By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Does VR Have to Do With Online Education?
Laura Lynch, LearnDash, 2018/11/22
I remember when we first created multi-user online environments back in the early 90s. They were a natural to support learning online, we reasoned. The first thing we build, of course, were classrooms, field trips, and scenarios. We were terribly naive. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational Technology & Education Conferences #40 December 2018 to June 2019
Clayton R. Wright, 2018/11/12
Clayton R. Wright's excellent list is now available. He writes, "The 40th version of the Educational Technology and Education Conference list comprises 1,719 confirmed events. The listings for November and December, 2018 have been updated since distribution of the previous list. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”
Peter O'Shaughnessy, Medium, 2018/11/12
Why has Mastodon survived despite the scepticism of early critics? This article makes a good case as to why those sceptics were wrong. Essentially, survival for Mastodon - an a distributed open source federated network supported by users - is very different from survival for a typical start-up, which has to grow fast and raise funding or die. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Believing without evidence is always morally wrong
Francisco Mejia Uribe, Aeon, 2018/11/12

In ‘The Ethics of Belief’ (1877)  William Kingdon Clifford gives three reasons for believeing that belief without evidence is morally wrong (quoted from the article):

• every single belief has the capacity to be truly consequential
• poor practices of belief-formation turn us into careless, credulous believers
• we have the moral responsibility not to pollute the well of collective knowledge

I am always wary of arguments that conclude that we have a 'duty' or 'responsibility' because these are easily abused by others and almost always require that we act against our own self-interest, sometimes in devastating ways. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The future of work won't be about college degrees, it will be about job skills
Stephane Kasriel, CNBC, 2018/11/12
This feels like a paid placement on CNBC from a job skills company (but it's real news, so they wouldn't deceive is in this way, right?). It's based on a (sponsored) survey Freelancing in America 2018, released Wednesday, that says "freelancers put more value on skills training." I think it's true that the jobs of the future don't exist today, but the same could be said for any number of skills! Like, say, newsreader. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Most Advanced AI in the World Is Worthless Without This One Key Element
Margaret Rogers, ReadWrite, 2018/11/12
The key element is 'trust' (which they could have put in the headline, but then it wouldn't be clickbait). "AI only works with continuous feeding of data... If that data does something to break consumer trust then the relationship can be difficult to repair. Customers value human qualities like morality and fairness, but AI algorithms don’t always deliver." The argument here is that AI is here to stay because it delivers return on investment (ROI), and if that ROI is threatened by lack of trust, then the ethical framework will be put in place to ensure trustworthiness. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Universities Team Up on Completion
Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/11/12
The original headline for this article (preserved thanks to RSS) was "APLU enlists 130 universities in collaboration on completion and equity gaps," but this new headline completgely changes the emphasis, which makes me worder what I'm reading. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Public goods and public policy: what is public good, and who and what decides?
Ellen Hazelkorn, Andrew Gibson, Centre for Global Higher Education, 2018/11/12
This article appeared in Higher Education today, but behind a paywall. It however appears to be substantially the same as the article that appeared on the Centre for Global Higher Education website in May of 2017 (35 page PDF, 15 pages of which are bibliography). It notes that "higher education is usually seen as serving the public good," and that support from the public may be contingent on this, but raises the question of who defines the public good and how is it defined. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ‘Secret sharing’ system keeps your personal data safe
Taylor Kubota-Stanford, Futurity, 2018/11/14
The article feels more like marketing than data but it does indicate a trend toward secure personal information online. And the Prio mechanism it proposes could work, I think. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Coming Social Economy
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2018/11/14
According to this article, "More than a third of the American workforce participates in the freelance economy." and "The majority of current high school students will spend at least part of their careers freelancing." They are thus becoming increasingly dependent on platforms like Craigslist, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Upwork that "match buyers and sellers". This leads the author to predict "a social economy of people helping people." There are ways this can be done well and ways (as we have seen with Uber) this can be done very poorly. More...