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21 octobre 2019

Digital Gifts: Participation and Gift Exchange in LiveJournal Communities

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Gifts: Participation and Gift Exchange in LiveJournal Communities
This article looks at the giving of gifts in a social blogging network, LiveJournal. Ask a LiveJournal member why they give a gift and the answer, according to the author, is some variation on "I wanted to." But gift giving is arguably never so simple - and while the author avoids depicting th activity as ultimately self-serving, she does give it the function of "maintaining social bonds, constructing virtual identities, and ensuring continued presence of participants." This may be the result of gift giving, but not necessarily the cause. More...

21 octobre 2019

Predicting Large Scale Adoption of Technology

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Predicting Large Scale Adoption of Technology
I do a lot of predicting in this newsletter and while I don't use this rubric (my definition of 'usefulness', for example, if very different) these are the sorts of things I do take into account. And I use something I saw somewhere once called the 'two advances' rule. Which is: any old technology can be an advance in one type of thing. But a new technology will take off only if it represents a major advance in two separate dimensions. More...

21 octobre 2019

Networked Proximity - Full PDF

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Networked Proximity - Full PDF
Ulises Ali Mejias has posted the final draft of his dissertation, a long PDF that will make good airplane reading. From unauspicious beginnings he makes a somewhat audacious claim - "the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality." Certainly this is something I would want to assess before accepting. More...

21 octobre 2019

ALEKS from McGraw-Hill: Web-Based, CCSS-Aligned, AI-Driven 6-12 Math Curriculum

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ALEKS from McGraw-Hill: Web-Based, CCSS-Aligned, AI-Driven 6-12 Math Curriculum
Michael Karlin, The Ed Tech Round Up, 2019/02/28
This is a glowing review of ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) from McGraw-Hill Education. The idea is that "it is designed to provide instruction and guidance at whatever level a student may need." Of course it is not intended to replace the teacher (yet) and the reviewer takes pains to say this. On the other hand, "the AI is built on information gained from free responses and not multiple choice questions, so it is able to capture more of the subtlety and specifics of exactly what students know." It felt a bit like a softball review but Michael Karlin asserts "the opinions expressed in this review are my own". More...

21 octobre 2019

Electron Express

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Electron Express
Stephen Downes, Feb 28, 2019, In-House, Ottawa
This is an overview of how applications are being created for the web and the desktop using Node.js packages including Express and Electron. It's intended for a non-technical audience and describes how the software works and what it can do. This not a 'how-to' guide, it's a survey of the landscape.
[Slides]. More...

18 octobre 2019

Meet YiSi, a machine translation teacher who cracks down (nicely) on errors in meaning

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meet YiSi, a machine translation teacher who cracks down (nicely) on errors in meaning
National Research Council Canada, 2019/02/25
You may have heard of machine learning. This story is about machine teaching, that is, teaching a machine. This article is about a machine that teaches a machine to learn. It's not as confusing as it sounds: "YiSi is an open-source software that examines sentences produced by machine translation and compares them against the original text or a human reference translation. YiSi assigns an accuracy score from 0 to 100 to each translated sentence, pinpointing problems in translation for developers to improve in the translation system. More...

18 octobre 2019

Is Ed Tech Hype in Remission?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Ed Tech Hype in Remission?
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/02/25
I'm not alone in seeing the decline in e-learning, but Michael Feldstein holds out hope for at least one part of it: He writes, "The one area in the market where I see something approaching hype, which I would characterize more as 'intense interest coupled with a lot of hand-wringing,' is in the Online Program Management (OPM) space." From where I sit this is pretty niche; the wider world of learning technology has passed beyond online programs (and passed beyond traditional education altogether). More...

18 octobre 2019

Shift Happens 2

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shift Happens 2
Jamai Blivin, Merrilea Mayo,, Innovate+Education, 2019/02/22
There's a lot happening in this report (48 page PDF) and I have to say that if your focus is traditional higher education then you had better take notice, because if these authors are right (and they probably are) then the outsode wprld is about to overwhelm you. "In this new ecosystem, learning has become incrementalized, increments of different sizes have become credentials, and each increment is both gated and signaled by passing an assessment, rather than a credit hour of seat time or a semester of enrollment." Once we begin down this path, there's no turning back". More...

18 octobre 2019

Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
Mike Orcutt, MIT Technology Review, 2019/02/21
One of my colleagues, Andriy Drozdyuk, has been saying all along that there is only one real blockchain, Bitcoin, because the innovation is as much social as it is technical. It is the investment and number of distinct users that makes it secure, not the technology. The recent Ethereum Classic hack may be proving him right. In this hack, bad actors took over more than half of the nodes and then began to write 'double spend' transactions, effectively defrauding the system. Ths is th sort of attack blockchain technology - though not necessarily Bitcoin - is vulnerable to. More...

18 octobre 2019

◇ф(3ψ2)=666

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...

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