By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peers, more than teachers, motivate us to learn
Andy Henion-Michigan State, Futurity, 2017/03/21

Interesting summary of a publication (I can read it here but it might be blocked where you are) suggesting, as the title says, that peers motivate us more than teachers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Virtual Reality: The next big storytelling medium?
Stephanie Chan, Cisco | The Network, 2017/03/21

Would I pay money to see a movie in virtual reality (VR)? Oh my yes I would. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Eliminativism and the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Richard Brown, 2017/03/21
The idea of 'eliminativism' is that our common-sense psychological concepts such as 'beliefs', 'desires', etc., don't actually exist. This has important implications for education, since pretty much all of educational theory depends on these concepts. I am an eliminativst philosophically. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Recommended Reading: CBE platforms represent a truly niche market
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2017/03/21
It's pretty hard to make that case when you're steeped in enterprise learning, but I think it's true: "CBE is indeed a niche market growing much more slowly that many had hoped or predicted." There are reasons for that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Critically examining unbundling
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2017/03/21
"Like its close cousin Disruption," says Martin Weller, "unbundling has been a favourite philosophy of the silicon valley start up. It has often been applied to education (even, erm, by me). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Learning Analytics Blueprint
Desire2Learn, 2017/04/14

This is a piece of marketing published by D2L some time in the last year. It's a nice overview of how to plan for the use of data analytics and how to work with the results. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New machine learning models can detect hate speech and violence from texts
Myriam Douce Munezero, Phys.org, 2017/04/14
This dissertation presents "a framework that can be used for the automatic detection of antisocial behavior in text. The framework is based on the emotion and language theories." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Burger King Ad Creates Whopper of a Mess for Google Home
Richard Adhikari, E-Commerce Times, 2017/04/14
This is funny in a couple of ways. First, it's funny because the Burger King television spot succeeded in prompting Google Home to look up 'whopper burger' and read back the response to people. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It’s Time to Mobilize Around a New Approach to Educational Assessment
Alvin Vista, Esther Care, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2017/04/14
We know there are better models of assessment than they typical tests and assignments being used today. Even so, these models are not changing rapidly at all. So what's going on? More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why VR Is Failing
Rob Enderle, E-Commerce Times, 2017/04/14

It might be a bit early to say that virtual reality (VR) is "failing" but the arguments in this article are sound. More...