By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. European guidelines for validating non-formal and informal learning
Cedefop, 2016/07/22

This document (64 page PDF) is more of a framework than a final statement on the topic of recognizing individual achievement, but as such it's a great start and will likely become a document of reference in the field. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could AI replace teachers? 10 ways it could?
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2016/07/05

Donald Clark reviews a number of the ways artificial intelligence could replace teachers. I read this during the day yesterday and referenced it in passing when I spoke. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Jump Ship From Evernote and Take Your Data With You
Thorin Klosowski , LifeHacker, 2016/07/05

Good article describing how people locked in Evennote's silo can get their data out of the system and into another product. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Do Adaptive Learning Right
Keith Devlin, Randy Weiner, EdSurge, 2016/07/05
Responding to Audrey Watters's examples of how things can go badly wrong with adaptive learning, Keith Devlin and Randy Weiner argue "Watters’ bleak future will only come to pass if the algorithms continue to be both naïvely developed and naïvely applied, and moreover, in the case of mathematics learning (the area we both work in) applied to the wrong kind of learning tasks." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Natural language understanding (almost) from scratch
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/07/05
This article gives you a sense of where one branch of artificial intelligence is working today. Researchers are testing their neural network algorithms against four standard tasks in natural language analysis:

• Part-of-speech tagging (POS), labels each word with a tag that indicates its syntactic role in a sentence
• Chunking labels phrases or segments within a sentence with tags that indicate their syntactic role
• Named-entity Recognition (NER) labels recognised entities within the sentence. For example, as a person, location, date, time, company
• Semantic-role labeling (SRL) “gives a semantic role to a syntactic constituent of a sentence.” More.

The challenge here is o succeed at these tasks "without needing task-specific representations or engineering." It is often the case that you can tweak the result with a hint here or there. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bitcoin and Blockchains explained
David Hopkins, Technology Enhanced Learning Blog, 2016/07/05

This is another useful attempt to help people get a base-level understanding of what a blockchain is and does. Transactions are encrypted and put into blocks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Campaign for America’s Future: Are Public Schools and Private Equity a Bad Mix?
Jeff Bryant, National Education Policy Centre, 2016/07/06
The short answer to this question in that, yes, they are a bad mix. They offer choice, but "these publicly financed arrangements come with great risks, however, due to the high failure rates of charter schools." Additionally, there is the danger of loss of control of the school system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of Critical Thinking
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2016/07/06
There's a book on critical thinking in me somewhere trying to get out. But in the mean time people will have to make do with the many resources already available on the internet, for example, this set of videos on the fundamentals of critical thinking. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Amazon Inspire Removes Some Content Over Copyright Issues
Natasha Singer, New York Times, 2016/07/06

I wonder how much of this is genuine concern and how much of it is a campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt. True, some materials were genuine infringements and removed from Amazon's OER site. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DERN 2016 Survey
Distance Education Research Network, 2016/07/06

Following the retirement of Helen Galatis, ACER Research Fellow, who has curated Australia's Digital Education Research Network (DERN) newsletter since 2012, and maintained the research reviews following Dr Gerald White's retirement., DERN (Distance Education Research Network) services are being reviewed. More...