By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Designing for least knowledge
Jon Udell, 2018/12/28
Jon Udell takes a bit before getting around to his main point, which is that it makes more sense to design services in such a way that they can't know private user information, so they don't need to assume the liability for getting hacked and leaking this data all over the place. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Very Slow Movie Player
Bryan Boyer, Medium, 2018/12/28
I don't intend to build one of these (there's just not enough time for everything) but it's a great idea: take a Raspberry Pi computer, attach it to e-paper (like the display a Kindle uses) and then run movies on them at the rate of 32 frames per hour, ie., very slowly. The result is a movie experience that runs for days and monthss instead of a couple of hours. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
Max Read, New York, 2018/12/27
The story here is that  "year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot." The question is, what (if anything) can we do about it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Recalibrating Our Approach to Misinformation
Michael Caulfield, EdSurge, 2018/12/27
I generally appreciate what Michael Caulfield has to say, but I haven't been in agreement with his approach to fake news. And I really dislike his characterization of critical thinking as "the thoughts and prayers of the educational industry." Now to be fair, he is talking about it being "wrongly applied". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Article: Connectionism: A Summary of the Proceedings
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, 2018/12/27
This paper summarizes the proceedings of the Connectionism conference held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on February 16 and 17, 1990. Participants included Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart, Paul Churchland, George Lakoff. One of the commentators was Tim van Gelder, who I didn't know at the time would ten years later invite me to Australia on a three month fellowship to study the automation of critical thinking. Thanks are due to Jeff Pelletier, who put up some of the cash needed for us to attend the conference, and to Istvan Berkeley, who aided with some notes and diagrams (and who sent me this PDF to post here some 29 years later). Click here to view the paper. It's hard to believe it has only been 29 years since then.

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Are Underinvesting in Human Capital
Michael Echols, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/12/27
One of the reasons why I could never be EdSurge's new business reporter is that I could never take the business-focused stance toward the 'education industry'. This article is a case in point. More...