By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns
Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 2017/05/15
I always thought it was just me: that deep need to yawn in class, or that feeling I can't keep my eyes open. It hit me throughout school and university, and more recently while attending conference presentations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I’m a Deleter
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/05/15
It never occurred to me that this could be a thing. "The cool ed-tech kids are deleting tweets," writes Alan Levine. "I’m not cool," he says. He runs contra Audrey Watters. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Google Took Over the Classroom – The New York Times
D', Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Net, 2017/05/15
"Natasha Singer wrote a piece for the NYTimes on Google in the classroom," writes D'Arcy Norman. "Is it a marketing ploy? (of course it is – there is no such thing as a free lunch, etc…) Google says 'of course it isn’t – we just want kids to learn! It’s about the learning!'" The main point here, though, is that Google is tracking the students' every move, all in the name of 'improving education'. It's hard to believe that this is necessary. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. One business case for OER examined
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2017/05/15
Tony Bates looks at the most recent edition of Distance Education and in particular at an article focused on the business case for open educational resources. The case, in a nutshell, is that people can use open access to decide whether they want to invest time and money in a particular program. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I So Want Try a Docker/Kitematic ContainerBook…
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2017/05/12

We move one step closer to personal cloud-based environments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Algorithm Summarizes Lengthy Text Surprisingly Well
Will Knight, MIT Technology Review, 2017/05/12
The day I started work at NRC I was told of our efforts to summarize documents using artificial intelligence. NRC has moved on to other things but document summarization has remained the subject of sustained research elsewhere ever since. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Spotlight On Adea 2017 Triennial and Its Key Takeaways On Education and Training in Africa
Stefano De Cupis, African Development Bank, AllAfrica, 2017/05/12
This article reads a lot like an overly-wordy press release than it does an article, but I wanted to include it because of the background on work going on and organizations involved in Africa. In particular we have the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), whose annual conference is highlighted here (here's their blog (RSS is broken though)). More...