By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub: How does a new generation of researchers perceive Sci-Hub?
David Nicholas, LSE Impact Blog, 2019/02/21
The author is not a Sci-Hub fan (calling its appeal "ideological" and its business model " a pure and unashamed ‘pirate’", but he does accurately capture the value of Sci-Hub vis-a-vis other reserach article sharing sites such as ResearchGate. "Sci-Hub’s attraction, unlike RG’s, is not its social media features (it has none), but that it offers free and relatively easy access to millions of papers harvested (illegally) from publishers’ websites". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 2019 National High School Big Data Challenge: Big Data de Terre
STEM Fellowship Journal, 2019/02/21
I spent the day today as a judge in the Big Data Challenge for high school students at SAS in Toronto. This publication contains the abstracts of the finalists. "This year’s challenge provided a multidisciplinary competitive opportunity; over a period of three months, teams analysed sustainability data through the prism of computational methods. Teams worked to reveal the impact of environmental conditions on human health and well-being, diving into predictive analytics of optimal envi-ronmental characteristics for long-term, long-distance space travel. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ◇ф(3ψ2)=666
Metafilter, 2019/02/20
My first thought when I looked at this was, "Yow, this is hard." I still think it's pretty hard, but I also think that it's a nice way to get people to think about math and to reframe math problems in an interesting way. The idea is that the diamond represents a function which, when defined, will yield a value of '666' when combined with the rest of the problem. So if you have, say "◇665" then the correct answer is "f(x) = x+1". See that I mean? You're thinking of math in terms of functions, not just numbers and variables. It's been made into an app, but you don't actually need the app. If I were a teacher, I'd offer one of these a day, starting with easy ones, and progressing through the year with more and more complex problems, rewarding the class (not an individual) if it's solved by the end of the day. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Clearer Signals From Employers
Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/02/20
This is another step in an iterative process that is tightening the linkage between employers and education institutions. The idea is that the network’s goal is to use standardization about needed job skills, or competencies, and open data systems to 'better align student, work-force and credentialing data with the needs of the economy.'" The next step, obviously, is to describe students' skills in terms of these standards. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Actually, Higher Ed is Not That Similar to the Newspaper Industry
Steven D. Krause, 2019/02/20
Steven Krause response to a point raised in the Chronicle this week (and a point I've made numerous times over the last two decades) about the similarities between education and news media. First, he says, "while content 'scales,' education and assessment do not."  Second, he writes, "people who make this comparison to journalism... underestimate the depth and breadth of higher education." Third, he says, "while most people seeking news don’t like to pay for it, almost all would-be college students (and their families) are more than willing to pay." I think there are responses to each of those arguments. I  would note, especially, that when I was a young paper carrier, everybody paid for news. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How sharing work can build students’ networks
Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute, 2019/02/20
This is mostly a marketing piece focusing on a tool called trovvit, designed to help students forge (and) maintainconnections that help them get by and get ahead... by letting students showcase their skills and store their networks in one place." Or as founder Torrence Robinson says, "Think LinkedIn meets Instagram for students." Why is such a tool needed? "Students haven’t yet had careers.  Their 'work' does not fit into resume format. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alternative digital credentials will transform higher ed within five years says UC Irvine dean
Betsy Foresman, EdScoop, 2019/02/20
This prediction may be confounded by the non-cooperation of educational institutions. While they will face a lot of pressure to standardize certification, surely they can see what happens if they do. "They 'unbundle' learning acquisition and verification. To earn an ADC, an individual only has to demonstrate mastery of a skill and does not need to satisfy course requirements." But these institutions might not have a choice if alternative digital credentials (ADC) are independently developed and adopted. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories
Herb Caudill, Medium, 2019/02/20
This was a nice slow read suitable for a train ride (which is where I read it, on the way to Toronto) and it's useful not just a set of lessons about whether to rewrite software from scratch (something I'm thinking of for gRSShopper, because Perl is old and stale) but also a set of origin stories for a number of influential software products (including Firefox, Basecamp, Visal Studio Code, and Trello). It also poses the sort of problem edtech companies are faced with today as they work with legacy softwar, an entrenched user base, and a rapidly evolving internet. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web Through a 30 Year Old Lens

Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2019/02/19

As I write right now the service is overloaded and unresponsive, so you may have to wait a few days before enjoying it. But it's worth the wait, because it's worth keeping in mind that a scant 30 years ago (for me, half a lifetime ago) the web was very different - text-only, filled with hyperlinks to other sites. More...