By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hans Vaihinger
Timothy Stoll, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/01/24
This is a great overview of a philosopher who was entirely new to me. The influence and importance of Hans Vaihinger is explained well in this article, as are his two major contributions: his two-volume interpretation of Kant (which describes the Critique of Pure Reason as a patchwork), and his Die Philosophie des Als Ob (PAO), which translates to The Philosophy of As-If. This is great stuff, worthy of a 21st century treatment. Drawing on Schopenhauer's idea that the intellect is “a mere tool in the service of the will”, Vaihinger argues that the purpose of the intellect "is therefore not “to be a copy [Abbild] of reality,” but rather “an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world.” In other words, "the purpose of thought is “to calculate those events that occur without our intervention and to realize our impulses appropriately.” That accords well with the contemporary line of thought (with which I concur) that the brain is essentially a prediction engine. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mojo Vision’s AR Contact Lenses for your Eyes
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2020/01/22
This is another item to put under the heading of 'future technology'. Not because it's impossible - the proofs of concept are already available. But because it will still take a lot of work to finish and commercialize. The technology in question is the augmented reality (AR) contact lens - that is, a contact lens that projects computer-generated data right into your field of vision. "The first versions will include a tiny single-core ARM-based processor and an image sensor. Later versions will add an eye-tracking sensor and a communications chip. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate
Aja Romano, Vox, 2020/01/22
Good article in Vox listing what we didn't learn from Gamergate (quoted):

• Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs
• Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured
• Social media platforms didn't learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart
• Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.
• Politicians and the media must take online "ironic" racism and misogyny seriously.

These issues are of course not limited to video gaming culture, and the effects have spilled over into all domains. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deep learning 3: teaching to develop students’ mental models – responsive teaching update
Harry Fletcher-Wood, Improving Teaching, 2020/01/22
The focus of this article is on ways to help students develop mental models. As a strategy for remembering, having a model is useful - it's a lot easier to remember things when they're placed into a structure. But must remember this  (this was the whole of my Master's Thesis) the model is not the reality. It's not a 'lens'. It's a aid for remembering, just in the same way the memory palace is a aid. The real skill here is being able to navigate from one model to another (a bit like depicted in the diagram), seeing the subject first from one view, then from another, keeping in mind all along that no view is the 'right' view. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pearson Bets on Adaptive Learning (Again) With $25M Acquisition of Smart Sparrow
Tony Wan, EdSurge, 2020/01/22
The lede is about Pearson's acquisition of Sparrow, an adaptive learning company, but the bulk of this article provides a lot of useful background about boat Sparrow's approach and into Pearson's activities in the ed tech space, and in particular, the Global Learning Platform, which is the adaptive-learning engine of the company. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meet the Humans Behind College Chatbots
Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge, 2020/01/22
This story looks at the people who create scripts to be used by chatbots. The 'chatbot' described in this article is a tool that sends unsolicited text messages to students, though it may respond if texted back. Either way, there's a lot of scripting of the precise interactions to be sent to students. The article is an interesting look at the considerations involved. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Old Ways Are the New Way Forward: How Indigenous pedagogy can benefit everyone
Jean-Paul Restoule, Chaw-win-is, Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s IdeaLab, 2020/01/22
I ran across this article (18 page PDF) searching for related materials and find it well worth sharing. As the summary says, the article "argues that traditional Indigenous ways of teaching and learning are relevant not only for Indigenous people, but for the education of all people.' A good portion of the article is devoted to defining indigenous ways of teaching and learning, and many of the tenets will feel familiar to readers of this newsletter. Related: Cindy Peltier on two-eyed seeing "as a guiding approach for researchers offering Indigenous voices and ways of knowing as a means to shift existing qualitative research paradigms". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOC Completion...according to whom?
Apostolos K., Multilitteratus Incognitus, 2020/01/22
This article addresses a simple but essential question: what constitutes 'completing a MOOC'? After all, I go to lots of websiutes, browse around a bit, and leave when I'm done. I comsider myself to have 'completed' the website. Why would a MOOC be any different? Anyhow. Apostolos K. writes that there are multiple perspectives - the student's perspective, the teacher's perspective, points in between. When MOOCs first started, certificates could have been used as an indicator, but now that you have to pay for them, they signal only willingness to pay. Once all the cruft of the traditional course began to accumulate on MOOCs, "it just didn't feel worthwhile to go above my own learning goals and jump through someone else's hoops". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Connectivism and leadership: harnessing a learning theory for the digital age to redefine leadership in the twenty-first century
Frederique Corbett, Elio Spinello, Heliyon, 2020/01/22
The first half of this paper is a relatively by-the-book overview of connectivism, focusing mostly on George Siemens's presentation, but including my own contributions on methodology. The interesting bit begins just past halfway, at 4.2.2., where the connection between connectivism and leadership is discussed. Some bits of note: the authors cite some used bits from an article by Kristina Natt och Dag, both on leadership, and on adult learning (but it's currently locked behind a paywall and thus useless). The authors also suggest that there hasn't really been any research developing connectivism beyond its original formulation, which I'm not sure is true, but I guess it could be seen that way. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LMS – VLE and/or Productivity Tools
Michael Sankey, 2020/01/22
The basis for the post is the disconnect between learning amanagement systems, which are used by students, and productivity tools, which are used in the workplace. "Surly we should be transitioning them to the use of these tools while still studying with us, and getting them to work together in this collaborative way, along with the other tools they will use professionally," writes Michael Sankey as he offers a model that describes the transition. Or, the hammer could simplay fall on the LMS. More...