothesis" and are not technically OER. But that has always been (part of) my point (contra Wiley) about there being no need to be a license purist to achieve the benefits of open access. But mainly, Wiley here says nothing, and seems to care nothing, about the outcomes of those people not fortunate enough to make it into a university class. That's why he has failed, after all these years, to see the actual benefit of OER.
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Chutima Suraseth, Prakob Koraneekij, Heliyon, Sept 01, 2022
Most discussions of learning analytics look at things like content recommendation or prediction of learning outcomes, but this paper (14 page PDF) describes the creating and testing of a sociometric web application that performs a network analysis to identify how and why students associate with each other. Imagine being able to look at a screen and being able to see at a glance who the popular stidents are, who the outcast students are, and how they are different.
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Jane Hart,
Sept 01, 2022
Jane Hart has published her list of top educational tools for 2022, and usefully, divides it into three sections: tools that support personal learning (PPL), tools for workplace learning (WPL), and tools for education. The top of the list is virtually unchanged from last year (as is the make-up of the top 100 list as a whole). YouTube, PowerPoint, Google search, Microsoft Teams and Zoom lead the way. "It has become clear that whilst 2021 was the year of experimentation – with an explosion of tools being used as people tried out new things, 2022 has been the year of consolidation – with people reverting to their trusty old favourites."
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Maria Perifanou, Anastasios A. Economides, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, Sept 01, 2022
Instead of focusing on the well-publicized MOOC platforms (Coursera, EdX, etc), "this study (30 page PDF) used 21 metrics to explore 35 MOOC platforms from across the world." It doesn't offer a lot of depth and insight, but it does aggregate a number of statistics related to each, including things like visitor engagement, technical characteristics, partnerships and courses. It's significant that many of the fields remain as question marks. Interestingly, "almost no platforms had adequate speed. Even so, most platforms provided mobile-friendly pages. Some platforms presented few accessibility and contrast errors while others had many accessibility issues."
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Jennifer M.B. Fugate, Sheila Macrine, The Brains Blog, Aug 30, 2022
This post introduces a (short) series of blog posts on embodied cognition all based around Macrine and Fugate's book Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning. This trend is especially relevant to those who view learning from a cognitivist perspective. "Cognitive psychology has undergone a paradigm shift in the ways we understand how knowledge is acquired... Learning occurs through the body and is grounded in both perception and action. That is, cognition is deeply dependent upon the learner's physical experiences. Embodied learning shifts the focus from an exclusively mental effort toward an embodied, sensory-rich experience."
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Ben Werdmuller,
Aug 30, 2022
Ben Werdmüller discusses different ways of paying for content on the web. What bothers me about commentaries like this one is that they suppose (a) 'paying for the web' (as in the title) is the same things as 'paying for content', and (b) the suggestion that there wouldn't even be a web as we know it without commercial models. Both of these are really wrong. We already pay for the web when we purchase computer systems, buy a lot of software, and pay for internet access. That's why it's so cheap to distribute content on the web; the consumers pay the cost of transmission! And there was a very robust and active online culture that had developed well before the internet was ever commercialized. There was never any need to pay for content until commercial entities pushed out and replaced our conversations, message boards, helper posts, and everything else. There's no actual need for commercial content. There's just a lot of people selling it who really want you to believe you can't live without it.
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Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, Aug 30, 2022
We all know, I think, how important it is to provide transcripts of audio material. This not only helps people whop are hard of hearing but also those who cannot play sound for some reason, for example, a broken computer or a sleeping baby. But transcription has always been expensive and slow - until now. This article mentions five apps that will automate the transcription process - and I would also add Google's sound recorder, which I use on my Pixel 4, which does a great job. Automated transcriptions aren't (yet) perfect and need to be reviewed, but they're one of the best examples of the benefits of machine learning and AI.
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Phil Hill, Phil on Ed Tech, Aug 30, 2022
Edmodo, the popular online learning and social networking application widely used in school settings, announced that it was shutting its doors halfway through August, leaving users of the free service a few weeks to gather their content (if they could) and find an alternative. Here is the announcement. Edmodo raised around $100 million in VC funding over the years and eventually sold to a Chinese company for $135 million, who then tried to reach international country-wide sales, starting with Egypt in 2020, so over time, it appears that the company will continue down this path while ending the free offering. If I were purchasing a platform on a country-wide basis I don't think I'd be interested in one without a strong user base, so I don't really see much of a future for Edmodo here.
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PhilSci-Archive, Aug 30, 2022
The idea of 'levels of description' is intuitively appealing. "For example, fundamental physics speaks of particles, fields, and forces; biology speaks of cells, organisms, and ecosystems; psychology speaks of mental states, intentionality, and cognition; and the social sciences speak of institutions, norms, and conventions." But how should we understand what we're doing when we use these levels? Are they just more or less coarse descriptions of the same reality, or does each level correspond to a complete linguistic category? Do lower-level descriptions refer to parts of the same entities, or to different entities entirely? Do facts at higher levels stand on their own, or are they determined by facts at lower levels? Even if you aren't interested in the proposed unifying framework of levels (that starts on page 9) the description of the different perspectives is important and needs to be kept in mind when we talk about learning and cognition.
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Rick Seltzer, Higher Ed Dive, Aug 29, 2022
As is well known, the Biden administration in the United States cancelled $10K worth of debt for lower-income students with loans in that country. The 'moral hazard' in this case, as posited by the American Enterprise Institute's Beth Akers, "we have basically sent a message to borrowers now that you won't necessarily be on the hook to repay all the money that you borrowed to pay for school." It's hard to find the moral hazard here, especially when similar loan forgiveness is a routine practice for corporate borrowers. Where Akers and Biden find common ground is in the idea of tying loan repayments to income (something that would have helped me a lot when I was just getting started). They may also, I think, find agreement on the spotlight this places on rapidly rising tuition fees in general, and the shrinking proportion of the higher education budget that is actually supported by government at any level (at least, in the English-speaking world). But on the core issue - whether government should support individuals to the degree it supports corporations - I feel there will be no consensus.
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Yiwei Peng, Junhong Xiao, Asian Journal of Distance Education, Aug 29, 2022
I was greeted on my return with news of Junhong Xiao's resignation from the board of Distance Education based on that journal's pre-emptive desk rejection of this paper questioning research methodology in the field. The authors address an issue that has been on my mind for a number of years now (readers from 2003 will remember my response to Charles Ungerleider's take on the same issue) and while I would not endorse alignment with the Campbell Collaboration I certainly think research in the field of education needs a rethink, especially in light of things like the replication crisis in the social sciences, which was discussed here as recently as 2020. Disclosure: I have collaborated with Junhong Xiao on numerous articles published in Distance Education in China. Related: John Danaher, Why do academic publications lack rigour? Taylor on the problem of woozles.
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Rupert Wegerif,
Aug 29, 2022
Education professor Rupert Wegerif takes a different route - one based in classics and literature - to approach questions that have framed discussion in these pages over the years: "Is it really such a good thing that the education system puts so much focus on knowledge as representation and so little on knowledge as relationship?" he asks. "We know that finding out about a job from books is no substitute for actually doing that job. Doing a job means becoming a different person and experiencing what it means to do that job from the inside." Related: Carlotta Pavese, The Epistemology of Skills.
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Zina B. Ward, Philosophy Compass, Aug 29, 2022
I intend this article especially for learning styles sceptics, as they have not (in my opinion) adequately addressed the fact that "we do not all make choices, reason, interpret our experience, or respond to our environment in the same way." Indeed, "far from being the exception, cognitive variation appears to be the rule." This article addresses the methodological questions around the phenomenon: "There is much work to be done refining strategies for navigating the uniformity/uniqueness dilemma and distinguishing between different types of cognitive variation." Individual differences impact how we observe, reason and learn, and these need to be taken into account by educators. Moreover, such differences raise questions "about whether human cognition is subject to systematic irrationalities," a.k.a. 'cognitive bias'. I've linked to the preprint; the published version is paywalled. Image: Fajar Kurniasih, Cognitive Variation in Language Learning.
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Zoë Corbyn, The Guardian, Aug 29, 2022
This is coverage of Ian Linkletter's ongoing lawsuit over Proctorio's student surveillance software and the wider effect the company's tactics have had on commentators. "Multiple critics of the technology declined to speak to the Guardian citing an aura of litigiousness. There is 'censorship through the fear of a lawsuit'." It also covers the case of Erik Johnson, a computer engineering student who eventually reached a settlement, as well as that involving the anti-surveillance advocacy group Fight for the Future, which ran a website that satirizes Proctorio CEO, Mike Olsen. It also mentions lass-action lawsuits that have been filed against Proctorio along with two other companies – Examity and Honorlock. In related news, a federal judge in the U.S. ruled just a few days ago that scanning students' rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional (see also).
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Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, Aug 29, 2022
Throughout August there has been an ongoing dispute over whether management and staff of Alberta's distance education university, Athabasca University, ought to be required to work in person in an office located in the town of Athabasca, 150 km north of Edmonton. I won't try to summarize the whole debate, though Tony Bates previously pointed to the absurdity of it, while Jon Dron commented on the difficulties it would cause. I think there's a point to be made about living in the community you serve - though the question here is whether the university serves the 3,000 residents of Athabasca or the 40,000 students connected through telephone wires and internet services. Athabasca University's board - and its recently appointed chair, a Calgary lawyer - is slated to make the decision August 31.
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Apostolos Koutropoulos, Multilitteratus Incognitus, Aug 29, 2022
Apostolos Koutropoulos writes, "the fetishization of campus culture, exhibited both in this article and elsewhere in the world of academia, is what's preventing us from truly integrating new, smart, and healthy procedures that bring different together people, from many different locations, to accomplish goals." I agree, and his responses to various pro-campus arguments resonate with me (and, I would add, they apply to the office as well). Much of the distinct 'culture' created by in-person working and unscheduled run-ins is nothing more than fiction, and the rest is (as I've commented before) based on privilege. We could be offering the opportunity to anyone who wants it to access a quality education, but instead we've mythologized some sort of special kind of learning that can only take place in person and this is what justifies limiting access to only a few people.
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Lucy Prodgers, Elizabeth Travis, Madeleine Pownall, Higher Education, Aug 05, 2022
This article (16 page PDF) is your traditional social sciences survey of a class of psychology students (the most representative sample group anywhere!). The observation is that "there was a general sense that it was difficult to obtain a feeling of learning community when learning was delivered exclusively online and for some this was not a possibility at all." Specifically, "central to this sense of isolation was the inability to physically see, meet and share space with fellow students." Moreover, "a sense of mutuality and shared experience appeared crucial to the underpinning of learning communities." Let me propose an alternative interpretation: students are unable to feel a sense of privilege when they're not physically connected. They don't feel they get exclusive access to services (for example, "visibility and accessibility of academic teaching staff"). They feel this loss as a devaluing of their education, as it becomes something anyone could obtain, and not specific to their own particular cultural and ethical community identified by a range of cues, practices, and tokens developed by their out-of-classroom interactions with each other. Image: Myers & Ogino.
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Tim O’Reilly, O'Reilly, Aug 05, 2022
"What if," asks Tim O'Reilly, "instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium?" Then the metaverse is "about a time when immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we communicate and share digital experiences." I think this is very much applying a web 2.0 lens to web3. The distinguishing characteristic of the metaverse and web3 is object permanence in a digital space. And yes, we could think of a set of objects as a place, or as a communications medium, and any number of other things. But what's actually new is that we can now use digital objects in ways previously reserved for physical objects only - as keys, tokens, currency, credentials, identifiers, and the like (use your imagination to extend this list).
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Anne Quaranto, PhilPapers, Aug 05, 2022
What I like about this analysis (57 page PDF) of the phenomenon of 'dog whistles' is that it embeds it into the idea of linguistic practice as (in part) characterizing a community. A 'dog whistle' is "speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience." The author provides several examples. The question is, is it a dog whistle only if the speaker intends it to be a dog whistle. Anne Quaranto argues that dog whistles can be unintentional, but conditions apply. "Covertly coded speech is only possible because there's something a speaker and hearer are both part of - a linguistic practice, an established usage learned from others and shaped by others' past performances." We see this a lot in the community not just in the form of dog whistles but also as memes, popular expressions, abbreviations, slang, and many other forms. The idea that we're all speaking 'one common language' with mutual understanding and shared meaning is, to my mind, wrong. Image: Vox.
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Casey Woodling, Comparative Philosophy, Aug 05, 2022
This (17 page PDF)(also) is a clear and direct presentation of Malagasy ethics and in particular the principle of fihavanana. "As a first pass, we can say that fihavanana is a state of peace or harmony that people can achieve with others within their communities; it is modeled on the peace, harmony, solidarity, love, and closeness that is often seen in family ties." Source materials are Malagasy proverbs (ohabolana) that either directly use the term or talk about it without using its name. It's worth noting some of the distinction between this concept and the Western approach to ethics that many pundits say are 'universal': the allowance that "emotion and feelings have a role to play in deciding what one ought to do," the idea that "one should do good for others out of a feeling of love and not out of a sense of requirement," and some clear limitations of the scope of the moral community. Image: Pharos.
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Laura Ascione, eCampus News, Aug 05, 2022
This short post summarizes the 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Data and Analytics Edition (54 page PDF) and focuses on the 15 trends across five categories it outlines: data-supported social equity, lagging technology, economic challenges from external competitors, the influence of environmental issues, and the interplay between politics and education. These lead to the four scenarios, which are, respectively: only measurement matters, budget-imposed constraint, institutional collapse, and institutional transformation. The report itself also outlines key analytics technologies and trends (p. 12) which include emphases on data management, data sources, architecture, data literacy, diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), and assessment.
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Harvard Graduate School of Education, Aug 05, 2022
This toolbox reminds me of de Bono's lateral thinking more than anything else, not in terms of content (they are quite different) but in terms of providing a series of 'tips and tricks' to improve thinking habits and to break us out of bland complacence. It's also much more extensive than de Bono, divided into ten categories each of which has a number of specific items. Via Doug Peterson.
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Ben Werdmuller,
Aug 05, 2022
Interesting set of reflections on the use of AI for creative purposes. Ben Werdmuller considers some of the legal implications - for example, "I did not grant permission for my code, my drawings, or my photographs to form the basis of someone else's work. But a human artist also draws on everything they've encountered, and we tend not to worry about that" (see also Wendy Grossman on this). He also suggests that AI will be used as a tool for creativity, rather than replacing creators entirely - "at least, for another generation or so." I'm waiting to see the DALL-E fashion designs.
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Mike Taylor,
Aug 04, 2022
It's that time of the year again when educators and developers send their list of top tools to Jane Hart. This is Mike Taylor's list, which is headed by Feedly, Wordpress and Twitter. Here is Helen Blunden's list, which drops Twitter entirely, and is headed by Feedly, WordPress and YouTube. Is this the year of Feedly? Here's my top ten list.
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Peter Kafka, Vox, Aug 04, 2022
I think it's pretty funny that 'the newsletter boom' came and went between 2020 and 2022 (ie., between the 19th and 21st year of this email newsletter's publication). Here's a statement of the obvious: "Newsletters, it turns out, are just like blogs and podcasts — they're super simple for anyone to create. But turning them into something beyond a hobby — let alone turning them into a full-time job — requires talent and sustained effort." The trick to newsletters - beyond the commitment and effort - is understanding that you are writing to a specific community and not to the wider public at large. And it requires understanding that you won't earn a living from the newsletter, that writing it is an input to whatever you actually do to earn a living. A lot like education and professional development.
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Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, Aug 04, 2022
We read from time to time the recommendation that we teach it, but what exactly is computational thinking? There's no shortage of more superficial definitions, but to get a full and deep account, this book (free and self-published by Jeff Erickson) recommended by Terry Freedman is a pretty good reference. Now I would recommend everyone learn everything in this book (though it wouldn't hurt) but rather would define something like computational literacy as a basic understanding and ability to apply the key concepts outlined here, things like recursion, decisions, search, probability, graphs, hashing, etc. This book, meanwhile, would be an indispensable reference for anyone teaching computational thinking.
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Esteban Morales, First Monday, Aug 03, 2022
You'd think studies of social media rely mostly on data from social media services, but no. "Findings show that most studies do not use social media data and instead rely on traditional data sources, such as surveys... researchers seldom followed methodological approaches that take advantage of the digital environments in which social media operates. Additionally, this gap in previous research can be seen in the minimal presence of quantitative approaches to social media data, such as social network analysis." If it were up to me, we would spend much less time (if at all) on survey data. Image: Wikipedia.
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Yet Analytics, Aug 03, 2022
Just passing this along with links: "STEEL-R is an Army STTC project focused on experiential learning analytics in the synthetic training environment (STE). The project enhances aspects of the Total Learning Architecture (TLA) for implementation in the space of immersive training. During the development of the project, we identified a novel use of xAPI Profiles which has implications for the way that learning activity data becomes relevant for business systems."
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Michael Feldstein, eLiterate, Aug 03, 2022
The churn in the commercial MOOC and OPM world continues. This is Michael Feldstein's analysis. "The key phrases in this excerpt are 'conversation rate,' (sic; pretty sure he meant 'conversion rate') 'top of the funnel,' and 'search volume.' These are marketing terms. Free MOOCs are at or near "top of the [sales] funnel." They are designed to identify and attract paying degree candidates." And "When 2U introduced its slogan 'Free to Degree,' the company wasn't describing their breadth of coverage. It was describing its sales funnel for getting students into paying degree programs." So - yeah, we get it. Commercial MOOC platforms are commercial.
But the problem isn't with MOOCs. It's with online program management (OPM) companies. These are companies that manage online programs for a percentage of tuition revenue. This was good for universities when online programs (including MOOCs) were a sideline. Now they're centre stage, and universities are looking to get out of these contracts. That's why OPM company 2U is laying off workers and (if we follow Feldstein) pivoting to marketing. That's why the University of Arizona (not to be confused with ASU) bought out its OPM Zovio. Is it just a pendulum swing? Or maybe something more permanent?
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Julia Driver, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aug 03, 2022
This is worth reading, but notice the assumptions baked in right from the start: "morality is a set of norms and principles that govern our actions... we can also think of morality as consisting of moral reasons... moral norms are universal in the sense that they apply to and bind everyone in similar circumstances... they are also commonly held to be impartial, in holding everyone to count equally." Each one of these propositions is debatable, and that's why the article is worth reading. Image: Richard Carrier.
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Christian Engel,
Aug 03, 2022
I'm going to have to actually follow the instructions to determine whether the advice here is good, but the article does offer an insight into just what constitutes a personal presence on the indieweb. It also shows the major issue for the indieweb: "there is no out-of-the-box solution for making your website ready for the IndieWeb. It involves a lot of customization, fiddling with services and setting up endpoints." Most people won't do that. I don't want to do that.
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Cal Newport,
Aug 02, 2022
There are two types of feedback for an AI-driven social media recommendation service: explicit and implicit. Explicit feedback includes things like likes, follows, retweets, etc., where the user is actively expressing a preference. Implicit feedback is everything else, and includes things like what you view, how long you watch, your facial expressions, etc. For the purposes of this article, Facebook is based on explicit feedback, while TikTok is based on implicit feedback. Why does this matter? The author believes that if Facebook follows TikTok into relying on implicit feedback, this will be a "poison pill" that "that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution" and leaves us with "more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements." Sure - except it just doesn't matter. There's a third type of feedback, which I'll call "third party feedback", and that's all the feedback that comes from someone else and influences what you see. That's the most important kind of feedback. Advertisers, political campaigners, people promoting their own videos - these are what matter to both TikTok andf Facebook. That's what we don't see in "more human online engagements" and that's why their success and sustainability is so limited. Via Helen Blunden.
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Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, Aug 02, 2022
Over the years readers will have seen me challenge the idea of representationalism as a theory of mind, learning and belief. Here's another expression of the same sort of argument, posing an alternative called 'dispositionalism', which is closer to what I would favour. "According to dispositionalism, to believe that P is to be disposed to act and react in ways that are characteristic of believers-that-P." Now what really matters (to me) is how we cash out this notion of 'disposed to act', which I talk about in terms of pattern recognition and characteristic responses. But what matters is that we both reject "a particular type of cognitive architecture - the storage of representational contents matching the contents of the believed propositions." Anyhow, this article looks at the dispute in some depth, and traces some methodological implications (for example, 'the problem with questionnaires').
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Chris Aldrich,
Aug 02, 2022
Chris Aldrich points to this open text, How to Make Notes and Write, by Dan Allosso and S. F. Allosso. In a nutshell, the book describes how to take notes from readings and sources, find how they are connected, and weave the results into longer works. This is sometimes called personal knowledge management (PKM) or the Zettelkasten method. Aldrich offers a link to an annotated version of the book. I find the approach a bit mechanical (as maybe it should be if you're just learning). Then, I have virtually zero desire to write longer works, and prefer to be able to envision the entire text in my own mind before writing it and filling it in.
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Clare Gormley, Fiona O’Riordan, National Institute for Digital Learning, Aug 02, 2022
It says right in Wikipedia (and reflecting my own experience) that "The goal of a hackathon is to create functioning software or hardware by the end of the event." This event, while laudable in its effort to get groups of people together to think about a problem (specifically, to "design an authentic and sustainable assessment experience for all"), is not what I would consider a hackathon (notwithstanding its designation as a social innovation hackathon). Why am I being pedantic about this? Because there is to my mind a world of difference between producing an actual working solution and a potential solution, and this very much impacts everything from the people you include in the workshop to the sort of approach that is ultimately adopted. A hackathon doesn't just produce a concept, it produces a proof of concept.
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Esther Clark, Christensen Institute, Aug 02, 2022
This article mainly leaves me wondering what the upside is for the Christensen Institute in running what appears to be essentially marketing copy. It certainly undermines its core message about innovation (despite what Thomas Arnett writes at the bottom of the article). We read the wildly inaccurate claim that "King's InterHigh is considered the original online school." It was founded in the UK in 2005, a full decade after many organizations had started offering high school programs online. And forming a partnership with the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) may be good business but it hardly qualifies as innovation.
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Lucy Knight, The Guardian, Aug 02, 2022
This is why people are so cynical about new technologies. Here's why Pearson plans to sell textbooks as non-fungible tokens (NFT): "In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale... technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life." In other words - you can't sell your used textbook without giving a cut to Pearson. Here's a message to publishers: nobody wants a technology that allows you to control everything they own.
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Filipa M. Rodrigues, Ana Maria Abreu, Ingela Holmström, Ana Mineiro, Scientific Reports, Aug 01, 2022
I was drawn to this item (10 page PDF) because I would have expected the opposite, based on what I have heard from people's experiences with online conferencing. The authors argue that "faced with higher fatigue rates and lower performances, the DHH population might be at disadvantage in the several dimensions of academic challenges, leading to further inequalities and constraints that affect well-being and participation opportunities." But the study is, in my view, significantly flawed. The e-learning design employed was, to my view, idiosyncratic, throwing as many different visual elements as possible into a small screen (illustrated). But more significantly, while we would expect the study to compare online and offline learning for DHH students, it in fact studies online learning for DHH and groups of hearing participants. So I would take the results of this study with a very large grain of salt.
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Aug 01, 2022
Here's another object lesson in being careful when you choose your technology provoder. Justina writes, "At my university, we do not have an enterprise license for Pressbooks, but we did purchase about 20 "Individual Faculty" licenses a few years ago. These were advertised at the time as perpetual; that is, $99 for life. Well, apparently that life is ending on 9/29/22. Our faculty are faced with three choices: 1) opt in to the new platform for $500/year, 2) move their e-book to a different platform, or 3) let it be deleted on 9/29/22." Ouch. But fortunately, PressBooks is open source, and the books can be transferred to another location. If PressBooks weren't open source, the university would be stuck.
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Ahmed Tlili, Daniel Burgos, Interactive Learning Environments, Aug 01, 2022
Using AI to support open educational practices can be a blessing and a curse, write the authors. "A blessing, as AI-based OEP will help provide more adaptive and engaging learning and teaching experiences; while a curse, as researchers and practitioners need to pay an extra eye to the challenges merging from both areas together (i.e. copyright, privacy, and data normalization)." Outlining the topic briefly, this article (9 page PDF) introduces a collection of papers (and includes a call for more papers) on "how responsible AI in open education (i.e. the use of AI with OEP) should be designed and developed." Image: UNESCO.
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Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, Aug 01, 2022
Bonfire is a decentralized social network application, much like Mastodon. Circles were a way of subdividing your friends or contacts into subcategories, such as 'family', 'work', 'baseball', each with their own permissions. Twitter adopted something similar back in May. The main issue with Circles is that they're a pain to maintain. Who wants to go through their friends list sorting them? "What I'm hoping," says Doug Belshaw, "is that this bridges the gap between social networking as we know it (e.g. Mastodon, Twitter) and group chats (e.g. Signal, Telegram)." I don't think this is it, though I think there is certainly an opportunity for someone somewhere to get online group formation right. I think members need to be more or less self-selected from an eligibility pool, not assigned, and management needs to be fluid and seamless.
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Eleni Schirmer, The New Yorker, Jul 29, 2022
This tells you all you need to know about how the university system is broken. " Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old." An outlier? Certainly. But it's the sort of thing that should never happen.
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InclusiveAccess.org, Jul 29, 2022
'Including access' is a misleadingly named system whereby expensive textbooks are included in the cost of tuition fees, rather than sold separately. It's 'inclusive', I guess, because students can no longer share copies or buy used textbooks. Does it do anything good for students? Apparently not. "The key finding of the study is that Inclusive Access programs did not show any measurable improvement in student outcomes—either for students overall or those more likely to be underserved." Via Alex Enkerli.
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Reddit, Jul 29, 2022
It's classic Reddit that the first response to this useful post is to assert (a) that the post belongs in another forum, and (b) that 'we know' the stuff presented in the post. I think, though, that this general level guidance is exactly what nose-to-the-algorithm data scientists need to see from time to time. In any case, the post is more generally useful, and offers a good guide to the issues that should be considered when implementing recommendation systems anywhere, including learning analytics. If your project hasn't taken these ten items into consideration, then that's a point of failure.
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Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, Jul 29, 2022
So here's Donald Clark's assessment of MOOC provider FutureLearn: "It is a financial disaster. After ten years, virtually alone in the UK market, it has a whopping £16.1 million loss on £11.3 million revenues. With £15.7 million on salaries, it's drowning, with its nose and lips are barely above water." Notwithstanding the corporate requirements of Open University, my question is this: is education supposed to make buckets of cash? What's wrong with spending money to provide affordable (or even free!) public higher education? Ah - but I don't expect my own idealism to prevail in the brutal numbers game that is higher education in the English-speaking world.
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Decentralized Identity Foundation, Jul 29, 2022
Decentralized Identifiers (DID) are a core part of web3 and with the 1.0 specification being approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) companies can now move forward with widespread adoption of supporting services. It's worth noting, though, that the W3C specification allows for centralized decentralized identifiers, a point both Google and Mozilla raised in their objections. It would also have been desirable to see "at least one, interoperable method that works out of the box." Microsoft, as well, raised concerns about compatibility with JSON and JSON-LD. Here's the W3C announcement.
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Phil Marston, Teaching Matters, Jul 28, 2022
I like this article because it describes the process behind the design of a grading rubric instead of just presenting one. It also describes a method whereby instructors work with students to design the rubric. I can see this being a really useful exercise in a class, though it may have the outcome of hing most students satisfy all elements of the rubric in their submitted work - not because they made the rubric too easy, but because they have thought in a systematic way about what would constitute high-quality work.
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Peter Gluckman, International Science Council, Jul 28, 2022
This is a very good discussion of the nature of science and the role played by values and principles, and should be taken as informing the ed tech and online learning research community as well. Opening an International Science Council (ISC) meeting on the subject, Peter Gluckman notes that "science is not a fixed knowledge system but one that is self-correcting and evolves," and "does not exist in isolation from other knowledge systems be they originating from religion, tradition, local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or the tacit or learned knowledge of different occupations." This is important because the values and principles from these other sources of knowledge all have a role to play in how science is managed and applied in society. There's much more; take the 10 minutes to have a read.
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The Guardian, Jul 28, 2022
This study is different from earlier work in that it is based on actual gameplay data rather than just self-reports. It's also a much larger study. "We really gave increases and decreases in video game play a fair chance to predict emotional states in life satisfaction, and we didn't find evidence for that – we found evidence that that's not true in a practically significant way." The article note that the generalization may well break down in individual cases (as always). "There may be an effect if a player increases their playtime by 10 hours a day above what is typical for them." Here's the link to the full study.
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LMS Pulse, Jul 28, 2022
Despite what the headline says, this article does not actually describe how to build an LMS using node.js (I was so disappointed). But it does talk a lot about how node.js would be a good approach to building an LMS, and there's a box pointing to an article on how to send an xAPI statement with node.js so there's that. I was sort of hoping this might introduce a series of articles on building a node.js LMS, but alas no, it just points to some development company. But it would be a great series of articles, wouldn't it?
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Jul 28, 2022
Following Ben Werdmuller's example, I hae posted my OPML file on GitHub. This is a list of all the RS feeds I subscribe to in a formal you can use to fill your own RSS reader. I like the example; if enough people do it then there's potential for a larger graph of RSS feeds and followers.
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eSchool News, Jul 27, 2022
You may recall he idea of 'houses' in schools from Harry Potter (10 points to Griffindor) though of course it predates the books by generations (my own high school tried it in the 70s with limited success). In this item, "CritterCoin guides schools through sorting students into Houses and identifying the behaviors they want to reward. Schools then design their own digital coins and teachers award them in real time when students demonstrate positive behaviors." Do school houses need NFT pets? Obviously not. Will they catch on? The jury is out. (p.s. put me in Ravenclaw).
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Mary Jo Madda, EdSurge, Jul 27, 2022
Theranos, as this article suggests, "not only wasted millions of dollars, but put some patients' health in jeopardy." It served as an object lesson of the dangers of a 'fake it till you make it' methodology. So who is the Theranos of education, asks Mary Jo Madda. She offers two candidates: AltSchool, which "sought to create a network of microschools buoyed by a technology platform containing self-paced courses and curriculum"; and Knewton, an adaptive learning platform whose "founders oversold the potential of their adaptive software."
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Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, Jul 27, 2022
Doug Peterson comments on the Ontario government's post-covid plan. It's based on 'catching up' and (in my view) getting back to the way things were as soon as possible. This isn't a surprise - even during the pandemic it was evident that the first response would be to return to pre-covid conditions. Peterson makes the point that the government should maybe have negotiated with stakeholders before announcing the plan, which is a fair point. But they will have to deal with them eventually, especially as people start to miss some of the good things that happened over the last to years.
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nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, Jul 27, 2022
Here's the core message: "A common mistake is presuming that a person's instinctive reactions are their 'real, authentic' self. They are not.... Doing and saying the first thing that comes into your head doesn't make you more authentic – it just makes you an insensitive idiot." Or in slogan form: "As Heraclitus once said 'dogs bark at things they don't recognise'. Be less dog."
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Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan, European Journal of Education, Jul 27, 2022
I have a certain interest in the concept of the doctorate, mostly because it represents a gap in my academic record. This article places the doctorate in its historical context while observing that it is undergoing substantial changes. It was rooted in an aristocratic and guild tradition, was reformed in the 1800s, but still represents an emphasis on individual scholarship and apprenticeship. It also requires deference to authority, a deference still evidenced in some of the rituals surrounding the defense of a dissertation. Today, though, a new model is emerging, based on more collaborative approaches to research and and based in a collection of papers rather than a lengthy individual dissertation. Good article; well worth a read.
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Deniz Akşimşek, htmx, Jul 26, 2022
The term REpresentational State Transfer (REST) came from Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding's PhD Dissertation and originally referred to a request and response expressed entirely in hypermedia. Over time, however, these responses can to be encoded in JSON, and though not technically REST, is what tends to be called REST today. It's what I have been calling (and will probably continue to call) REST today. This article, though, is a good read that sets the record straight. Via Peter Murray / boost by Scott Leslie.
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Colin Seale, Cult of Pedagogy, Jul 26, 2022
This article looks at "helping teachers embed culturally responsive critical thinking into their existing curriculum so it doesn't feel like one more thing." Though its main purpose is to promote a book written by the author, i does offer some practical advice. One suggestion is to allow students to make up their own 'rules' - "there is nothing stopping third graders from designing their own rubrics for what makes a good paragraph 'good' based on their analysis of paragraphs written at various levels of quality," or example. Or "a more intuitive way to organize the periodic table of elements?" Or "rank the main characters from the most shady to the least shady." It's not about the new rules themselves - it's about the discussion around the rules. This is where we see the nuance and, if all goes well, culturally responsive critical thinking.
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Alex Sujong Laughlin, Poynter, Jul 26, 2022
It's easy to be critical of those in edtech who went to work for the big companies and made 'house money'. But we need to be clear that a refusal to 'sell out' is made possible only with a certain level of privilege and security; "You don't turn down a job during the Great Depression." These are questions I've wrestled with my whole life. I've always worked for 'the company' whether it be the college, the university, or the government. But while I've always worked with one hand for the company, I've also dedicated one hand 'for myself', and it's with that second hand I've held on to the work worth doing, the values worth preserving.
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Brigitte Vézina, Camille Françoise, Ony Anuken, Dee Harris, Creative Commons, Jul 26, 2022
This report (22 page PDF) surveys experts in the Galleries, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) community to identify barriers to providing open access to resources in the sector. As the summary suggests, the major barriers are access to money and resources, the need for appropriate knowledge and skills along with apprehensions and risk aversion, and policy challenges including copyright law. Not surprisingly, the report is written in a tone that favours open access, though with recognition about the potential for commercial use and sensitivity to cultural and indigenous artifacts. Image: OpenGLAM.
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Douglas Portmore, Daily Nous, Jul 26, 2022
"It's standard to divide the moral landscape into deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, thereby assuming that these three are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive," writes Douglas Portmore. But yo don't need a whole essay to show that deontology can be consistent with consequentialism; "treat every person as an end in themselves" is an example of both operating in a single maxim. In fact, though, the field of ethics is not exhausted by those three categories; in my own work I include social contract theory (normally thought of as a branch of political philosophy) and ethics of care and moral sentimentalism generally. All this is why it's so difficult to simply assert that we all know an 'ethics of edtech'.
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Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, Jul 22, 2022
This article looks at the deployment of the cloud to support education (a practice that is well-entrenched, I would observe) and identifies five areas that require analysis: "corporate cloud enclosure of public education, enhanced extraction of economic and data 'rent' from the education sector by cloud operators, expanding infrastructural power over the edtech ecosystem, extension of capacities of automation and anticipation in education practice, policy and governance." The overarching concern being expressed is that the cloud is mostly a provate commercial space, and so the use of the cloud by education entrenches the corporate position as an education provider. There are risks, to be sure, but I'm not thinking anything like a non-corporate cloud deployment is in the works right now. Nor does it make any sense to not take advantage of what the cloud can offer. So, yeah, "taking up an advocacy position against cloud infrastructures or platforms" doesn't make sense. What does make sense (as always) are regulatory environments, taxation policies and service provision agreements that serve the public interest.
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Phil Hill,
Jul 22, 2022
This article and a longer follow-up outline Phil Hill's views on the current state of the online program management (OPM) market. The use of a graphic from Max Max: Fury Road summarizes that perspective quite well. "The company is losing its ability to steer and control its own destiny due to the financial pressures – more market valuation in nature than revenue or profit-based." Hill also comments critically on a Wall Street Journal 'gotcha' article. It missed, he says, what could have been a good story. "Aggressive recruiting of students for online programs – degree-granting and otherwise – is an annoyance and a weakness of the OPM market."
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Zachary Chamption, Futurity, Jul 22, 2022
We've looked at this approach in the past and I expect we'll see much more of it. "An approach called federated learning trains machine learning models on devices like smartphones and laptops, rather than requiring the transfer of private data to central servers." Typically the edge devices (ie., your smartphones and laptops) will install an already partially trained model (say, something that already knows about musical genres) and then use your own data to complete the training (say, your own musical selections). Edge AI can also feed generalized results (not personal data) back to the central server. "Federated learning relies on an algorithm that serves as a centralized coordinator. It delivers the model to the devices, trains it locally on the relevant user data, and then brings each partially trained model back and uses them to generate a final global model."
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George Veletsianos,
Jun 29, 2022
George Veletsianos quotes at length from a report written last year by UNESCO's International Commission on the Futures of Education, Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. His emphasis is on the dialogue that needs to happen in education and "the renewal of education as a common good and the co-construction of a new social contract for education" which will require "a renewal of the public mission of universities towards the generation of an open and accessible knowledge commons, and the education of new generations of researchers and professionals." Something like Octopus is a start - but this is just one part of the larger (and hopefully decentralized) ecosystem of knowledge, learning and research (I'm typing this as I watch the Octopus launch event - and it's the first thing that's really excited me for some time). But this isn't social contract so much as it is an architecture.
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edCircuit, Jun 29, 2022
This article in edCircuit is a reprint of a press release. "Avantis Education today announced the launch of Eduverse – a ground-breaking new online platform that gives students access to a K-12 metaverse." The only ground-breaking here should be the burial of the idea that this is in any sense the 'metaverse' - it's just a bunch of VR scenarios made available for private access by school classes. These are called 'expeditions' and are either 360-degree photos or 3D models, both well-known and we--established technology. Most of this is promotional; the real money is in Avantis' ClassVR headsets. None of this is new; beware people wrapping older tech in new 'metaverse' clothing.
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Anne-Marie Scott,
Jun 29, 2022
Some good thoughts here about the relation between scale and edtech. "Access is a problem of scale at one level and I am committed to working on that but I increasingly hear reductive views of digital learning limited to students navigating personalised pathways through high-end content and teachers interpreting that learning through analytics. This seems devoid of any kind of good relations and community." She continues, "I remember a time when I got excited about generative and liberating uses of technology... I think this is still possible, and I think work around open practices, open pedagogies, ethics of care, and decolonisation point the way towards how to do it in today's dogpile of an internet." I agree.
But why is it this way? Ben Werdmuller points to the cause. "The need for high scale is a crater that has been dug in the fabric of civic life. For a startup to be venture fundable, it must demonstrate that it is scalable: in other words, it can plausibly grow to be a billion dollar company without linearly increasing the size of its team." This, he says, is the startupification of education. "Venture funding isn't the only way to fund a startup, but it's certainly the way that's caught the public's and the industry's imagination, and the result is that the notion of scalability has, too."
The difference between education based on conversations and relationships and education based on data and analytics is that in the former, but not the latter, each connection is unique. It occurs in a specific context, with specific people, with distinct backgrounds, perspectives, goals and values. It's not something that can be mass produced; it requires mass participation, but not of each person doing the same thing, but of each person doing different things. Datafication and analytics produce abstractions, reproducibility, and scale, but at the cost of sterility and meaninglessness. They produce action without responsibility, content without provenance, requirements without justification. The only meaningful metric is volume, and this subsumes all other measures of value and consideration.
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CRISPR in the Classroom Network, Jun 29, 2022
The New York Times came out with an article 'CRISPR in the Classroom', which is of course paywalled, but there's a tone of resources already available online that describe and help teachers and students do their own gene modification experiments. This seems to me to be a good starting point, including access to open educational resources (OER). There are also CRISPR materials for sale, for example, this kit from Lab-Aids, hands-on labs from MiniPCR, CRISPR-in-a-Box from Rockland, and resources from CRISPR Classroom. Chris Anderson writes, "Transcription, translation, and protein synthesis can all be taught with a gel electrophoresis kit, which you can also make by yourself relatively cheaply (Instructables is your friend!). The Exploratorium of San Francisco has a good activity with different food dyes that model how different genes move from the gel matrix."
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Neil Mosley,
Jun 24, 2022
"One might argue that it has become quite vogue to position yourself as anti-tech, tech sceptical or critical when it comes to digital technology in education," writes Neil Mosley. "It has become the veneer to have and the standpoint to personally signal if you want to align yourself and be publicly accepted into certain crowds and tribes." This does indeed describe some crowds and tribes (examples of which he cites in the article). But I think a fair-minded assessment of the field as a whole that does less cherry-picking and surveys a wider literature would find enough advocacy, punditry and sketchy research to satisfy all points of view. As even Mosley himself admits, "Whenever, I read corporate research I'm probably more highly attuned to the potential of bias... I expect more from academic research." Well, I expect more from corporate research; having a profit motive does not relieve anyone of the responsibility to seek the truth.
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Center for Education Reform, Jun 24, 2022
This short post excepts from a paywalled Wall Street Journal article setting out the talking points for the current round of education reform advocacy. "The government will spend nearly $250,000 on each of her children. Yet she won't have much of a say in how the dollars are spent. Without her consent, the bureaucrats who run the public schools will build facilities, hire teachers and plan curriculum that may leave her children far behind their peers, all at exorbitant prices."
I can see the argument for putting the money directly into parents' hands. They would be able to make choices that the current system doesn't support. And I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying that these would be bad choices, or that parents would spend the money on themselves. No, let's address the core point head on: the private sector does not provide social services more efficiently than the public sector. If it did, the U.S. health care system wouldn't be such a mess. If it did, we'd be comfortable with private road, police and fire services. If it did, charter schools would already outperform much less well-funded public schools. If it did, we'd outsource the military function to mercenaries. The core of the WSJ article is based on a lie.
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Todd A Carpenter, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jun 24, 2022
This article is ostensibly about the efforts of Clarivate to break what it calls OCLC's (think Dublin Core) "monopoly" over publication metadata. It feels like an argument for a commercial system rather than a more open and public system. But I can't be certain; there's a lot of obfuscation in the article. But one thing is true: "The availability of open citations, the discussions about open identifiers for institutions, and the questions around open infrastructure all hinge around the ecosystem of data — who controls it, and what can be done with the data once it is aggregated." All of this, to me, creates an argument for open data. But I'm sure some - commercial publishers, say - will disagree.
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Annie Brookman-Byrne, Bold, Jun 24, 2022
"Today, education is still primarily concerned with promoting economic growth," argues Nienke van Atteveldt in this interview. "This focus has profoundly shaped assessments and the way most education systems work, which is to emphasise individual test scores. This is not the best way to enable children to flourish, because it increases often unfair competition... I would like to see a new mindset in education, one that treats all trajectories as equally valid as long as children are learning new things and continuing to progress." He continues, " We had already recognised that "learning to know", which is one of UNESCO's four pillars of education, was only part of the story. The other pillars are learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together. We looked at how these various elements influence one another." Related: The International Science and Evidence-based Education Assessment.
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Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, Jun 21, 2022
Alan Levine comments on what appears to have been the recent sale of Lumen Learning's OER content to Course Hero, which promptly enclosed it and used it as an advertising vehicle to sell additional paid resources. "So yeah, out with the Rights to R*5 and we start now with the Right to Profit from OER content. It's just P's all the way down," writes Levine. "If anything is a call to detach from profit oriented platforms and reclaim the web for your own, well this call has been screaming for a long time."
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BCcampus, Jun 21, 2022
This is a really nice library of open educational resources created and hosted by BCcampus. Clint Lalonde writes in a Mastodon thread, "the vast majority of the heavy lifting putting this new BCcampus #OER collection site together was done by Mel Meyers over the past year prior to her BCcampus secondment ending, as well as the BCcampus Dev/Ops team." Most of the resources are books, there is often supplementary material, and many of them are reviewed. Lalonde also writes, "we are using a headless CMS framework called Strapi. We built it from the ground up... It will be open sourced at some point. This is just the MVP, but has some nice features including native LRMI metadata support. As a headless system, everything is accessible via an API so very flexible."
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Mahdi Yusuf, Architecture Notes, Jun 10, 2022
I saw this somewhere on Mastodon this week (I can't find the reference). It's an update to the original article from Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz published on the venerable Dr. Dobbs web site (I used to rely on the magazine). This article is shorter and punchier and no less relevant, though I like to think that a lot of administrators and developers have learned these lessons by now.
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Eric Grevstad, PC Magazine, Jun 10, 2022
To be clear, this article isn't talking about specific computers, it's talking about types of computers, as identified by model or band name (the type-token distinction strikes again). So we read about such types as the IBM PC Model 5150, the overpriced but oh so chic Apple Macintosh, the Dell XPS 13, and 17 others. I think talking about specific computers would have been a much more interesting article. You know: the computer used to run the first Pong video game, the computer Edward Snowden used to reveal government spying on its own citizens, the computer Seymour Papert used to teach music in this video, the computer Murray Goldberg used to write WebCT. Via Doug Peterson.
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Michael Feldstein, eLiterate, Jun 10, 2022
Michael Feldstein took so long getting to his point I thought he was trying to sell me something. But no. His main point is that Instructure proved successful in the LMS market by helping shift the locus of decision-making from computer services and IT departments to the faculty who would actually use the system. There's merit in that observation. He wraps this discussion in an argument to the point that people should be wary about missing patterns or trends they weren't expecting. In other words, people should get out more and see things from different points of view. There's merit in this point as well.
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Chris Aldrich,
Jun 10, 2022
Chris Aldrich describes the IndieWeb community as consisting of three spheres: the logos (or knowledge) which can be found in the community forums or discussions; the ethos (those representing the IndieWeb ethic) who can be found out there interacting on their own ("because they grew up in the period of the open web, or because they never felt accepted by the thundering herds in the corporate social enclosures"), and the pathos (or sympathizers) "wishing they had better user interfaces, better features, different interaction, more meaningful interaction, healthier and kinder interaction." Image: studiobinder.
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EdSurge, Jun 08, 2022
I'm not sure how much I believe this, given what EdSurge has published in the past. It here touts its Voices of Change project, "creating opportunities for educators to reflect, share and learn from one another through journalism, storytelling and research." The problem is that this content is mixed almost indistinguishably with its sponsored content, which you can read about on its ethics page. "EdSurge allows Sponsored Content in two forms: (1) Content produced by EdSurge Studio on behalf of its advertising partners; and (2) Content produced by advertisers that meet our editorial standards." The publication says it posts disclaimers, but the reason advertisers don't just advertise is that they know readers will be deceived by it. But these are EdSurge's choices to make, and it's up to you to assess the publication according to your own standards.
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Kathe Pelletier, EdScoop, Jun 08, 2022
This is a short article but it makes several very good points administrators in higher education should keep in mind before adopting artificial intelligence:
- "match the tool to the purpose" - and indeed, have a purpose
- "invest in data capabilities first" - this includes data management, ethics and policies, and overall data literacy
- guide and leverage AI with human interpretation
- be informed and critical about AI, knowing what it can and cannot do
- "lean into improvement opportunities" in pedagogy and programming
I would also add the point that students need to be aware of how AI is shaping their own disciplines, removing much of the rote work and replacing a lot of creative, classification and recognition tasks with faster and cheaper tools.
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UniversityDAO, Jun 08, 2022
This is an interesting idea that might work or (more likely) is completely unworkable. Here's the Product Hunt pitch: "UniversityDAO is a decentralized autonomous university aiming to end student debt and empower Universities to own their university through the tokenization of the University system." Here's a white paper. The idea is that students buy tokens (using real money) and this is used to fund the university; the tokens, meanwhile, represent shares in the ownership of the university (or whatever is left after the students' education is funded). Related: Social Bees University DAO, University DAO Voting, Invisible College.
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Ben Dickson, TechTalks, Jun 08, 2022
Ben Dickson summarizes Demystifying AI for the Enterprise, a book that "shares best practices and practical case studies of how AI is being applied to different industries." Though not specifically addressing the educational context, the applicability is nonetheless clear. It offers what is called the IMPACT technology adoption model (standing for imagination, maturity, people, augmentation, amplification, automation, culture and transformation (if you squeeze your eyes you can see the words SAMR written there)). "A good AI strategy starts with knowing what problem you're trying to solve," writes Dickson. "Having a good understanding of the capabilities and limits of current AI technology will help you look at problems from a new perspective." I would also advise not dismissing AI or selling it short. It's real, it will have an impact, and it's happening now.
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Yannic Kilcher, YouTube, Jun 08, 2022
I rarely post single-link YouTube (SLYT) posts, but you will want to watch this 20 minute video. In a very well produced presentation Yannic Kilcher describes how he trained a GPT bot on some of the worst and vile discussion threads on 4chan and produced a convincing result, including achieving a greater score on 'truthfulness' than other GPT language models. Here's a full set of links to the model, code and dataset. Even if you're not interested in this specific bot, the video provides good descriptions of how language models work, how he defeated 4chan's captcha, and a bit about how language models are evaluated for things like truthfulness.
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Jaclyn Brown Wright, eSchool News, Jun 06, 2022
This article reads like a product endorsement for an AI tutor called Amira (by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It may well be; the article doesn't say one way or another. Amira "listens to children read and provides micro-interventions at the phonetic level just like a real reading interventionist in real time, one by one, for every child simultaneously." I'm not sure pronouncing words correctly constitutes 'literacy' but the main point here is that if and when AI tutor tools produce results, they will be used. That's the future of learning technology we should bank on. It's a pretty easy prediction.
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Haje Jan Kamps, TechCrunch, Jun 06, 2022
What I like about these courses (there's actually a set of ten of them) is that they're free and they appear to be of decent quality (I signed up to take a look and do a quick evaluation for myself). I don't like that you have to register for them with an email address. I imagine I'll be receiving prompts and reminders for the rest of my life now.
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Christina Hendricks, You're the Teacher, Jun 06, 2022
This distracted me for the morning (I am waytoo easily distracted). Today's Daily Create is to "Introduce yourself with a creative alternative CV"–"something more creative than an dry traditional CV." So even though I don't follow DS106's Daily Create (for this exact reason) and am not participating in MyFest22, I couldn't resist creating my own alternative c.v.
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LMS Pulse, Jun 06, 2022
Every few days (because I have a lot of websites) I receive another notification from LetsEncrypt that my site security certificates have successfully updated. I never take this for granted. These certificates are what makes it possible for people to browse my corner of the web securely. They're your guarantee that the site you're reading actually came from me, and isn't someone trying to pretend to be me to, say, collect data or solicit input from anyone. LetsEncrypt is a free service, which is important, because certification services are otherwise expensive (and part of the reason people depend on third party sites like Blogger or Twitter rather than hosting their own). If you don't know about LetsEncrypt you should read this article and learn.
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Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, Jun 03, 2022
The answer to this question isn't one or the other, of course. It's all three (and various flavours of each). You use different media for different purposes. For people whowant daily updates from me, there's email newsletters - that's really good for people who don't want to miss anything. The same is true of Twitter followers. For the content curators and knowledge seekers, RSS is really good because it provides a searchable archive and a way to integrate what I write with everything else they're reading. People who need more presence in their content will prefer my web-based presentations, which include audio and video. They and other people who find me by search rather than subscription also benefit from my blog posts. For those who want to see the dialogue with the world as my ideas form and take shape, there's Mastodon (and some of my video playlists) - but be warned, my thoughts are borne out of a lot of extrinsic and extraneous content, such as cycling, video games and photography. And then there's my home page, which includes links to all these things.
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Cliff Atkinson, Richard E. Mayer, Indezine, Jun 03, 2022
I think this presentation (15 page PDF) offers good advice, but for the wrong reasons. It advocates for less text and less extraneous content on Power Point slides, and a structure where the words and picture on each slide support one main point. I agree. But not because of cognitive load theory, which (as readers know) I have criticized in the past. No, instead I would argue that the advice is good because humans perceive through pattern recognition. This suggests a model where presenting the same relatively simple (but not too simple!) pattern in multiple modalities (test and audio, but also activity and other sensations) develops and/or activates deeper patterns, layering what is being presented on pre-existing knowledge (aka pre-existing patterns of connectivity). Via Mike Taylor.
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Nanyi Fei, et al., Nature, Jun 03, 2022
This article describes a strategy to produce artificial general intelligence (AGI) with what might be called weak semantic correlation with image-text pairs. Traditional models seek strong correlation, and are therefore based on feature detection mechanisms that can be organized into (say) sentences. This requires a lot of overhead for limited capacity; "only millions of image-caption pairs are collected by years of human annotation"). Instead, "since there do not necessarily exist fine-grained region-word matches between image and text modalities, we drop the time-consuming object detectors." Without this overhead, the system is able to find patterns for vague concepts (eg., 'nature' or 'time') and find non-obvious and non-explicit between things, like metaphors and analogies.
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Josephine Lulamae, Algorithm Watch, Jun 03, 2022
There's no good mainstream coverage of this yet, but we've entered the world where people can use facial recognition software for as little as $5 a month. This article describes a number of ways it's being applied. FindClone is a Russian company, but now because of the invasion of Ukraine people are looking for FindClone alternatives. It's enough of a concern that image 'cloaking' technology such as Fawkes is being developed. I think attitudes about facial recognition may shift over time; we've used it for centuries on a human scale (think: wanted posters, police lineups, drivers licenses, passports). The line will be drawn based on already existing conventions, with prohibitions against using facial recognition for discrimination or stalking, for example. The edge cases are new uses such as targeted advertising, setting insurance rates, social credit, or performance evaluation.
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Tom Haymes, Idea Spaces, Jun 03, 2022
What this list shows me is that the '25 books' isn't the list of books you must read, but rather, for the author, the list of books they have read. Even assuming the same framework (which depicts technology as being about designing systems to produce outcomes) I can think of alternative (and, IMHO, deeper and better) books in each category. Why the military texts for 'understanding systems' when we woulkd be better served with analogies from business (Senge, say) or ecology (Bronfenbrenner). Similarly, for design, I'd be more likely to draw from architecture (Lockton, for example) than science fiction. But if I did want to talk about worldmaking, I'd be reading about knowledge construction (van Fraassen or Goodman). But that's me. There is not one best list. There's your list, and your choices (war and SF versus ecology and construction) not only reveal who you are, in some important ways they also define who you are. Via Aaron Davis.
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Matthew Halliday, University Affairs, Jun 02, 2022
We've discussed the proposal for a 'Canadian DARPA' in the past and as this article reports it is absent from the latest federal budget. However, "In its place was a pledge to create a Canadian innovation and investment agency. Rather than funding pie-in-the-sky research, it will focus on more down-to-earth work: fostering and commercializing innovations already generated within Canada's research community, as well as bridging the research and business communities in general." This is quite similar to the approach taken during the Harper years and I fear the result will be the same: transferring public money to private enterprise while producing no tangible outcome. See also these two posts from previous years on this topic.
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Ahmed Elkady, Videonet, Jun 02, 2022
We're only a few years away from really good automated translation services. In some cases it's already here; as related in this article, Cinedigm used Papercup's AI dubbing service to dub all 31 seasons of Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting. The future for this technology isn't the $2.5B market "that correlates to roughly 50,000 hours of content dubbed through traditional human dubbing" but rather the "$10B market of suppressed existing demand". That said, if automated translationdoesn't dramatically reduce the costs of dubbing, there's not much point developing it. So these numbers should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
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George Veletsianos, et al.,
Jun 02, 2022
I had to check to make sure this wasn't Jon Dron's paper on a similar topic, but this paper (7 page PDF) has none of the depth or complexity of that one. It offers a thought experiment featuring a person learning about decentralized finance and asks "what are some of the systemic implications instructional designers and researchers should consider for online and distance education environments?" The thought experiment features the student taking a progression of courses, eventually landing it what can only be described as something like a traditional university class, only hybrid. Does anyone really learn about an emerging topic like decentralized finance that way? I'd feel sorry for them.
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D'Arcy Norman,
Jun 02, 2022
Because our research group has spent the last 20 years working as a distributed group I've had a lot of experience with hybrid meetings. For the most part, I hate them. If you attend 'in person' the displays are typically too small to actually view remote participants (this is especially the case if the remote participants also attend 'in person' but in a different room in a different city). Remote participation, however structured, is limited, and a special effort needs to be made to ensure the host participants even recognize that they're in the meeting. This post covers auto-tracking cameras (we used those too, they help a bit) and the Neat Board "to slice the video feed from the high quality wide-angle lens and create individual participants in Zoom for every person in the room", which is an interesting option - but for the people in the room the remote participants still don't really exist, and that's the real challenge of hybrid meetings.
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Cameron Paterson, It's About Learning, Jun 02, 2022
I am certainly supportive of an environment that supports thinking and reflection, and not merely rote learning. So there's probably something of value here. Still, it bothers me the way this article is written in the tone of a revival meeting, and I don't think you need to tithe or go on a fellowship to Harvard's Project Zero in order to foster "a new story of learning where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the ongoing, day-to-day experience of all group members." Maybe it's just the way this is presented, where there's this idea of having to 'believe in' something for it to work. But it's just science. You just start using it, and it works. You show people how to use it, and it works. It's not a belief system; you don't need to build a culture around it. Via Aaron Davis.
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Kimberly A. Calderwood, Connie L. Kvarfordt, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Jun 01, 2022
The value of this study (10 page PDF) is in the depth provided by the 18 interviews. It allows the authors to extend what I think are commonly thought of as 'safety' and 'comfort' in learning both offline and online. And I can relate to many of the comments - the stress, for example, in traveling to an in-person class, the need to have my breaks from other people by myself (even in-person I don't like socializing during breaks), the comfort of sitting in my own chair and eating my own food (and coffee! decent coffee!). Image: Mohamed Hassan.
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Jully Paola Merchán Tamayo, Meredith Rocchi, Jenepher Lennox Terrion, Simon Beaudry, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Jun 01, 2022
This is an interesting idea: "to compare an autonomy-supportive with a controlling syllabus to see how students felt when reading the syllabus, and how the syllabus related to their impressions of the professor, reported motivation, and expectations for the course." The study (17 page PDF) describes the language adjustments made to the syllabus, and tests for a range of perceptions (for example: approachability, engagement, fairness), with the results suggesting "autonomy-supportive language promotes positive outcomes for students compared to controlling language."
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Viola Manokore, Jeff Kuntz, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Jun 01, 2022
This article (15 page PDF) uses the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (see Koehler & Mishra, 2006) to examine educators' experiences. "The TPACK framework suggests that educators should have adequate technological, pedagogical and content knowledge for them to successfully enhance student learning, no matter which environment they are working in." Conclusions were based on a self-selected set of 140 respondents from a province not named "to protect the identities of the participants" (though the authors are from NorQuest College, in Alberta, so you can do the math). Not surprisingly, the vast majority felt confident in their content knowledge, and also not surprisingly, "more than 50% of the study participants reported that the quality of their practice declined as they shifted from face-to-face to remote teaching as a result of the pandemic," attributable to their lack of mastery of the full TPACK framework.
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Philip Ball, Quanta Magazine, Jun 01, 2022
I've commented in the past that the only 'purpose' or 'directionality' in the universe is entropy. I've also questioned the role of information theory in knowledge and learning, describing knowledge and learning as physical, not cognitive, processes, governed not by content but by the laws of physics. But what if these two views can't both be true? That's the dilemma I face after reading this article that (to vastly oversimplify it) describes entropy in terms of information. "Quantum resource theories adopt the picture of the physical world suggested by quantum information theory, in which there are fundamental limitations on which physical processes are possible." Stuff like this keeps me up at night.
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Diego Rates, Dragan Gašević, International Journal for Students as Partners, Jun 01, 2022
"After more than a decade of studies," write the authors, "there is still a critical literature gap about analytics designed to support the activities and decisions of student representatives." This paper is intended to address that gap, though mostly as a very limited and preliminary exploration. As a former student representative myself, I am familiar with the challenges they face when a Board president (say) suggests "you do not represent the views of your members". Would analytics change that? To a degree, but only to the limit of its capabilities. There's only so much you can do with comments from students. It would be useful, in addition, to have access to data collected by the institution ("all the participants said they had not been provided with any of the student feedback collected by staff").
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[Slides][Audio] This short presentation introduces major elements of the metaverse, outlines some applications for education, discusses how it may be combined with other technologies for advanced applications, and outlines some issues and concerns.
Smart Education Summit: Reinventing education in the Metaverse era, Online, via Teams, to Rabat, Morocco (Lecture) May 13, 2022 [Link] [Slides] [Audio] [Video] [
[Slides][Audio] Video slide presentation to accompany my data literacy report (79 page PDF). It's a comprehensive analysis opf the concept of data literacy, descrivbing the overall competencies involved, methods for assessing data literacy, and methods for enhancing data literacy.
In-house, Ottawa (Seminar) May 11, 2022 [Link] [Slides] [Audio] [Video] [
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, May 04, 2022
I do not disagree with Audrey Watters's reasoning as she bans services like Genius and hypothes.is from adding annotations and commentary to her website. She writes, "This isn't simply about trolls and bigots threatening me (although yes, that is a huge part of it); it's also about extracting value from my work and shifting it to another company which then gets to control (and even monetize) the conversation." I'd do the same, but my own work does not attract nearly enough attention of this sort to make it worth the effort.
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Tristan Greene, The Next Web, May 04, 2022
The subtitle is "scientific endeavor is no match for corporate greed" and the paper describes Google's firing of another lead AI researcher and the proliferation of questionable papers in the literature seeking to monetize one or another aspect of the technology. Here's the issue, though. I don't think there's evidence that shows that either corporate greed or scientific opportunism is unethical by today's standards. They are essentially 'business as usual'. Now sure, I am among those desiring that a different ethic prevail. But I have never felt a part of the majority when it comes to ethics.
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Ravit Dotan, The Gradient, May 04, 2022
Most of what's contained in this article is consistent with my own findings in the realm of AI ethics, and most especially, consistent with the idea that finding a single universal set of principles of AI ethics is probably unattainable. If there is such an appearance of consensus today, it is probably an illusion created by a marked imbalance in the origins of those creating the principles - and here we refer not only to culture or national origin, but also factors such as employment and industry. "Governments mention privacy and security more than other types of institutions, but mention accountability less. Corporations mention transparency and collaboration more, but mention privacy and security less. Academia, non-profits, and non-government organizations mention humanity and accountability more, but mention fairness less." Etc.
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Philippa Nicoll Antipas, Conference Inference, May 04, 2022
I'm not a fan of the black text on a dark salmon background, but I like the idea of redesigning conferences. Here, Philippa Nicoll Antipas describes an approach called Plan D, "a game-like collective activity whereby teachers are supported to go rogue and design their own professional learning and development needs." This in many ways resembles an unconference or a barcamp.
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Mark Stenberg, Medialyte, Substack, May 04, 2022
As readers know, I attempt to link directly to source articles, and not to any resource that puts up a subscription wall (aka a spamwall) or a paywall between my link and the resource in question. This is getting harder and harder with the proliferation of different types of paywall. This article is a pretty good guide to the many models in use today, with examples of each, up to and including the dynamic paywall used by Rolling Stone which employs an algorithm to put up the paywall if it thinks you'd be willing to pay.
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Irving Wladawsky-Berger,
Apr 01, 2022
Imgur has a clever parody running today; I saw it here but it's probably gone now; view my capture here. It replaces the traditional 'up' and'down' voting arrows with cryptocurrency icons, the result being a 'value' created for each contribution. In a sense this parody represents the 'new economic system' contemplated here by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The parody is funny because Imgur's rankings are really arbitrary and capricious, and converting them to currency would distort them beyond recognition (and take all the fun out of them). And that's the fear about web3 (and ed3, the online learning analogue). See also: Dion Hinchcliffe.
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Simon Varwell, Sonny Maley, WonkHe, Apr 01, 2022
This article should be read for fun and not really taken seriously. It takes a typology developed in 1996 to describe online gamers to describe learners in 2022. I could certainly imagine it being applied to multi-player role-playing games, or even to contemporary games like No Man's Sky. But the categorizations themselves are weak: we have the achiever, the explorer, the socializar, and the killer. Even in 1996, though, we could have added categories like the builder, the storyteller or chronicler, the troll, and the newb. Does anything follow from these categorizations? Not really (you might use them as personas in game design, as a creative tool). But they're fun to think about.
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Education Matters, Apr 01, 2022
You can read the article if you want to but if you're like me you'll be distracted by the photo and will start playing "how many things are wrong with this classroom ?" You can see from the branding on the wall that it's a ViewSonic hybrid classroom, so presumably it's their best effort, right? Yet look at how people have to be clumped into a tiny group in the centre to even see the view screen. You might notice (if you look carefully) a projection of the remote participants on the back wall. The room is colourful, which is nice, but visually distracting and yet boring at the same time. The desks are tiny and you couldn't really work on them. There are no plug-ins anyways. You might be thinking that with all wheels it would be easy to reorganize desks, and you could, but there's no way to have hybrid groups.
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Amy Winger, Faculty Focus, Apr 01, 2022
This article is written very passively and awkwardly. It is best represented with the following statement: "In using courage, compassion, and connection when communicating with students, it reduces perceived stress and enhances the student experience while also improving the teacher-student relationship." Oh! for a good editor. But I link to it because it raised a question in my mind: in the rush to move back to traditional in-person classes, how are we going to deal with the sudden loss of connection that students will feel? Is the physical presence of a teacher in a classroom going to be enough to replace the always-on instant connection students can experience when online? When a student experiences anxiety or depression in an in-person class, how are they able to reach out for help when they have no access to messaging?
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Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, Apr 01, 2022
Martin Weller argues that good online group work "is completely achievable, and will give all the same benefits you would gain from face to face group work, therefore it should be implemented for the same reasons." My own experience is that it is in many respects better. You don't get a lot of the posturing (and preening, and negging) that you get in real-world groupwork. People are more able to participate on their own terms, and it's harder to bully them into compliance. And when working online they have direct access to other resources, backchannels, tools, and all the other affordances of digital cooperation. Weller offers some cautionary notes - for example, that it can take longer to do some things online, it sometimes requires more planning, and 'retention' might be a bit lower.
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Andy Calkin, Getting Smart, Apr 01, 2022
When I say that the role of the educator is to model and demonstrate, this is in part the sort of thing I have in mind: "To help students become capable, caring, self-directed learners and creative problem-solvers, these educators believe, their schools should deliberately model those same attributes for them—in their design of learning, for sure, but also in the ways the adults work together, address problems, design systems and procedures, and engage with the community." You can tell students things all you want (and we do an awful lot of that) but they will learn from what we do, not what we say.
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Jillian Makungu, Caspar Groenveld, EdTech Hub, Mar 17, 2022
This article profiles the EIDU mobile learning app, which provides learning analytics and "is tailored for learners in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)." The fawning language and over-use of adjectives tell me that this is probably a sponsored advertising message, though we are not told this anywhere. So much for EdTech Hub's credibility as a trustworthy news source. It's too bad - the topic is genuinely interesting, which is why I'm including it here, and I'm sure readers would want to learn more from a credible observer (if you know of good independent ed tech coverage from east Africa, please let me know).
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Lee Rainie, Cary Funk, Monica Anderson, Alec Tyson, Pew Research Center, Mar 17, 2022
This is a survey on American attitudes toward several specific AI technologies, including driverless cars, facial recognition, exoskeletons, fake news detection, brain chip enhancements and gene editing. Opinions are mostly split, though there's a marked aversion to brain chips. I fall mostly on the side of saying they would all be good for society, which interestingly aligns me more with Republican respondents, according to the survey. Yes, there is a possibility for dystopia - but from where I sit, no matter what technology we use, there's always a possibility for dystopia. Just ask the Kievan Rus or the Kievans of today. Anyhow, there's a lot more than just a surface discussion here, as people's views about each technology is described in some depth.
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Kripa Sundar, Pooja K. Agarwal, Retrieval Practice, Mar 17, 2022
This report is written at a fairly theoretical but is actually concerned with a very practical question: "If retrieval practice is so powerful, why is (John) Hattie's score for retrieval practice only 0.54?" It's a good question, but what really valuable here is this discussion of the difference between individual studies, meta-analyses, and meta-meta-analyses (which is what Hattie does). It's especially important to note the requirements for good meta-anayses: consistency in learning outcomes measured, consistency in learning strategies studied, and inclusion of recent studies. These requirements are the greatest strength of meta-analyses, but also the greatest weakness. The only way to measure outcomes, for example, is to include "studies that measured student learning and transfer of knowledge in similar ways, i.e. using exams," which creates a very narrow and one-dimensional focus. Via 3-Star.
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D J Hobbs, Psyche, Mar 17, 2022
Living in a house with four cats means I'm constantly seeing what I think is a cat out of the corner of my eye. Is it really a cat, or just a crumpled shirt, or just a shadow from a cloud outside. From the phenomenological perspective, it doesn't matter. We can set aside the question if what I saw was 'real' (this process is called 'bracketing') and ask about the connection between what I saw and what I thought about it. For Edmund Husserl, this process of 'reduction' needs to be done as precisely as possible, to avoid allowing our assumptions to creep into our understanding of what we actually experience in consciousness. This is a great article on Husserl's thinking about phenomenology and makes something that is quite complex easily readible and accessible. I have a lot of time for Husserl and this way of thinking and recommend it.
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FutureLearn, Mar 17, 2022
I want to preface this post by saying that Futurelearn is normally very good. But I don't think I've ever seen an article miss the point as badly as this article on Javascript. The key, main and core thing to know about Javascript is that it works with the document object model (DOM). This object oriented approach allows programmers to manipulate and attach functions to web page properties, including media elements, the canvas, and much more. The second main thing to know is that it is asynchronous, which means that you can write a function and let it do do something while you do other things, and then deal with it when it comes back with a response. The third thing to know about is Javascript templating and the wide use of frameworks such as Vue, React, jQuery and Node. These capabilities not only make Javascript unique, it also creates a complexity to Javascript programming that needs to be understood to be appreciated. The FutureLearn article describes none of this, instead treating Javascript as though it were just another scripting language.
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Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, Feb 10, 2022
Alex Usher is always at his best when he's responding to real writing that real people (or in this case, consulting companies) have produced. In this case, I thoroughly enjoyed his take-down of the disciplinary 'thought-leadership' of the likes of KMPG, Deloitte, McKinsey and others. As he says, "the foci of most of these consulting firms reveals no more that one would get from faithfully reading Inside Higher Education or World University News for a bit." I concur. But - and this is the worrisome part - research produced inside government for executive and ministerial advice depends heavily on these consultants' reports. I like to think that one of the major services I provide inside government is to be able to provide background and context to these consultants' reports, and to correct for some of the excesses.
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Rui Ma, Class Central, Feb 10, 2022
I commented earlier that I didn't think of badges as suitable incentives for professional development. I still believe that, but I admit it's a little inconsistent with what we see here, where Rui Ma writes " I find certificates highly motivating in helping me complete the courses." She is here talking about certificates from universities, major companies, developer platforms, and online learning platforms. All free. This article focuses mostly on free course and certificates for developers, which to be honest is where most such activity takes place. But this has to be a longer term challenge for institutions that charge thousands of dollars for their courses and (most importantly) degrees and certificates. Doesn't it?
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Amy Kind, The Splintered Mind, Feb 10, 2022
Starting with Arthur C. Clark's A Fall of Moondust and John Christopher's The White Mountains, I read a lot of science fiction when I was younger. As this article notes, science fiction has looked at the question of personal identity every which way. What is it to say that I'm the same person over time? What would we say if I crossed worlds or dimensions or split into multiple entities? As a philosopher I also considered the matter, but I've never been comfortable with the discipline's desire to come up with 'one right answer' to these questions. I think of my own identity one way (specifically: if I think it's me, it's me) and people in the community think of it differently (specifically: physical bodily continuity). The interesting questions revolve not around which of these views is right, but around how these views intersect, for example, in questions about knowledge and skills, responsibility, authority, consent and agreement.
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Michelle A. Amazeen, Nieman Lab, Feb 10, 2022
In the world of ed tech, native ads most often appear as 'guest posts' that serve to disguise the fact that they are content paid for and produced by an advertiser. I get several requests to run guest posts every day, as do I'm sure most other writers and bloggers in the field. It's pretty easy to spot the websites that run the posts, though I'm sure I've been fooled on occasion. After all, the intent is to fool us. I sometimes report on them and where relevant cast doubt on their authorship. To be clear (not that it will stop the inquiries): I do not run guest posts or native advertising ever. Nor do the credible writers in this field. But many commercial publications (including news media) are happy to take them. They should know that they undermine their own credibility. I hope the money is worth it.
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Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, Feb 10, 2022
I've noticed a recent shift in terminology from 'ethical AI' to 'responsible AI' in tech media. Presumably the latter is something Google can support, while the former is still something it struggles with. Anyhow, a large enough gift from Google is certain to help universities not notice and to get on board with the new program. Let's hear it for "efficacious implementation of artificial intelligence.
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Alexandra Mihai, Educationalist, Feb 10, 2022
This article is essentially a grab-bag of learning design principles, but they have been rounded up and presented under the heading of 'intentional learning design', which in this case is a slogan describing their use in blended learning. I know that sounds a bit cynical, but read the article and see whether I'm wrong. :p The principles include such standbys as 'focus on the learning not on the tools', 'learning as a flow', 'teacher presence', and 'opportunities for engagement, interaction, feedback, and reflection'. There's nothing wrong with any of these, but I don't see them as speaking specifically (and only) to intentional blended learning design.
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