By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The XR Association Releases New Guidelines for Social VR
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2019/12/27
These are not technical specifications but rather recommendations for rules and practices to govern behaviour in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) spaces (collectively known as 'XR'). Past experience in other virtual spaces such as discussion boards and social networks shows that disruptive and antisocial behaviour can escalate quickly. This document from the XR Association offers recommendations to help prevent that. "VR users may experience abusive behavior in a more bodily or visceral fashion". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Answer for Schools Is Not More Technology. It’s Teachers and Human Connection.
Danielle Arnold-Schwartz, EdSurge, 2019/12/26
This item hits all the right buttons but it's fundamentally wrong. Yes, business-minded people thing of ed tech as a way to save money. Yes it's true that in many cases people need a human connection. Yes it's true that education is a core requirement for democracy. But it does not follow that "We need educational technology that puts highly trained teachers at the center of product design and implementation." And it does not follow that we should "forget the efforts to appeal to fiscal reforms." We need to lower costs, if education is to reach seven billion people. And there are many ways to create the necessary human connections without requiring teachers - our friends, family, co-workers, peers, mentors and online community are all made of people, and in many cases in a much better place to help us learn. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?
Melanie Mitchell, Aeon, 2019/12/26
I understand the concern, but I think it relies on a myth that won't - in the long run - bear scrutiny. The argument here is essentially that human drivers depend on a wealth of knowledge known as 'common sense' - "the mostly tacit ‘core knowledge’ that humans share – knowledge we are born with or learn by living in the world." The myth here is that there is 'core knowledge', that it is common, and that it is required by an autonomous car. The sort of person who uses 'common sense' to plough through a pile of leaves or into a flock of pigeons is the sort of driver who has accidents because "nobody could have predicted" the hidden tree trunk or the damage a pigeon can cause. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Five Stage Model
Gilly Salmon, 2019/12/26
Gilly Salmon is asking for feedback on her five stage model of online learning. I'm not a fan of 'stages' - the idea that we would been socialization and information exchange before knowledge construction and development seems overly formal; all of these happen all of the time at once. And these days, we don't need to 'access' so much any more; we just turn on the phone. Also, we rarely socially 'construct' knowledge; it's a much more organic process. Some interesting comments on the LinkedIn post. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational visions
Rebecca Ferguson, Ann Jones, Eileen Scanlon, Ubiquity Press, 2019/12/26
I spent the better part of Boxing Day afternoon reading and mostly enjoying this book (186 page PDF). It is based on the work over the last 40 years of the Computers and Learning Research Group  (CALRG) at the U.K.'s Open University. The point of departure is CALRG's "Beyond Prototypes" which is used to explain "why educational technology initiatives worldwide succeed and why they often fail." This then informs  four major areas of inquiry: teaching and learning at scale, accessible inclusive learning, evidence-based learning, and STEM learning. Each is given a historical perspective, then in a separate chapter a look forward. In a commentary on the book Martin Weller describes it as a "good example" of an alternative to the "wilful historical amnesia in much of ed tech." Maybe so. But let's not forget that this is a book specifically about the Open University, and that while nobody doubts the OU's importance to the field, nobody would say that it alone defines its history, despite the often subtle ways the book says just that. Still. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia
2019/12/26
This link is to the first issue of the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia. I like not only that it is open access, but also that it is by and for undergraduate students. Now I have my criticisms of journals and that whole practice, but I also think it's really important for students to engage in the actual practices of a profession (for better or worse) as they learn about it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. English isn't generic for language, despite what NLP papers might lead you to believe
Emily M. Bender, Symposium on Data Science & Statistics, 2019/12/26
This is from last March, but I found it today, and the title alone is worth passing along this set of slides. "Natural language isn’t just English, and NLP work should stop pretending that it is. If you’re a consumer of NLP tech (e.g. for text as data research), demand better." See also: Wenyan, "an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature
Caitriona Ní Shé, et.al., Dublin City University, 2019/12/25
This is a good paper (43 page PDF) but because of its methodology - a systematic literature review - it reflects a fairly narrow perspective and feels ten years out of date. According to its publicity it "emphasises the importance of interpersonal skills and having a compassionate approach for effective teaching online" but I found this a bit incongruent with its discussion of the roles of an online teacher (and, again, this is a discussion long since past - see my own work in this area from a decade ago). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. @bluesky
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2019/12/25
These are reflections from Tim Bray (who knows a thing or two about protocols) on Twitter's @Bluesky proposal to create a decentralized social network. Will it work? he asks. Probably not. There are too many things that can't be fixed via the protocol alone - things like "the messy political mechanisms behind our imperfect but essential legal and regulatory frameworks." But maybe it could work, he says, with carefully designed APIs and the sort of AI-based indirection proposed by Stephen Wolfram. And there needs to be some mechanism to define 'verifiable or not' in the network's algorithms, he says. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2019)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2019/12/25
Audrey Watters has amassed an impressive list of ed tech failures of one sort or another for the year and comments, "So much innovation and 'edsurgency.' And if we’re not careful, if we do not hold these entrepreneurs and barkers and politicians accountable, if we do not remember their failures and falsehoods, then we will find that all this will just repeat itself on into the next decade". More...