By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google DeepMind: The smart person's guide
Hope Reese, Tech Republic, 2016/08/04
The real "smart person's guide" is probably an academic paper or two, not a light web read from Tech Republic, but this will probably do. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER universitas
OERu, 2016/08/04
Passing this along from OERu: "As a charitable organisation, YouTube has approved a Youtube for non-profits account for the OERu. We have met all the requirements to qualify for a custom url for the new channel, expect that we need 100 hundred subscribers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why ontologies are best left implicit (especially for credentials)
Doug Belshaw, Ambiguiti.es, 2016/08/02
This is exactly right: "the attempt to define what ‘exists’ within a given system is usually a conservative, essentialist move. It’s often concerned with retro-fitting new things into the current status quo, a kind of Kuhnian attempt to save what might be termed ‘normal science’." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Simone de Beauvoir Defends Existentialism & Her Feminist Masterpiece, The Second Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Interview
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2016/08/02

It has always puzzled me what writers mean when they label a video "rare" as in this case. Is there only one copy (now a billion copies on the web)? Is it a subject that doesn't come up a lot? Whatever. Get out of your comfort zone. Watch this video. Ponder life, existence and death. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Profit and education aren’t mutually exclusive
Ian Lindquist, American Enterprise Institute, 2016/08/02
I think that the people arguing for the privatization of education are going to have to come up with better arguments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Females’ Enrollment and Completion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Massive Open Online Courses
Suhang Jiang, Katerina Schenke, Jacquelynne Sue Eccles, Di Xu, Mark Warschauer, arXiv.org, 2016/08/19
According to this study, "globally MOOCs have the potential to provide learning opportunities for females in less developed countries. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that greater gender segregation may exist in more economically developed countries." Even so, only about 24% of enrollees in STEM MOOCs were women, suggesting a need to explore ways to make them more gender-inclusive. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 3 things to get right when designing CBE programs
Karen Yoshino, Blackboard Blog, 2016/08/19
One of the issues I have with competencies is that too often they are just a rewrapping of content knowledge in new terminology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From massive access to cooperation: lessons learned and proven results of a hybrid xMOOC/cMOOC pedagogical approach to MOOCs
Ángel Fidalgo-Blanco, María Luisa Sein-Echaluce, Francisco José García-Peñalvo, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2016/08/17
"What MOOC factors exert greater influence on dropout rate: participant profile or the underlying model?" ask the authors of this paper on different approaches to MOOCs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PKP Joins ORCID
Kevin Stranack, Public Knowledge Project, 2016/08/17
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which creates things like the Open Journal Systems software (OJP), has joined the scientific identity registration system known as ORCID. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Untold Costs of Social Networking
Luis Suarez, E L U S A, 2016/08/17
Luis Suarez has never taken his online interaction for granted - for example, he engaged in a multi-year 'no email' project to encourage people to communicate with him more efficiently. More...