By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. #FUSION12 - Discussion about MOOCs with Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes, Jan 20, 2020, D2L Fusion. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. App and resource store
JISC, 2016/09/19
The UK's JISC has released an alpha version of its 'App and Resource Store'. Consisting in the first instance of resources migrated from the now-defunct Jorum service, the store will "works just like any other digital store, with a mixture of free and paid-for resources, each with clear licensing and cost." Here's an example of one of the migrated Jorum resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why there is no Facebook killer: the death of the P2P dream
James Hudson, Hacker News, 2016/09/19
The problem, as we all know, is that "Facebook is simply a cage to hold and study us monkeys while we are being fed ads. These ads are targeted based on an analysis of our activity on Facebook." So why isn't there a P2P version of Facebook, where we could get the interactions without the intrusion? The problem lies in the limitations of the mobile web. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who are the founding fathers of distance education?
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/09/19
Let's just use the phrase "founders of distance education". Tony Bates offers several alternatives to the three suggested by Steve Wheeler (Bates, John Daniel, and Michael Moore) including Isaac Pitman, the University of London External Programme, Chuck Wedemeyer, Harold Wilson, Jennie Lee, and Walter Perry. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Infographic: The bot platform ecosystem
Jon Bruner, O'Reilly, 2016/09/19
This infographic is only a small shard of the emerging ecosystem but it serves to highlight the developing market of AI bot platforms (Siri, Cortana, Now) along with messaging (Messenger, Allo, Skype) and the underlying AI -as-a-service (Watson, Alexa, Luis) and bot frameworks (Wit.ai, BotKit, Bot Framework). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Microsoft is Poised to Destroy MinecraftEDU
Wesley A. Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, 2016/09/23

By "destroy" Wes Fryer means "raise the price of" but the implications are fairly clear; he is concerned Microsoft's new licensing policies will price it out of schools' ability to pay. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seoul Man speaks: The Fourth Industrial Revolution Meets the Fourth E-Learning Revolution
Curtis J. Bonk, TravelinEdMan, 2016/09/23
Curt Bonk "gave the keynote speech at E-learning Week at Coex," in Seoul Korea. He writes, "I was asked to speak about the Fourth Industrial Age (more info on it; see the Davos Reader). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blind people do math in the ‘visual’ cortex
Jill Rosen-Johns Hopkins, Futurity, 2016/09/23

What I like about this item is that it speaks against the idea that there is a special area for discrete functions in the brain. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/09/23
"The YouTube system is built on top of Google Brain, or as we now know it, TensorFlow. To give an idea of scale, the models learn approximately one billion parameters and are trained on hundreds of billions of examples. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yahoo hack hits 500 million users, but who are the suspects?
BBC, 2016/09/23

The lesson here is, if you put your data into a big giant data store, it's going to be hacked. And the agency that does it is probably going to be a national government. More...