China’s schools are quietly using AI to mark students’ essays ... but do the robots make the grade?
Stephen Chen, South China Morning Post, 2018/05/29
I'm not sure what 'quietly' means in this context, given that it's all over the media, but it's no surprise, given China's advanced artificial intelligence capability (as evidenced, for example, by its facial recognition systems). More...

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to

Daniel DeNicola, Aeon, 2018/05/29

This is a challenging proposition. It is not the assertion that you can only believe things you know to be true - that's too strong. But it is the proposition that you ought not be able to believe things you know to be false (things like: the moon landing was fake, the world is flat, and other more venal beliefs I won't repeat here). More...

Switching from subjects to skills: Teaching students born in the age of technology
Kurt Söser, Microsoft Education, 2018/05/29
Here's the argument: "We as educators have to shift from teaching students in subjects, to teaching students in skills." Why? "It is the human brain (and heart) that has to get behind the simple steps of a solution that lead into bigger things and the mathematical concepts behind them. And that’s where an educator steps in, to have a conversation about skills and concepts." Honestly, that's not a very good argument all. More...

Now playing: a movie you control with your mind

Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review, 2018/05/28

The headline should probably read 'influence' rather than 'control'. Still, the idea of a movie you can influence with your mind raises new possibilities for interactive media. More...

The 3 Types of Diversity That Shape Our Identities
Celia de Anca, Salvador Aragón, Harvard Business Review, 2018/05/28
I talk about diversity as a core value in learning networks, so the question for me is whether this discussion of diversity adds to that. More...

My #Netnarr Reflection
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/05/28

This is a wrap-up from Levine's Networked Narratives class at Kean University. More...

The Little “b” and the Big “C”
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/05/18
There was once a time when blogging was new and exciting and something we thought everybody could be doing. I wrote Educational Blogging. Alan Levine launched CogDogBlog, Jim Groom was writing about blogging, and John Cricthlow wrote about Small b blogging. It's still relevant. But it's not like publishing or social media. More...

EIFL 2017 Annual Report
Rima Kupryte, EIFL, 2018/05/18

EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) "works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America." This is its annual report for 2017. More...

A/B testing shows that Pavlovian gamification does not work
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/05/18
When somebody says "does not work" the first question should be about what counts as "working". Here Donald Clark writes that an A-B test (basically, you compare two interventions side-by-side) shows that "the gamification lesson plan fared worse than non-gamified lesson plans." In the report (20 page PDF) from 2016 the researchers use a platform to conduct "rapid randomized controlled trials (RCT), the evidentiary gold standard of evaluation for assessing what works." This 'gold standard' consists of pretests and post-tests consisting of a "set of six or ten post-exercise multiple-choice questions." In these trials, the non-gamification system reliably reported better results than the gamified system. More...

Facebook admits hundreds of apps vacuumed up user data
Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/05/18
The other shoe has dropped. Facebook "announced on Monday that it has found at least 200 other apps that had access to user data in the same way that the app behind the infamous Cambridge Analytica leak did." You may also have read reports that Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt, but there was no real penalty as "the key players behind it have reportedly created a similar company called Emerdata." Meanwhile, Equifax made money from its data breach last year. More...