Patterns in Course Design: How instructors ACTUALLY use the LMS
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Patterns in Course Design: How instructors ACTUALLY use the LMS
John Whitmer, Blackboard Blog, 2016/10/27
I'll save you the suspense: they mostly use it to distribute course content and announcements. They also use it as a gradebook. More...
Twitter is killing off Vine
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Twitter is killing off Vine
Casey Newton, The Verge, 2016/10/27
The news today spread faster than any Vine video (it came and was over while I was watching a single Bill Mahar video). More...
Wednesday at Educause 2016: Power of introverts, top IT issues
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wednesday at Educause 2016: Power of introverts, top IT issues
Roger Riddell, Education Dive, 2016/10/27
So if there's no such thing as learning styles, why is a talk about introverts an EDUCAUSE keynote. More...
The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2016/10/24
Some good points here following Google's quiet change of policy to allow personally identifiable web tracking. "Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct," says Julia Angwin. More...
Attending to the Digital
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Attending to the Digital
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/10/24
Interesting article from Audrey Watters, as is so often the case, and I like the focus on the origins of the meaning of the word 'attention' and the oft-cited concern that the digital is creating an attention deficit. "You can see that the noun is accompanied by all sorts of verbs. More...
H5P Examples and Downloads
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. H5P Examples and Downloads
H5P, 2016/10/24
This site came up in one of the online discussions I follow. More...
Quality Standards for Competency-Based Educational Programs
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Quality Standards for Competency-Based Educational Programs
Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), 2016/10/24
You have until December 1 to provide comments to the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) on this draft set of guidelines for quality in competency-based education. More...
Has AI (Finally) Reached a Tipping Point?
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Has AI (Finally) Reached a Tipping Point?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2016/10/24
Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers a useful overview of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) from a non-technical perspective referencing Stanford University's One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100, 52 page PDF) including the list of 'hot' areas of current study (quoted, p.9):
- Large-scale machine learning - algorithms to work with extremely large data sets.
- Deep learning - has facilitated object recognition in images, video labeling, and activity recognition
- Reinforcement learning - experience-driven sequential decision-making
- Robotics - train a robot to interact with the world around it
- Computer vision - form of machine perception; automatic image and video captioning.
- Natural Language Processing - systems that are able to interact with people through dialog; machine translation
- Collaborative systems - autonomous systems that can work collaboratively with other systems and with humans
- Crowdsourcing and human computation - make automated calls to human expertise
- Algorithmic game theory and computational social choice draw - handle potentially misaligned incentives
- Internet of Things (IoT) - devices interconnected to collect and share their abundant sensory information
- Neuromorphic - mimic biological neural networks
The report notes, "Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind. More...
Geishas, headdresses out as Canadian universities stave off offensive Halloween costumes
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Geishas, headdresses out as Canadian universities stave off offensive Halloween costumes
Michelle McQuigge, Toronto Star, 2016/10/24
In Canada we have a tradition of dressing in costume on or around Halloween (October 31). Traditionally these costumes were of scary things (such as skeletons, ghosts or monsters) but it has since branched out to include most anything (I once went out as the Empire State Building). More...
Internet of Broken Things
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Internet of Broken Things
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/10/24
As is always the case, technology as planned works very differently from technology when mixed with humans. Witness the Internet of Things (IoT), the nascent linking of phones, printers, cameras, and a host of other dumb smart devices. They have now become the prime vector internet attacks. More...
