By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EdX’s Struggle for Sustainability
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/12/18
Like many others I'm sure, I've received those emails to please donate to EdX. But to be clear, the amount they need to survive is only a small blip in Harvard's multi-billion dollar endowment. So perspective is everything. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. First Public Working Drafts: The Profiles Ontology; Content Negotiation by Profile
Xueyuan Jia, W3C, 2018/12/18
As the news item says, "The Profiles Ontology is an RDF vocabulary to describe profiles of (one or more) standards for information resources" and "Content Negotiation by Profile describes how Internet clients may negotiate for content provided by servers according to profiles." There are still open issues in both drafts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Oh, What A Tangled Web! Citation Network Underscores Editorial Conflicts of Interest
Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/12/18
This article references a case where a case where a publisher (American Scientific Publishers) was identified as "displaying a problematic pattern of citations". Phil Davis surveys some of the measures journals take to prevent this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Developing Student Support For Open And Distance Learning: The Empower Project
Journal of Interactive Media in Education Latest Articles, 2018/12/18
This article summarizes the EMPOWER project, launched the 2015 by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Modernised learning delivery strategies: The Canada School of Public Service technology integration project
Stephen Downes, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2018/12/18
This paper reports on the first of two projects I did with the Canada School of Public Service. In this project I surveyed the landscape of new learning technlogies, including such areas as mobile learning, crowdsourcing and e-books, and studied the work they had undertaken to support initiatives like this, and given their state of development and need, mapped a development strategy for them.

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/12/18
Audrey Watters is not writing a ten-part review of education this year offering instead this quick summary that says, essentially, that innovation in the field has slowed to a crawl and that governments and educators are making the same mistakes over and over again. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning lessons from data controversies
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2018/12/18
This is the transcript of a talk devoted to showing how people have lost faith in the idea that data will solve the problems of 21st century education and technology. "We’re now learning some hard lessons from the rapid expansion of data analytics, algorithms, and AI across society," writes Ben Williamson. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
Andriy Burkov, 2018/12/18
If you want a holiday reading project, this might be it. I especially recommend chapter 6 on neural networks and deep learning - it covers such things as multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial
Robert W Yeh, et.al., BMJ, 2018/12/16
The outcome of this trial was that "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention." It was a randomized control trial and statistically valid. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School data security incidents rise in wake of GDPR
Freddie Whittaker, SchoolsWeek, 2018/12/16
This sounds like a significant increase. "The number of incidents involving the disclosure of data reported to the ICO rose to 353 in quarter two of this year, up from 239 during the same period last year and just 26 the year before." This is the interpretation attributed to Mark Orchison, a consultant whose firm 9ine works with schools on data protection. More...