By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Gentle Introduction to Deep Learning for Graphs
Davide Bacciu, Federico Errica, Alessio Micheli, Marco Podda, arXiv, 2020/01/29
By the second paragraph of the 'high-level overview' (the paragraph titles 'Mathematical Notation') the reader may be forgiven for thinking that this introduction is not so gentle. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Comparative Analysis of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Platforms
Maria Conache, Ramona Dima, Andreea Mitu, Informatica Economică, Paperity, 2020/01/29
As I read through this, I found myself adding gRSShnopper to the list of platforms being compared (not that it would really make sense to compare it with Coursera, Udactoty, Udemy and EdX). Organization type? Not really organized. Partnerships? Not really. Free courses? Always. Paid courses? Never. Etc. It's funny how ther other platforms all seemed to follow the same pattern in the end. Even their connection speeds are about the same. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Brain Is So Noisy
Michael Segal, POCKET, Nautilus, 2020/01/29
This sounds like my brain: "Kaschube and his colleagues... have found a host of features that stand in stark contrast to the circuits that engineers build: spontaneous activity and correlation, dynamic context generation, unreliable transmission, and straight-up noise." It's never quiet in my brain. I suspect it's never quiet in most people's brains. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 5 Myths to Teaching a Choice Curriculum
Janet Taylor, Art of Education University Magazine, 2020/01/15
To be clear, the article is marketing for the Art of Education University, which describes itself as "a university built by art teachers, exclusively for art teachers." It offers access to online professional development resources for a monthly fee. I'm not endorsing them, just noting that they exist. Anyhow, the article specifically discusses offering "choice" in classes, which is what caught my eye. It addresses arguments against choice, for example, "(students) just don’t know what to do when they have full choice", and "you don’t teach any technical skills!". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Smile with your eyes': How to beat South Korea's AI hiring bots and land a job
Sangmi Cha, Reuters, 2020/01/15
CNN has picked up on a line of thought brought up in this Reuters story from a few days ago. The gist, in a nutshell, is that job interviews are being evaluated, at least in part, by artificial intelligence systems. The Reuters story focuses on the use of AI in Korea. "According to Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI), nearly a quarter of the top 131 corporations in the country currently use or plan to use AI in hiring." The CNN article highlights US-based companies like HireView, Yobs and Talview. What's significant is that they're not testing for knowledge. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Samsung’s Neon Project – Artificial Humans or Chatbots?
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2020/01/15
Though “fictionalized and simulated for illustrative purposes only”, products like Samsung’s Neon are being called ‘artificial humans’, “a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence.” This article talks about the potential and also raises some (much-needed) scepticism. As the author writes, "If you’re going to give us artificial humans, then, by all means, do so. We have enough illustrations from SciFi to tide us over in the interim." If we extrapolate to the world of artificial teachers (and why not?) we should ask, do we want our AI teachers to have feelings and emotions? Does that help them become more sympathetic. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the network effect and PLN’s
Clint Lalonde, Ed Tech Factotum, 2020/01/15
Clint Lalonde describes his thinking and efforts to convince people to use Mastodon, noting that it's hard to get a social network off the ground because of the network effect, that is, the idea that networks become much more useful as the number of people using them grow, but which means they can appear less desirable at the early stages. I don't see Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter (which I continue to use as a broadcasting tool) but as an alternative to Facebook (in other words, as a place to form community and chat). Also, I will never overcome "the hesitation around 'using' people." I don't believe in using people. I am happy to contribute to community and to converse with friends, but the minute I start assessing a network based on 'what I can get out of it' my motivation and my relationship with the network is broken. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. GODAN Action Open Data Management in Agriculture and Nutrition Course
Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition, 2020/01/15
This is nice. The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) has published course materials from its Action Open Data Management MOOC as a gitbook (a gitbook is an open content authoring and versioning environment). The course "aims to strengthen the capacity of data producers and data consumers to manage and use open data in agriculture and nutrition (and) to raise awareness of different types of data formats and uses, and to highlight how important it is for data to be reliable, accessible and transparent". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deep Learning: The Impact on Future eLearning
Anandhavalli Muniasamy and Areej Alasiry, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2020/01/15
This paper makes a promise it doesn't really deliver on, suggesting that "deep learning has evolved into developing ways to repurpose existing resources (that) can mitigate the expense of content development of future eLearning." Let's just mark that down as 'future technology'. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses
Holly S. Fiock, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2020/01/15
After the literature review, the bulk of this article is devoted to a big table titled "Summary of Instructional Activities for CoI." The seven big rows of the table echo Sorensen and Baylen’s final principles for online instruction, and each is subdivided into the three 'presences' from the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. I see this mostly as a classification exercise, though I suppose if pressed we could read the rows and subdivisions as providing research support for the activities listed. But I'm left wondering, why these activities rather than others? Why is this an 'activity', for example. More...
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