By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Review of Blockchain based Educational Projects
Bushra Hameed, et.al., International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2020/01/14
This article surveys a total of nine blockchain based educational projects (Edgecoin, Tutellus, Sony Global Education (SGE), TeachMePlease, SuccessLife, EchoLink (now called EKO), Blockcerts, Gradbase and OriginStamp) found in the literature and compares them with respect to the blockchain features being used and the services being offered, ultimately mapping the services to the features. More...
The Greatest Elearning ‘Hacks’ For Liberal Arts Education — CLAMP Hack\Doc Fest Highlights
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Greatest Elearning ‘Hacks’ For Liberal Arts Education — CLAMP Hack\Doc Fest Highlights
Cristian T. Duque, LMSPulse, 2020/01/14
This article introduces us to CLAMP - the Collaborative Moodle Liberal Arts Project. CLAMP has "a unique purpose, difficult to imagine in other LMS. To customize the software to cater the users and contexts fitting of a liberal arts education." This article summarizes the results of a recent hackfest held in Pennsylvania. More...
Plagiarize This Jot
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Plagiarize This Jot
Christopher J. Sprigman, Jotwell, 2020/01/14
This is an interesting thought: "Essentially, academic plagiarism norms are the equivalent of a tax imposed on junior scholars, for the benefit of senior scholars. Junior scholars must err on the side of attributing ideas to senior scholars, whether or not attribution is accurate or helpful, on pain of suffering a plagiarism accusation". More...
From context collapse to content collapse
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From context collapse to content collapse
Nicholas Carr, Rough Type, 2020/01/14
When social media first came into being, pundits like Michael Wesch and dana boyd talked of "context collapse" - you would no longer have a work identity, home identity, party identity, whatever; they would all collapse into a single public identity. But eventually people rebelled, and social media began to help us respect boundaries. But now we're entering the real on "content collapse". All content is the same. "A presidential candidate's policy announcement is given equal weight to a snapshot of your niece's hamster and a video of the latest Kardashian contouring." The danger here - as with context collapse - is that "content collapse consolidates power over information. More...
Computing Education Lessons Learned from the 2010’s: What I Got Wrong
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Computing Education Lessons Learned from the 2010’s: What I Got Wrong
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Research Blog, 2020/01/14
The bulk of this post is devoted to the question of whether constructionism is the way to use computing in education. Mark Guzdial, like so many others, has followed the thinking of Seymour Papert in this. " The idea of building as a way of learning makes sense.," he writes. But as described by Papert, it may not make sense. More...
A Pedagogical Perspective on Big Data and Learning Analytics: A Conceptual Model for Digital Learning Support
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Pedagogical Perspective on Big Data and Learning Analytics: A Conceptual Model for Digital Learning Support
Sabine Seufert, Christoph Meier, Matthias Soellner, Roman Rietsche, Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 2020/01/13
This is a pretty good paper. The authors draw on three meta-analyses of learning analytics literature in order to create a framework for describing learning analytics projects. They then apply this framework to four use cases: socal learning analytoics for prediction and for reflection, and individual learning analytics for the same two functions. I think this reading of learning analytics is a bit narrow, and the divisoion between social and individual a bit arbitrary, but the tables produced by the literature search are a valuable reference.
This is the first paper I've posted here from Springer-Nature's SharedIt service (which has been running since 2016). The idea is that authors can share read-only PDFs using access tokens to social media and blogs. More...
Graphy
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graphy
Blake Regalia, 2020/01/13
As the website says, "graphy is a collection of high-performance RDF libraries for JavaScript developers with a focus on usability. Each package works with both Node.js and the browser (with the help of a bundler such as Browserify or Webpack)." You would be forgiven if you've forgotten about the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is a world wide web standard for encoding semantic data in 'triples' (subject-verb-object) using standardized vocabularies. It is still current, though, being used (for example) in Tim Berners-Lee's Social Linked Data (SoLiD) project. More...
Three ways to combat peer review bias
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Three ways to combat peer review bias
Verena Weigert, Jisc Blog, 2020/01/13
I'm not sure exactly how the headline writer got 'three ways' out of this article. By my count it could be four, or more likely, one. Or maybe one thing that is three things, like the Trinity. The article centers around an open-access scholarly publishing platform called F1000Research and cites it as an example of full open peer review. (One?) It references a project to "to test if reviewers would judge research papers differently if they can see who else has reviewed the paper." (Two?) It also describes a tool that does sentiment analysis of peer reviews. (Three?) Finally, it describes an open peer review prediction tool. More...
Black Wednesday
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Black Wednesday
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/01/13
I don't like commenting on world events on this blog because I would imagine most people hear enough about them from other sources. However, the recent loss of Ukrainian International Airways Flight 752 from Tehran is an exception because, as Alex Usher notes, many of the passengers were en route to Canadian universities and research institutions. "All day Wednesday and Thursday, stories poured in from across Canada. Thousands of hearts breaking in a dozen cities across six provinces. So many good people, so many dear friends….and just so, so much talent. Gone, in an instant." This was our community that was hurt in a conflict we had nothing to do with, a community we share with our brothers and sisters in Iran and around the world. More...
The Quality Factor: Learning to Blog FOR your Students
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Quality Factor: Learning to Blog FOR your Students
Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, LangWitches, 2020/01/13
Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has completed a seven part series on blogging in education. Here are the segments:
- Reading Blog
- Writing Blogs
- Commenting on Blogs
- Connecting Blogs
- The Reciprocation Factor
- The Consistency Factor
- The Quality Factor
What caught my eye was the discussion of quality blogging in part seven. More...