janvier 2017

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Publishing's Prestige Bias
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/01/20

A study reports that journals tend to disproportionately select papers by authors from elite institutions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Explanatory Force of Network Models
Carl F. Craver, Preprint, 2017/01/11
Interesting paper that looks at network analyses of things (including brains) and asks about their explanatory power. A quick case in point (my own example): if we say a person knows P because she has network configuration C, does C explain why she knows P? Or does P explain why she has configuration C? This may seem trivial, but if we want to produce P in a person, the explanation is important, as it (maybe) tells us what causes what. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will an EU privacy proposal lead to a more trustworthy or annoying internet?
Ben Rosen, Christian Science Monitor, 2017/01/11µ
Proposed legislation from the European Commission "would require companies to get the consent of users before accessing their digital information." In particular, the law would require web browsers, on installation, to ask users whether they want to allow websites to place cookies on their browser." This seems pretty minor, but the article predicts dire consequences. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Directory of Vendors of Online Learning Products and Services
Don McIntosh, TeachOnline.ca, 2017/01/11
This is a "searchable directory of over 2,500 vendors of online learning products and services worldwide... They are part of a the fast growing ed-tech (educational technology) industry with over 8 billion dollars in annual sales of hardware and software with no sign of a slowdown." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We’re Thinking About Organizational Culture All Wrong
John Traphagan, Harvard Business Review, 2017/01/11

These points apply not only to organizational culture, but to culture in general. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I have maintained OLDaily and the rest of this website at my own expense since 2001. It is not subsidized by my employer or anyone else. I've always been happy to do it, but I need your help.
This site gets a lot of traffic - 400K unique viewers and almost a million page views in 2016. 2290.70 gigabytes of traffic. On average, it has cost $125 a month for the last ten years (currently, it's $US 140, or almost $200 Canadian, per month).
Thank you to everyone who helped last year. I raised just over $3000, which paid for the server and the traffic. I am committed to keeping all my services and resources free, and will not add a subscription to any part of my website, ever. That's a promise. So if you help me provide this service, I'd be happy to recognize your contribution, as thanks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Talk
Various authors, The Coral Project, 2017/01/06

This is Talk, Mozilla's new open-source comment system. The link takes you to a working Alpha version. Be sure to explore the options in the left-hand menu to see the possibilities in the new system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Norway to become 1st country to switch off FM radio
Thomson Reuters, CBC News, 2017/01/06
OK, so there's dab, but there's also DAB, which is changing the face of radio. DAB stands for 'Digital Audio Broadcasting' and it's doing to radio what HD did for TV - switching from analog radio signals to video. It's controversial. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. VRLearn: Virtual Reality and Learning
Bobby Carlton, Masie Center, 2017/01/06
Elliott Masie still understands branding as this 'VRLearn' report shows. Do yourself a favour, skip the user-hostile web presentation (unless you like simulated paper (complete with page-turning sounds)) and go straight to the 12-page PDF. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating cohorts: how to solve the online learning conundrum
Tim Sarchet, Personnel Today, 2017/01/02

One of the problems of online earning is that it can be a very solitary activity. More...