By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blockchain’s Occam problem
Matt Higginson, Marie-Claude Nadeau, Kausik Rajgopal, McKinsey, 2019/01/10
The Occam problem is this: unless and until blockchain becomes the simplest and most effective technology to do a job (any job) it will not be widely adopted. Yet despite huge investments, blockchain has yet to meet this challenge. We shouldn't be surprised. "It is an infant technology that is relatively unstable, expensive, and complex. It is also unregulated and selectively distrusted". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Science in Canada's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan
Richard Ackerman, Science Library Pad, 2019/01/10
As you know, I've been a long-standing proponent of open science within our government agencies. I'm also on a committee working toward open science (though I haven't really done much with it yet). So I celebrate the recent announcement, covered by Richard Ackerman today, of Canada's newest commitment to open science, part of the newest release of the National Action Plan on Open Government. The plan includes pledges to "develop a Canada Open Science Roadmap to provide a plan for greater openness in federal science and research activities". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community of Inquiry on Facebook in a Formal Learning Setting in Higher Education
Masood Nazir, Natasa Brouwer, Education Sciences, 2019/01/10
This article (23 page PDF) studies "an application of Facebook for higher education in science (STEM)," performing a content analysis on Facebook pots, and argues that the "results show that an integral Community of Inquiry (CoI) was formed on Facebook within the regular online course, encompassing all relevant CoI interactions leading to a powerful educational experience". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “I’m not a person that reads”: Identity Work, Adult Learners, and Educational (Dis)engagement
Scott McLean, Jaya Dixit, Canadian Journal of Education, 2019/01/10
This paper (27 page PDF) uses the frame of 'identity work' described by Snow and Anderson to interpret identity statements made by interviewees describing their experience with self-help books. Snow and Anderson identified four activities common to the practice of identity work including "verbal construction and assertion of personal identities." This activity has two modes, 'distancing' and 'embracement', and many of the responses to the survey were found to fit neatly into one of the other of these modes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jisc presents to MPs on education’s role in Industry 4.0
Rosie Niven, JISC, 2019/01/09
This article covers the first half of this two hour panel session with participants giving responses to questions posed by the British Parliament's Education Committee. The full session is interesting viewing. The panel was sometimes more about industry's role in education than the converse. It also looked at the role of AI in learning technology. And there was a good discussion of the role of technology in supporting students with disadvantages. The most interesting point came from Priya Lakhani as she described the disconnect between the speed of agile technology development and the lag created by randomized control testing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The 5 Technologies that will Change Networking in 2019
Anand Oswal, Cisco Blogs, 2019/01/09
The five innovations are: WiFi 6, 5G, digitized spaces, SD-WAN, and machine learening. The fourth is of most ibnterest to me at the moment. "Traditionally, corporate networks have been based around centralized control, routing, and security... That model still exists but it is breaking down. Designing networks primarily around branch-to-data-center connections doesn’t make sense when so many business applications are now run out of the cloud, and so many end users rely on the open Internet for connection when they’re not in a company office. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent
Boaz Miller, Zefat Academic College, 2019/01/09
This is a good paper that feels like it ends halfway through its topic. In the E-Learning 3.0 course (I'll have more on that Friday) we discussed the ideas that community is consensus - not the results of consensus, necessarily, but a shared process of consensus. This article looks at the relation between epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and consensus, looking at different models of consensus-formation, and then (briefly) the role of dissent, and (even more briefly) consensus-building algorithms. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Professors Worry About the Cost of Textbooks, but Free Alternatives Pose Their Own Problems
Beth McMurtrie, 2019/01/09
The results of this Babson Research Group survey Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 (48 page PDF) are not entirely consistent (professors claim to be deeply concerned about the price of textbooks, but most of them use commercial textbooks, with 98 percent of the texts used 'copyrighted' (ie., all rights reserved). But the suggestion that the survey finds 'problems' and 'issues with quality' in OER is a misrepresentation of what the study actually says; neither of these show up in the results at all (with the exception of one short comment on page 31). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The “Grievance Studies” Hoax and the IRB Process
Steven D. Krause, 2019/01/08
I admit, I don't have a lot of patience with the Research Ethics Board (REB) (our version of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) discussed in the article). It's slow and it often feels like it's reviewing the research, not the ethics of what we're doing. But it is impossible not to be sympathetic with the purpose of the Board, which is to ensure that scientific research doesn't create harm. And that's what's wrong with the reserach conducted by James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose and what hasn't really been made clear until now. It wasn't simply that they didn't consult their ethics board. It's that, under the guise of 'research', the study appears to have been designed to embarrass or humiliate its subjects. In so doing it discredits all research. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Moving Towards Sustainable Policy and Practice – A Five Level Framework for Online Learning Sustainability
Diogo Casanova, Linda Price, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2019/01/08
I'm never sure when I read an article of this sort whether the main purpose is the categorization into five components, or the arrangement of them into a hierarchy. If the former, then this paper (20 page PDF) is an innocuous survey of factors influencing the sustainability of online learning. More...