By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Marketplace in Confusion
Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/04/14
This article takes the perspective of private colleges that are reacting with concern after the state's announcement of a free college tuition program. They "reacted with a mix of dismay, confusion, criticism and, in some cases, resolve in the days after New York leaders struck a deal to start a tuition-free public college program this fall." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Democratizing digital learning: theorizing the fully online learning community model
Todd J. B. Blayone, Roland vanOostveen, Wendy Barber, Maurice DiGiuseppe, Elizabeth Childs, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2017/04/14
From the abstract: "As a divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, FOLC describes collaborative learning as a symbiosis of social and cognitive interactions amplified through effective use of synchronous and asynchronous digital affordances." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understanding Classrooms through Social Network Analysis: A Primer for Social Network Analysis in Education Research
Daniel Z. Grunspan, Benjamin L. Wiggins, Steven M. Goodreau, Life Sciences Education, 2017/04/13
The paper is a couple of years old but I thought it was a good introductory deep dive into social network analysis (SNA) for education. It contains good practical advice for people who want to apply SNA in their own educational research (for example, recognizing and dealing with survey fatigue). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Toyota says it is ready to mass produce robots
Jayson MacLean, Can-Tech Letter, 2017/04/13

Let us welcome our new robot overlords. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deep Learning in 7 lines of code
gk_, Medium, 2017/04/13
This is a technical article with some good less-technical points. First, we have the idea of how straightforward machine learning has become, as noted in the title. Second, though, those seven lines embody considerable depth of function. The data is run through several layers of neural networks (five of the seven lines in question). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What I wish I knew before joining Mastodon
Qina Liu, Medium, 2017/04/13
I've been on Mastodon for a while and have written about it previously, but if you're just looking at it now the first instance, mastodon.social, is now closed to new users. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scaffolding in Microlearning
Christy Tucker, Experiencing E-Learning, 2017/04/13
The interesting part of this post occurs when Christy Tucker says "Maybe you don’t need to scaffold within a microlearning module. Maybe the microlearning itself is the scaffolding." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Building APIs for the University and the Student
David Raths, Campus Technology, 2017/04/13
Creating an API for a university system is more of a challenge than you might think. ""The inconsistency was such that if you wanted to write a mobile app that dealt with a student, it was possible you would have to deal with 25 different APIs using five different identifiers, and multiple data formats." Yeah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Systems, Old Thinking
George Couros, The Innovator’s Mindset, 2017/04/13
The point of this article is that we have to get past old systems of thinking when we employ new technology. Couldn't agree more. But does the example make that point? George Couros writes that ionstead of saving all his stuff in folders (which is the old way of thinking) he just saves it wherever and makes sure it is tagged (that's the new way). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith’s publisher survival guide in the duopoly era
Sahil Patel, Digiday, 2017/04/11
The 'duopoly' in question is Facebook and Google, and arguably these two platforms have a firm hold on platform traffic. This article points out that this is not a good deal for publishers. More...