By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day
Jennifer Howard, Washington Post, 2018/10/16
The Mini-Heap entry asks, "what does it mean for the future of reading, learning, and teaching that the average person now reads 100,000 words a day on electronic devices?" But the article itself frames it as "what do we lose?" by reading these words. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Fix Fake News
Regina Rini, New York Times, 2018/10/16
I'm not really on board with the idea tat the New York Times has solved the problem of fake news, nor either that emulating the norms of the cocktail circuit is the way to do it - both are as capable of spreading rumours as well as fact, and neithr seems to be held accountable for it. But there is an element worth drawing out of this article, and it's this: the ability to spread fake news stems at least in part from our ability to remember who said what. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why did Donald Trump Stress the Importance of Building a Wall on the Mexican Border?
Mitch Weisburgh, PILOTed, 2018/10/16
This post has nothing to do with Donald Trump; rather, it's a device used to frame a discussion of Alex Rosenberg's How History Gets Things Wrong, The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, discussed here last week. We want the simple story of how Trump reached his decision, but the simple story is almost certainly wrong. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Anti-social Punishment
Martin Sustrik, LessWrong, 2018/10/15
I wish this study had been replicated in North America. It is nonetheless a fascinating study of cooperative behaviours, albeit under highly artificial conditions. The gist is that while punishing free-riders usually increases cooperation, in some cases the punishment actually reduces cooperation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Will It Just Be Machines Talking to Machines?
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/10/17
If it's just machines talking to machines then I don' see why I should be interested, but of corse the gist of the post revolves around whether these machines are trying to influence us. This may sound like a trivial question - and I like Tony Hirst's examples - but it raises the deeper issue of what constitutes (if anything does) machine autonomy. Because someone, somewhere, created the algorithms that automatically create headlines or autofill forms. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning vs Personalized Learning: What Needs to Happen
Stephen Downes, Oct 17, 2018, Online Learning 2018, Toronto, Ontario

This special briefing explores personal learning as the future of learning, explores why it's important, the tools which enable personal learning and the significant potential of personal learning as a key to life-long learning and the skills agenda.

[Link] [Slides]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Connected learning
Steve Wheeler, Learning with 'e's, 2018/10/10
It's nice to see people recognize the importance of connected reading, but this post recasts it as some sort of constructivism and feels like it should have been written in the 2000s. I don't want to be critical, because Steve Wheeler is normally on target, but as preparation for a talk in 2019 this outline is solely lacking. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How People Learn
Stephen Downes, SlideShare, 2018/10/11
This is a slide show for a talk I'll never give, because it's not my work. It is made up almost entirely of quites from the recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report I referenced here the other day. The idea was to pull out the findings and present them in an easy-to-read (and occasionally funny) presentation, because I felt that the work merited a wider reach.

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A new study provides some dispiriting evidence for why people fall for stupid fake images online
Laura Hazard Owen, NiemanLab, 2018/10/09
The usual advice given to people about fake news (and fake images) usually has something to with: consider the source, consider the content, does it look professional, are other people linking to it? Etc. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Common Core Produces Massive Failure in Writing
Diane Ravic, National Education Policy Centrer, 2018/10/09
We've seen calls in Canada for 'education reform' that looks a lot like the American Common Core focus on instructivism, core content, and a lot of testing. The promise was that it would improve outcomes, but Diane Ravich reports on a study that shows it produced the opposite. More...