By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Is Competing to Own Researcher Identity?
Roger C. Schonfeld, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2020/01/06
This overview of researcher identity systems not surprisingly focuses on commercial publishing solutions, including ResearchGate, Clarivate and Elsevier. A couple of paragraphs are allocated to ORCID, which arguably has more long-term potential than any of the commercial systems. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Don’t Think I’m an EdTech Guy Anymore
Dean Shareski, Ideas and Thoughts, 2019/12/31
Dean Shareski question the nature of the discipline to which he has devoted most of a career. I confess to having said in recent years that I don't think ed tech is a discipline any more, so I can identify with where Shareski is coming from. It has splintered, with the 'pure' ed tech focusing on, as Shareski notes, things like augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, coding, esports and blockchain. But there's also professional learning, global learning and digital citizenships, and I would add things like digital identity and open pedagogy. My focus has always been a bit different - my interest has always been 'online learning and new media'. But in the end, it doesnt matter how the communities form and reform. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The End Of Education Reform, Or A New Beginning?
Natalie Wexler, Forbes, 2019/12/31
I have to confess that my main question on reading this Forbes article was to wonder who is funding all those articles that say the cure to all the nation's educational problems is direct instruction. This is Yet Another Article where direct instruction is offered as the solution to sagging test scores (this time placed in the context of explaining why a decade of 'reform' has failed). And it's deceptive - it begins by arguing that things like rock star teachers, charter schools, 'back to basics' and endless testing have all failed, but then shifts gears, blaming the failure on critical thinking and constructivism, offering direct instruction as the cure. The only consistent explanation for test schools that I've seen is that they measure for social equity. Countries with wide divisions between rich and poor have lower scores, and poorer countries fare less well overall. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Killed My Teenager’s Fancy College Dreams. You Should, Too.
Melody Warnick, Slate, 2019/12/30
A middle-income family prevents their daughter from taking on massive student loans for art school. I read this as a "poor people shouldn't aspire to rich people things" story. But for an artist especially, a network of rich friends is a much-needed asset, and one her local college won't provide. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Algorithmic Puzzles: History, Taxonomies, and Applications in Human Problem Solving
Anany Levitin, Journal of Problem Solving, 2019/12/30
This is a fun read from a couple of years ago that turned up in an O'Reilly mailing list this week. While it will be of interest to psychologists and computer scientists, it will also give teachers ideas for class discussion or computation projects. The paper (15 page PDF) considers the nature or algorithmic puzzles, identifies two typologies based on the question posed and the generality of the input, and offers a list of 12 such puzzle that might be good subjects for future research. Or class projects. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education
Kevin Carey, Huffpost, Highline, 2019/04/04
"Just a few years ago," writes Kevin Carey, "universities had a chance to make a quality education affordable for everyone. Here's the little-known and absolutely infuriating history of what they did instead." I'm not sure how little-know it is; after all, the sector's failure has been chronicled over 20 years in these pages. But the core observation is dead on. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Establishing software root of trust unconditionally
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2019/04/03
A 'root of trust' "ensures that a system state comprises all and only content chosen by the user, and the user’s code begins execution in that state." In other words, only if you have a root of trust can you be sure nobody else has infiltrated your computer with spyware or whatever. This paper (Establishing software root of trust unconditionally Gligor & Woo, NDSS’19) demonstrates a proof for root of trust. The proof is complex. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Engineering Proteins in the Cloud with Python and Transcriptic, or, How to Make Any Protein You Want for $360
Brian Naughton, Boolean Biotech, 2019/04/05
The promise is something else: "In this article, I'll develop Python code that will take me from an idea for a protein all the way to expression of the protein in a bacterial cell, all without touching a pipette or talking to a human." In many ways this post is super-complex and I wouldn't expect readers to work though the example provided. For one thing, it would cost some money, and for another, synthesizing your own proteins isn't exactly the easiest thing to do if you don't have any bio-engineering background. That said, this is a fantastic example of the sort of thing we can do with dynamic data-driven open educational resources (OER). Even if all you do is follow along and tweak the embedded algorithms and graphs, you're still gaining something. (From 2016, via O'Reilly - the website is getting slammed at the moment but the response on Wayback is pretty good). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are we close to solving the puzzle of consciousness
David Robson, BBC News, 2019/04/01
Giulio Tononi's proposal here is that "any conscious experience needs to be structured, for instance – if you look at the space around you, you can distinguish the position of objects relative to each other. It’s also specific and 'differentiated' – each experience will be different depending on the particular circumstances, meaning there are a huge number of possible experiences. And it is integrated... shape and colour and location... are all held together at once in a single conscious experience." But why is consciousness one set of experiences and not another. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning analytics: going live
JISC, 2019/04/01
This is a review of JISC's learning analytics service which went live last summer. What have they learned? For one thing, "worries about staff and student reactions to learning analytics often melt away when consultation and communication are done openly and well. More...