By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Printing Delays Present ‘New Normal’ for Academic Books
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/01/15
While some would like you to believe that “Reports of the death of the book, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated,” the storyline suggests a very different conclusion. It's this: " There’s been a lot of consolidation and now there’s less capacity." In some parts of the publishing industry there have been paper shortages and production is curtailed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How To Write A Philosophy Paper: Online Guides
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2019/01/15
These are all pretty good guides and offer a fairly uniform view of what a good philosophy paper should look like. These are very different from what (say) a research paper in the field of education would look like. The latter are often structured to resemble empirical science (like you might find in engineering or physics) but are based on 'instruments' like surveys and polls. I personally think the philosophical approach is more suitable for education, given that there is little agreement on the goals, methods, instruments and outcomes of educational theory. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Electron
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2019/01/15
This is a two-part post (Part 1, Part 2) I wrote describing my experiences taking a Udemy course on Electron, which is an application that enables you to create desktop software for Windows, Mac and Linux using only Javascript, CSS and HTML. I made the course my project over the recent holiday break (we all do different things for fun). In these posts I not only describe what I learned and how I leaned it, but also my (not so pleasant) experience taking a course on Udemy.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cursos masivos abiertos en línea: El caso de México
Ricardo Mercado del Collado, 2019/01/15
Cursos masivos abiertos en línea: El caso de México (MOOCs: The Case of Mexico). 221 page PDF book download, in Spanish. I have a chapter in it: Visiones y rutas: Aprendizaje en línea y MOOC (Visions and pathways: Online Leaning and MOOCs), also in Spanish (my thanks to the translator). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The State of Critical Thinking
Reboot, 2019/01/11
This is a fairly detailed report (20 page PDF) based on a survey conducted using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The study notes that while "strong  reasoning  skills  have become  increasingly  key  to  navigating  everyday  life," it remains true that "in too many schools, critical thinking is not taught to young people" and "at workplaces, employers don’t do enough to prioritize richer forms of reasoning." In particular, the report says the teaching of critical thinking should not be left to parents because they don't have the skills and they don't teach them to their children. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2019/01/11
I would use the word 'reflect' rather than 'represent' throughout, but this article nonetheless paints a fascinating picture of how a neural network organizes itself into concepts. "Asking the GAN to paint what it thought, the researchers found distinct neuron clusters that had learned to (paint) a tree, for example... In other words, it had managed to group tree pixels with tree pixels and door pixels with door pixels regardless of how these objects changed color from photo to photo in the training set". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Higher Education and Identity Issues in Tara Westover’s 'Educated'
Eboo Patel, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/01/11
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of diversity: "in an era of higher ed where identity is king... a white middle class Evangelical man ought to be unmoored from his identity, a working class black Muslim female ought to be more deeply anchored in hers."  No. Diversity means that we see people as more than just race, class and religion. For any person, these may be important parts of their identity. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Innovating Pedagogy Report 2019
Grainne Conole, e4innovation, 2019/01/11
The introduction to this guide (45 page PDF) predisposes me to like it, though as I went through the ten pedagogical models presented (ranging from 'playful learning' to 'learning with robots' to 'making thinking visible') I found myself imagining about how these would be introduced and presented and instantiated (and a whole MOOC curriculum opened up in my mind, yet another project I'd love to undertake but just can't). ' Place-based learning', for example, speaks to me: I can easily imagine taking some students into a place, whatever it is, and asking them what they can infer from their surroundings. It's just these sorts of activities that create the perspective and breadth of vision needed to do things like develop the sort of ethical sense I allude to in the next post. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ‘Neuromyth’ or Helpful Model?
Greg Toppo, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/01/10
The original (and more accurate) title of this article was "In learning styles debate, it's instructors vs. psychologists." The focus is on science writer Ulrich Boser. He looked at the subject recently and found the debate alive and well. Where the two sides begin to converge, according to the article, is in the concern that "catering to learning styles in the classroom can actually foster a fixed mind-set, not a growth mind-set." As an overview this is a pretty good article - with its original title. More...