By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Recognizing
Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog, 2016/08/17
This is a first rate intellectual synthesis (8 page PDF) of what are at first glance two very approaches to cognition, Iain McGilchrist's thesis of a division of responsibility in the brain, 'the master and the emissary', and my own description of knowledge as 'recognition'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Musical.ly Became A Pop Culture Phenomenon
Jared Newman, Fast Company, 2016/08/23
What's interesting about Musical.ly is that it grew out of a failed ed tech startup. Musical.ly allows users to lipsync to popular videos and share the results with friends. It draws from a catalogue of several million songs. The original ed tech application was a device that enabled users to create five-minute videos explaining a concept or practice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When it’s Your Googopoly Game, You Can Flip the Board in the Air Anytime

Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/08/23

Alan Levine, being more thorough than I, discovered that if you click on 'Events' on your Live Streaming Dashboard, (right under 'Stream Now') you can run your Hangout on Air (aka Live Event) - look for the subtle 'New Event' button in the upper right of the page. Google usability engineers hate you. So you don't need the streaming media encoder. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online learning for beginners
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/08/23

The supposedly retired Tony Bates has authored another e-book, this one an introductoon to online learning for beginners. Here are the contents:

1. What is online learning?
2. Isn’t online learning worse than face-to-face teaching?
3. Aren’t MOOCs online learning?
4. What kinds of online learning are there?
5. When should I use online learning?
6. How do I start?
7. Why not just record my lectures?
8. Won’t online learning be more work?
9. How can I do online learning well?
10. Ready to Go

As usual the result is required reading. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The (not so) secret life of a networked and networking scholar
Paul Prinsloo, Open distance teaching and learning, 2016/07/19
I am increasingly left wondering how long social networks - Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn - can survive. They can disappear absurdly quickly - remember Friendster? MySpace? And I think that dissatisfaction with the existing sites is strong enough that users will quickly drop them if something better comes along. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Consciousness is a Big Suitcase
Marvin Minsky, John Brockman, Edge, 2016/07/19
Words like like 'intuition' or 'consciousness' are "suitcase words", says Marvin Minsky in this interview from 1998, "that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Philosophical Concept of Algorithmic Intelligence
Pierre Levy, Pierre Levy's Blog, 2016/07/19
"A science of human intelligence is indeed possible," writes Pierre Levy in a post last year, "but on the condition that we solve the problem of the mathematical modelling of language. I am speaking here of a complete scientific modelling of language, one that would not be limited to the purely logical and syntactic aspects or to statistical correlations of corpora of texts, but would be capable of expressing semantic relationships formed between units of meaning, and doing so in an algebraic, generative mode." I think we can agree that Facebook isn't this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the Nature of Mathematical Concepts
Verena Huber-Dyson, Edge, 2016/07/19
I studied under Verena Huber-Dyson when I was in Calgary and was opened to a world where we question assumptions, consider alternative (but complete and consistent) forms of formalization, and a range of reasons why we ought to question our core 'truths' about mathematics and logic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Companies Are Benefiting from “Lite” Artificial Intelligence
Seth Earley, Harvard Business Review, 2016/07/19
Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIAAS) is here. As this article notes, "At the less-expensive end is a knowledge-based approach that organizes data and language into highly malleable and helpful blocks of information." For example, there's "a virtual assistant known as ABIe (pronounced “Abby”) to answer questions from its 12,000 agents (for All State). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Intelligent assistants are catalysts for digital commerce
Dan Miller, Derek Top, Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, Opus Research, 2016/07/19
It's important that we note that "we are entering a world where an intelligence assistant recognizes our 'intent.' This could spawn a massive consumer behavior shift, as AI-influenced bots would mean far fewer Google searches by humans." More...