By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Immersive Education: VR Comes of Age
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2017/03/03
I don't think VR has come of age yet, despite what the headline says, though it has taken some large strides forward. "The initial 'cool' factor isn't enough to sustain the market," writes Dian Schaffhause. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Leveraging Technology to Build Literacy Among Millions of Displaced Children and Those with Disabilities
Rebecca Leege, EmergingEdTech, 2017/03/03
Overview of work by All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD), a partnership of USAID, World Vision, and the Australian Government. Key innovations included: EduApp4Syria, " open source smartphone-based learning games to help Syrian refugee children learn to read in Arabic"; "a pilot project that provides Indian students who are blind or low vision with mother tongue reading materials through Bookshare". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Using Internet based paraphrasing tools: Original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism?
Ann M. Rogerson, Grace McCarthy, International Journal for Educational Integrity, 2017/03/03
A 'paraphrasing tool' is a piece of software which will take a sentence (or paragraph, etc) and rewrite it so that it says the same thing, but using different words or phrasing. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The open in MOOC must include the ability to create courses
Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, 2017/03/15
"If we want truly open education," writes Graham Attwell, "then we need to open up opportunities for creating and facilitating learning as well as participating in a programme." I agree. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microlearning: What It Is Not and What It Should Be
Alexander Salas, Learning Solutions, 2017/03/15
'Microlearning' is one of those terms that is becoming increasingly vague with use and popularity. According to this article, "the term 'microlearning' was coined by the Research Studios Austria as "learning in small steps," and it has been heavily popularized due to most of its interventions being Web 2.0 friendly." It is not itself a theory but can be associated with cognitive load theory (CLT). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?
Bill Hicks, BBC News, 2017/03/15
I found this to be an interesting result. After cheating in Romanian exams was curtailed, "the pass rates of poorer students - those in receipt of financial assistance payments - fell by 14.3%, compared to 8.1% for better-off students." Now it might be tempting to say that the anti-cheating policy was anti-poor. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AT&T dismissed the idea that providers would redline
doctornemo, National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Metafilter, 2017/03/15
I first noticed this in the 1980s when I discovered that groceries in the suburbs were way better than the ones in the inner city where I lived. And now it's an internet is a problem I'm living with right now. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Learning
University Business, 2017/03/01
This is a special report from University Business. It's interesting in its own right, but readers may be interested in the full-length interview with me on MOOC and the future of online learning. A couple of notes: first, there's a really bad typo on page 6, where it says MOOCs were invented in 2005. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Topics That Are "Forbidden" to Science
Paul Ratner, Big Think, 2017/03/01
This article lists five areas that are 'forbidden to science'. I find it interesting that I am in some way implicated in all five. Here they are (and how I'm implicated):
Now, yes, my involvement isn't exactly what they're talking about. But that's a technical limit, not an administrative limit. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ResearchGate announces $52m investment
Research Information, 2017/03/01
Many of my papers can be found in ResearchGate as the company harvested them from various open access repositories. It also sends me regular appears to upload more, which I resist, because it's hard to search and use unless you're logged in. More...
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