By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EthicalML/xai
GitHub, 2019/03/22
From the website: " XAI is a Machine Learning library that is designed with AI explainability in its core. XAI contains various tools that enable for analysis and evaluation of data and models. The XAI library is maintained by The Institute for Ethical AI & ML, and it was developed based on the 8 principles for Responsible Machine Learning." This may all seem pretty esoteric, but I can imagine a  student assignment of the (far) future: use your AI to automatically generate a response to a Reddit discussion and them employ the AI to explain the reasoning for your AI-generated response. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Philosophers On a Physics Experiment that “Suggests There’s No Such Thing As Objective Reality”
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2019/03/22
MIT Technology Review recently published an article entitled “A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. Of course, the suggestion fell far short of a proof, but that didn't stop people from speculating. I personally fall into the 'no objective reality' camp, but not because of quantum physics. Anyhow, what's interesting about this set of short articles is that they make clear how important is the interpretation of any objective evidence. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All
Mike Isaac, New York Times, 2019/03/21
It's a bit funny to be posting a reference to this article in an email newsletter that has been publishing for almost two decades, but there you have it: "My new social network is an email newsletter," writes Mike Isaac. "Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings." This is part of the trend away from sharing on public platforms, he writes. " Now, more of us are moving toward private modes of sharing: a Slack group instead of a tweet; an encrypted Signal message instead of a status update". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do you do that online thing?
Laura Ritchie, 2019/03/21
You start either with an audience to speak to, or something to say. From there, you either tailor your message to your audience, or (better) you find an audience for what you have to say. Most of this video interview is focused on the latter, and people teaching students how to connect online will find this video, and the post its attached to, to be quite a useful resource. Having watched the video, I now see how I could maybe have been more useful, for example, by referring to something i wrote ages ago, How to be Heard. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scientists rise up against statistical significance
Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane, Nature, 2019/03/21
I am definitely of the same sentiment as these authors, especially when it comes to the 'proofs' of non-hypotheses (like: there's no such thing as learning styles) to which we have been subjected over the years. Here's what the authors say: "We’re frankly sick of seeing such nonsensical ‘proofs of the null’ and claims of non-association in presentations, research articles, reviews and instructional materials." Underlying this is a reaction against the idea of a statistical 'proof' of an all-or-nothing statement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google’s Stadia Streaming Platform is an All-Out Invasion of Gaming
Michael Crider, ReviewGeek, 2019/03/20
There will no doubt be a flurry of articles from the usual sources talking about how Google's Stadia service may be used in education. To be sure, there's something there - the idea of Stadia is that you can play a game in basically the same way you watch a YouTube video. The game is streaming, live, can be multiplayer, and interactive. So there will no doubt be educational applications - quests, simulations, collaborative co-creation, more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How MOOCs Make Money
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/03/20
My MOOCs, of course, don't make money at all, but that's not true of other MOOCs. In this article Class Central founder Dhawal Shah is interviewed on the subject of MOOC business models. Shah reports that " Coursera generated about $140 million in 2018; Udacity earned $90 million for the year; edX took in about $57 million for fiscal year 2017; and UK-based FutureLearn made about £8.2 million." According to Shah, "the market is sort of settled now and the focus is more on the big-ticket items, like online degrees and corporate training." As for the free courses that launched MOOCs into the mainstream a few years ago, Shah is more cautious. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Using Linked Data for Discovery and Preservation
Sayeed Choudhury, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/03/20
The idea of linked data has been around almost as long as the web itself, but the uptake has not been nearly as rapid. Part of the reason for this is that it hasn't been nearly as easy to adopt linked data as it was to adopt HTML. But as this article notes, this is beginning to change with more lightweight approaches to linked data, such as RMap, and with more tools able to take advantage of it, such as Archaeology of Reading and the Arches project. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DIB Guide: Detecting Agile BS
U.S. Department of Defense, 2019/03/18
This is an excellent 5-page document the purpose of which is to advise "how to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing ('agile-scrum-fall')." It's part of a much longer work on software development authored released this week by the U.S. Military. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. UK online pornography age block triggers privacy fears
Jim Waterson, The Guardian, 2019/03/18
There are two parts to this story: first, that people would need to register as authorized users by proving their identity (and specifically, their age), and second, that certain types of content for non-authorized users would be blocked. I put it in general terms like this because once such a system is established it would be very hard to resist using it for purposes other than the stated purpose. So the question is also has two parts: if we have to register as internet users, what do we want that to look like, and if we are to block certain content, how are we to decide what to block. More...