By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meet YiSi, a machine translation teacher who cracks down (nicely) on errors in meaning
National Research Council Canada, 2019/02/25
You may have heard of machine learning. This story is about machine teaching, that is, teaching a machine. This article is about a machine that teaches a machine to learn. It's not as confusing as it sounds: "YiSi is an open-source software that examines sentences produced by machine translation and compares them against the original text or a human reference translation. YiSi assigns an accuracy score from 0 to 100 to each translated sentence, pinpointing problems in translation for developers to improve in the translation system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Emerald Open Research
Emerald Publishing, 2019/02/25
I will give Emerald Publishing props for trying this. It's an open post-publication review process - the author submits the paper, which is openly published right away, and then reviewed, with the reviews also being posted. The author can then comment on the review. The business model is driven by an 'article processing charge' (APC) starting at $US 1200. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education: A free MOOC on cloud computing
Jennifer Jacobs, The Edge Malaysia, 2019/02/25
I've learned from the eCampus Ontario Extend MOOC that (a) I need more than one email reminder a week to participate, and (b) when I see a message that says "To see course content, sign in or register" I just move on to something else. Life is too short for logins. But those challenges pale in comparison with the MOOC being offered here by OpenLearning - these's not even a URL to sign up for it! After looking for a notice on their website (none) and for a press rlease (nothing) I eventually found it buried in the course listings. Here it is. Of course there's a login (bleah) and after three modules or so you'll finally make it into Amazon Web Services (AWS) via yet another login. I didn't think it was a terrible course but I did find it a lot more work to take than it had to be. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Some questions to use when discussing why we shouldn’t replace humans with AI (artificial intelligence) for learning
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2019/02/25
"All of our design and most of our assessments are created in an effort to help people know things," writes Dave Cormier, "and yet there is no clear agreement in education on what learning actually is." This point is especially salient when we ask what it would mean for an AI to function as a teacher. What would it need to know? The AI needs to know both the knower and whatever it is that they want to know - in the sense that they want to know it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Ed Tech Hype in Remission?
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/02/25
I'm not alone in seeing the decline in e-learning, but Michael Feldstein holds out hope for at least one part of it: He writes, "The one area in the market where I see something approaching hype, which I would characterize more as 'intense interest coupled with a lot of hand-wringing,' is in the Online Program Management (OPM) space." From where I sit this is pretty niche; the wider world of learning technology has passed beyond online programs (and passed beyond traditional education altogether). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School Your Target Audience with Customer Training Software
Christopher Pappas, MarTech Advisor, 2019/02/22
The case study just briefly mentioned at the beginning - Samsung Nation - is the most interesting part of the article (I will admit that as a Samsung user since the S3 I had never heard of Samsung Nation). The point here is that companies are turning to e-learning for customer support. Not a new story. The purpose of the article is to convince readers that they need an 'eLMS' (Extended LMS) to do this. They are specifically "intended for external partner training. This includes sales channels, vendors, franchisees, and, of course, customers." I wouldn't follow the advice in the article, though. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shift Happens 2
Jamai Blivin, Merrilea Mayo,, Innovate+Education, 2019/02/22
There's a lot happening in this report (48 page PDF) and I have to say that if your focus is traditional higher education then you had better take notice, because if these authors are right (and they probably are) then the outsode wprld is about to overwhelm you. "In this new ecosystem, learning has become incrementalized, increments of different sizes have become credentials, and each increment is both gated and signaled by passing an assessment, rather than a credit hour of seat time or a semester of enrollment." Once we begin down this path, there's no turning back". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Roots of Empathy
Allie Alayan, AACE Review, 2019/02/22
I'm not sure whether a baby counts as educational technology, but I'm going to accept the wide definition in order to link to this short item about the development of empathy being implemented in classrooms. It "is designed for teaching empathy to children between the ages of 5 to 13. Observing the emotional state of an infant is used to promote positive emotional and social development in children". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook Is Killing Onavo, Its Spyware VPN App
Andrew Heinzman, How-To Geek, 2019/02/22
For those who missed it: "Facebook offered a free VPN app called Onavo on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Unsurprisingly, Facebook spied on everyone who used that app. This has been going on for a few years, and it’s had real-world implications. According to Buzzfeed, data obtained by Onovo is the primary reason why Facebook bought WhatsApp". More...