By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Analyze your videos in a few lines of code
Sara Robinson, HackerNoon, 2017/04/20
More analytics for the masses. This application takes video that you upload and extracts content, then presents the content for different segments in a plain-text JSON file. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of our posts. And it’s getting worse
Kurt Gessler, Medium, 2017/04/20
I left Facebook at the end of last August for several reasons. The final straw was advertising designed to defeat ad blocking tools in my browser. But this was on top of increasingly irrelevant content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Open Textbook for Introduction to Philosophy
Christina Hendricks, Daily Nous, 2017/04/20

Though I'm not sure open philosophy needs a 'textbook' per se I still think this is a useful initiative that may grow. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them
Brian Epstein, Synthese, 2017/04/20
At a webinar yesterday we had some fun with different terms for groups of people (herds, swarms, flocks...) and this let to a but of a discussion of the considerations behind the naming of different types of groups (and objects). Here's a longish paper (49 page PDF) that thoroughly explores this sort of question. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Maplesoft Releases Online Courseware Environment for STEM
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2017/04/20
According to this report, "Maplesoft today released Möbius, a hands-on learning tool focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education." Yes, it's Canadian, sort of (subsidiary of a Japanese company). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coursera Removes Biometric Identity Verification Using Keystroke Matching
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2017/03/21
This is a bit of a puzzle. Over time, Coursera has focused on authenticating users and (thereby) offering 'validated' certificates. But the news now is that it is shutting this down. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lessons from Chicago: How to Hook Up Every Teen with a Tech Job
Jen Curtis, EdSurge, 2017/03/21
A long time ago I offered my own version of 'School 2.0' in which placement in the community was a core concept (that's it, pictured in the image). The current article describes an instantiation of that sort of vision. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Scholar is a serious alternative to Web of Science
Anne-Wil Harzing, LSE Impact Blog, 2017/03/21
I agree with this assessment. "Commercial databases such as ISI and Scopus have systematic errors as they do not include many journals in the social sciences and humanities, nor have good coverage of conferences proceedings, books or book chapters." They are, in a word, biased toward traditional scientific publications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Change Sprint – workshopping new ideas in a hurry
Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, 2017/03/21
There are two interesting things in this post. The first is the description of the 'change sprint' that is the focus of the post as a whole. It's a method for getting input from other people when you can't just open up ideas to the whole internet. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education
Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott, EDUCAUSE Review, 2017/03/21
This is an overview article of the potential of the blockchain in higher education. We've covered the blockchain in OLDaily before. In a nutshell: a transaction (contract, credential, whatever) is encrypted in a block, and the block is added to a chain of encryptions. More...