By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. All I Know Is What’s on the Internet
Rolin Moe, Real Life, 2017/04/11
This is an excellent post responding to the idea that fake news is recent, isolated, and easily fixed with media literacy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How India saved its internet from greedy corporations
Febin John James, freecodecamp, 2017/04/11
The headline is a little over the top but the article describes a determined attempt on the part of a number of companies to create a multi-tier internet where you have to pay extra for things like messaging. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eLearning Roadtrip
Ellen Wagner, eLearning Roadtrip, 2017/04/11
Good post from Ellen Wagner that is at once a history of successive programs from EDUCAUSE and the Gates Foundation on student advising and support services (variously the PAR, iPASS and IPAS) and at the same time a rumination on the concept of 'student success' itself. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada's Fundamental Science Review
C. David Naylor, et.al., Government of Canada, 2017/04/11
This report (280 page PDF) (if you don't have time to read it have a machine read it for you) addresses Canada's investment in research and development and is known colloquially as the Naylor Report. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Beginner’s Guide To Progressive Web Apps
Kevin Farrugia, Smashing Magazine, 2017/04/11
I spent a good part of the day investigating progressive web apps (PWA). These are the result of a model proposed by Google back in 2015 that merges web browser applications with mobile applications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How The New York Times, CNN, and The Huffington Post approach publishing on platforms
Joseph Lichterman, Nieman Lab, 2017/04/10
I'm not sure whether this represents a sea change or is just a blip, but the New York Times, which was one of the original partners when Facebook launched Instant Articles in 2015, has not ceased publishing that way. It still publishes a lot of content to platforms (as do most major publishers) but now in the form of links rather than full conten. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rules of memory 'beautifully' rewritten
James Gallagher, BBC News, 2017/04/10
If (and it's a big if) this thesis (pay-walled study) is correct, then proponents of cognitive load theory have a lot of rethinking to do. The suggestion is that while brains do indeed store short-term and long-term memory, they store these using two separate processes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training Data
Brendan McMahan, Daniel Ramage, Google Research Blog, 2017/04/10
One of the problems with learning analytics and analytics in general is that it requires a lot of data. This means you have to watch what a lot of people are doing, which has ethical and privacy implications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Pixels Collide
sudoscript, 2017/04/10
I'm not sure what principle this illustrates - chaos, maybe, cooperation, a bit, collaboration certainly, and competition too. Here's the set-up: last weekend Reddit created a grid where members could colour one pixel at a time, but would have to wait a few minutes before colouring the next one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Don’t Need Permission to be Open
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/04/10
What is open pedagogy? According to David Wiley, "open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions... (it) is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you are using OER." More...