By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lumen Seeks Continuous Improvement of OER in Two-Prong Approach
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/11/08
According to this article, Lumen Learning "has launched the 'Learning Challenges Leaderboards' ... as well as RISE and Shine, a community effort to improve the OER." The leaderboards "provide a fine-grained view into the specific skill-level outcomes students struggle with the most." RISE and Sine is "a community-based continuous improvement process." What I find interesting is the vague phrasing of the learning objectives on the leaderboard, using verbs like "explain" and "describe" and "determine" (which at best require a rote response) rather than performance-based objectives, such as "calculate" or "measure" or "model". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Spitball's Blockchain Student Economy Disrupts The Global E-Learning Market
John Welsh, Forbes, 2018/11/05
I think this project mistakes the reason why people share resources. Here it is: "Spitball 2.0, a new version of the platform, allows students to earn a cryptocurrency by sharing content or answering questions to buy study resources and possessions, as well as place advertisements for tutoring and student accommodation." If you have to be paid to share, you aren't really sharing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Levels
Wired, YouTube, 2018/11/02
I'm enjoying the '5 Levels' series of videos from Wired. The idea is that a specialist explains the same concept at five distinct levels of complexity, beginning with an explanation to a young child, and progressive to discussing it with another specialist. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Server to Client
Ali Alabbas, A List Apart, 2018/11/01
This article, the first in a series, is a very detailed explanation of how a web page gets from a remote server to your browser. If you have never heard of HSTS lists or service workers, this article is for you; it explains these concepts so clearly you'll think they're obvious. It also gets into DNS, caching, and CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) (a big deal for people writing web applications). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On Distributing Distributed Technology, Long Tails, and Scaling
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2018/11/01
In any technology cycle (including learning technology) "Long tail forming as an adoption pattern is a good way then to see if broad distribution is being achieved," writes Ton Zijllstra. This is the proposition he asserts of Mastodon, which has a big head (or a big spike) of a few very large instances, but only a stubby tail of very few small-scale adopters. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education
Shane Dawson, Kristen Eshleman, George Siemens, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/11/01
I think longtime readers of OLDaily will find most of the core concepts discussed here pretty familiar. They include complexity ("many simple parts [that] are irreducibly entwined"), networks, emergence, self-organization and social coordination, feedback sensitivity, and agility. The article gives a brief mid-level definition of each, and then orients to to a management perspective. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Agile training at Jurys Inn– used AI to produce in minutes not months
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/10/31
Some of the things described as AI in this post might be AI, but some of them aren't, and the conflation isn't really helpful. What is? Maybe this: " AI is now being used to create content and add curated resourced at the click of a button. WildFire will take any document, PowerPoint or video and turn it into high retention online learning, in minutes not months." What isn't. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personalization by Paper and Non-Mechanical Teaching Machines
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/10/30

Audrey Watters digs up a fascinating definition of 'teaching machines' (and implicitly, I would say, of what constitutes 'teaching'). Quoted from her text:

• First, continuous active student response is required, providing explicit practice and testing of each step of what is to be learned.
• Second, a basis is provided for informing the student with minimal delay whether each response he makes is correct
• Third, the student proceeds on an individual basis at his own rate.

I've seen the research supporting explicit practice and immediate feedback. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Unending Copyright Dispute
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/10/30
This article covers a "decade-long legal battle between Georgia State University and three publishers over what constitutes "fair use" of course materials." As Kevin Smith, dean of libraries at the University of Kansas, comments in this article, " “The saddest thing about this case is that, after 10 years, it continues to chew over issues that seem less and less relevant. Library practices have evolved during that time, and publishing models have changed. Open access and the movement toward open educational resources have had a profound impact on the way course materials are provided to students." True. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers
Diana Laurillard, Eileen Kennedy, The BERA Blog, 2018/10/30
On the one hand, I'm not enthusiastic about the tool itself. It feels like a metadata editor of old - " the aims and objectives, intended learning time, number of learners, overall sequence of teaching-learning activities (TLAs), different types of learning that each of these elicits, text to guide what learners do, group size, presence or not of the teacher, and linked resources (digital or other)." On the other hand, the idea of a scaffold that helps people design MOOC learning content is appealing in concept. More...