By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web Through a 30 Year Old Lens
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2019/02/19
As I write right now the service is overloaded and unresponsive, so you may have to wait a few days before enjoying it. But it's worth the wait, because it's worth keeping in mind that a scant 30 years ago (for me, half a lifetime ago) the web was very different - text-only, filled with hyperlinks to other sites. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Media: What Went Wrong
Edmund Lee, New York Times, Medium, 2019/02/19
The big news in digital media recently has been the waves of layoffs at such stalwarts as BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Vice. These were companies people thought had figured out the news business. It prompted MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to ask “What if there is literally no profitable model for digital news?” We see the same story in education, but moving at a slower pace. It's described as a "nightmarish vision" in today's Inside Higher Ed. In today's edition of the Chronicle's The Edge, Scott Carlson outlines the same case with respect to higher education. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada OER Group – 2019 update
BC Campus, 2019/02/19
This is a quick set of short updates from the Canada OER Group, a collection of higher education institutions from across the country. It's nice to hear from Grande Prairie Regional College, where I used to teach: " Currently, 37 courses at Grande Prairie Regional College are taught using OERs, but Ed Tech is working toward growing that number. 'We’ve partnered with the Students’ Association to organize events and advertise our services and resources,' said Anna Gillis. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls
Joi Ito, 2019/02/19
The lede is well and truly buried in this article, but here it is: "We are developing a new open source and modern publishing platform called PubPub and a global, distributed method of understanding public knowledge called Underlay." The PubPub code is open source and available on GitHub and is basically a Node.js-based content management system that looks and feels a lot like WordPress or Medium. Underlay is more interesting - its website says it is "a global, distributed graph of public knowledge... This is an attempt to replicate the richness of private knowledge graphs in a public, decentralized manner... We will work with other protocol layers to define the initial federation model, and decentralize the underlay with IPFS." So anyhow, I used PubPub to create what is now an empty journal (I'll accept submissions, but my approval process is arbitrary and capricious). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “Virtual Learning Environment Faculty Continuing Professional Development - Networked Learning Communities” A Critical Literature Review
Chris O Toole, Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 2019/02/19
As the abstract says, "This paper presents the results of a small-scale research study examining the professional practice of Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) teachers, who are encouraged to network and learn, establish on-going relationships with both their fellow teachers and those in other institutions, share knowledge, experience, resources and foster good practice for continuing professional development (CPD). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alexa, Siri, and Google Don’t Understand a Word You Say
Josh Hendrickson, How-To Geek, 2019/02/19
OK, the headline in this story is very obviously true, but stay with me for a moment. Part way through Josh Hendrickson asserts, "you get a failure message such as 'I’m sorry, but I don’t know that.' It’s little more than sleight of hand magic to trick you into thinking it understands." Yes, quite so. But how would you be fooled into thinking it understands? Well, you aren't fooled, really. But you go along with it because it feels right to do it. But now, how do you know you aren't doing that with people, too? What if people don't 'really' understand each other - what if what we call 'understanding' is really me projecting understanding on you, and you projecting understanding on me? This is what I think actually happens. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Blockchain is Helping Dallas Students Tell Their Story
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2019/02/19
This is a puff piece promoting Greenlight Credentials but it does offer one of the more compelling use cases for blockchain in education: "The benefit of a distributed ledger technology like Blockchain is that it allows employers and colleges to have instant verification of a multiple-source transcript." The key here is multiple-source. "Student profiles can host a range of evidences of learning including badges and a portfolio of artifacts." Of course, when you have multiple credentials in a single space, no one credential is special any more. More...
Lieu : Cité des Métiers
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Does Web-Based Training Work?
The answer (as we all know by now) is yes, but in studies of effectiveness, "the instructional method matters, not the delivery medium." The same is true of testing; as Ewan McIntosh write, "people writing as fast as they can for two hours is no way to test whether children can 'perform'." More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Study Questions RSS' Usefulness
I have been told that I am too critical. But stuff like this explains why. This post discusses a study by the University of Maryland's International Center for Media and the Public Agenda - surely a credibl;e agency, right? - suggesting that "RSS feeds from mainstream news sites aren't very useful in keeping up with the news" and that users would be better off using Google News. The study, of course, misrepresents how RSS is actually used. More...
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