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22 octobre 2019

Top Ten Missing Features of Second Life As an Educational Simulation Platform

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top Ten Missing Features of Second Life As an Educational Simulation Platform
See? I could have been a lot more critical of Second Life last week. By asking for thing like "Dynamic AI Characters, with which participants can repeatedly try new behavior to see how they react," for example. Or any of the other nine things Clark Aldrich thinks (reasonably) is missing from Second Life. More...

21 octobre 2019

Découvrez I-Bot, le robot qui a besoin d’aide pour mieux vous aider

Bpifrance CréationI-Bot, notre nouveau chatbot, vous aide à trouver des réponses à vos questions et à vous orienter sur le site Bpifrance Création. Interrogez-le pour le tester et nous aider à l'améliorer. Plus...

21 octobre 2019

Teaching Students to Read Metacognitively

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching Students to Read Metacognitively
Brooke MacKenzie, Edutopia, 2019/03/08
In a way, each one of these little posts in OLDaily is me reading metacognitively. I could imagine myself asking "Does it look right and sound right? Can I picture the story? Can I retell the story? Does my mind feel good?" What I like about this is that none of these address my memory of the story - they're all focused on what I feel and what I can do after having read the story. Brooke MacKenzie writes, "After we read the poem, I ask, 'What do you think this is about? What words in the poem make you think that". More...

21 octobre 2019

How to create a broader, fairer and smarter education system

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to create a broader, fairer and smarter education system
Joysy John, JISC, 2019/03/08
The message is this: "If our world is going to be driven by artificial intelligence algorithms, yet huge sections of society are underrepresented when deciding how these are programmed, then we have a problem. This has to change. Our education system must be multi-disciplinary and based on real-life problem-solving. Students need technical and creative skills." Quite so. But the main message of this post is that all this is especially true for girls and women. "There are issues around equity here... while role models are powerful, I think it's more than that." More...

21 octobre 2019

Towards an intuitive high-performance consensus algorithm

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards an intuitive high-performance consensus algorithm
Heidi Howard, Read, Write & Execute, 2019/03/08
This article looks at 'distributed consensus', that is, "is the problem of how to reach decisions in asynchronous and unreliable distributed systems." As Heidi Howard outlines, the two most widely known algorithms are Paxos (which I've covered here before) and Raft (which I thought I'd covered, but I can't find it). The difficulty with consensus algorithms is that they must not only work, they must be intuitive. We won't trust a consensus we don't understand. That's what this article is about. Howard writes, "We aim to improve performance and understandability by utilising two key weapons: generality and immutability." More...

21 octobre 2019

Learning to Learn

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning to Learn
Sarah Drasner, CSS-Tricks, 2019/03/08
I've been in the midst of what I've been calling 'retooling' - spending some time to reacquaint myself with the basics of our field, bring myself up to date, and yes - relearn. Not that I think everything I learned in the past is falso. Far from it. But as Sarah Drasner says in this article, "By choosing to be a developer, you are choosing to learn." Or an educator. Or a researcher. That's the job. My approach is a lot less formal than Drasner's, but it's still the same job. More...

21 octobre 2019

DSpace Docker for Repository Managers

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DSpace Docker for Repository Managers
Kristi Searle, Duraspace, 2019/03/07
DSpace has been released as a set of Docker containers, which makes it possible to run it from your desktop (for development purposes). That's the good news, though as always with DSpace, nothing is simple. Here's the resource page and here's the webinar page. To make it work, you have to install Git, Docker, and Docker-Compose (here is the set-up page). You'll also need a command line tool (I just use Visual Studio Code). In the command line tool, clone the docker-compose file, as shown here. Then execute the docker-compose command, as shown here. More...

21 octobre 2019

Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2019/03/06
This is a key question: "What is the family of problems that can be consistently computed in a distributed fashion without coordination, and what problems lie outside that family?" Here's the proposed answer: "Consistency as Logical Monotonicity (CALM). A program has a consistent, coordination-free distributed implementation if and only if it is monotonic." By monotonic, we mean this: "once we learn something to be true, no further information can come down the line later on to refute that fact." How do we get monotonicity? Confluent operations, that is, "If it produces the same sets of outputs for any non-deterministic ordering and batching of a set of inputs." Give it the same data, however ordered, and it produces the same results. It gives you something to think about. Accounting is confluent; the order of transactions doesn't matter, the balance is the same in the end. Voting is confluent; you vote in morning or evening, but the final tally is the same. But causation and agency are not confluent. More...

21 octobre 2019

How do we know how to act together?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do we know how to act together?
Jonathan Birch, London School of Economics, 2019/03/06
"Think of a simple act of cooperation: two people pick up a sofa together, carry it into a room, and put it down on the floor." This is a remarkable thing, and while Jonathan Birch wonders why humans can do this and apes can't, I'm more interested in wondering how it can be done at all. What's interesting is that "each person knows how to do their own individual part in a way that actively enables the other person to do the above three things." What do we need in order to make this work? Language? No, the cues can be non-verbal. Shared objective? Well, maybe, though the exact objective is constantly shifting and changing (sure, you want the couch in the room, but where exactly in the room?). Birch says, "what I can’t imagine is joint know-how without any understanding of each other’s thoughts." But suppose your couch-carrying partner is a robot without thoughts, but which behaves the same way your partner would. More...

21 octobre 2019

Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
Jordana Cepelewicz, Nautilus, 2019/03/06
According to this article, " In a paper published earlier this month in Science Advances, for instance, a team led by Neil Johnson, now a physicist at George Washington University, demonstrated that a decentralized model performed best under Goldilocks conditions, when its parts were neither too simple nor too capable." The headline of the Nautilus article suggests an explanation for the phenomenon. More...

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