The market is dead: long live the market
Adam Wright, Wonkhe, 2018/07/03
Adam Wright says it all in the first paragraph: "There is no evidence that greater competition between higher education providers will improve the quality of provision. This is the conclusion of the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) recent (21 page PDF well worth reading in its own right - SD) report into the higher education market. More...

Aboutness in imagination
Francesco Berto, Philosophical Studies, 2018/07/03
One of the reasons I favour a non-representational semantics is that I don't think we can really make the idea of 'aboutness' work consistently. And 'aboutness' is core to the idea of representation: we define (in language, say) the way one thing represents, or is 'about', the other. What this paper addresses in one of the problem areas for aboutness: the imagination. More...

Big business ideas for the future role of universities in Australia are skewed and should be called out
Julie Rowlands, Jill Blackmore, 2018/07/03
This is discussion of the Australian EY report: Can Universities Today Lead Learning for Tomorrow (previously mentioned here). More...

Why the Civic Info Bill Is Such a Huge Deal
Mike Rispoli, Free Press, 2018/07/03
Five universities in New Jersey are participating in a state non-profit initiative " to strengthen local news coverage and boost civic engagement in communities across the state." It's good to see higher education institutions working for the social good; this is how they survive in the technological era. More...

Is strong AI inevitable?
Peter Sweeney, Towards Data Science, Medium, 2018/07/02
'Strong AI' in this article is characterized as AI that cannot only make predictions, as today's AI can, but as AI that can also create explanations. This is what is needed to progress from pre-scientific reasoning to scientific reasoning. The creation of explanations poses unique challenges to AI because it consists of things like interpretations (that is, things like models and world views) and formalisms (like math and language and other abstractions) along with predictions. Could AI produce these? Sure - humans do. More...

“I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets
Katrina Brooker, Vanity Fair, 2018/07/02
This is a superficial look at the effort to re-decentralize the web. It focuses mostly on Tim Berners-Lee and his Solid distributed web application. " The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. More...

Online & Blended Learning: Selections from the Field
Online Learning Consortium, Routledge, 2018/07/02
This eBook is actually a collection of excepts from other books. There isn't a direct PDF download - the PDF is "generated" when you click a button on the page (it's like publishers can never do anything in a straightforward manner - there always has to be something fishy or skeevy about the download). More...

500px photo site abandons freely shareable images with commercialization push
Stephen Shankland, Cnet, 2018/07/02
This is a warning sign for people sharing free and open resources: they can disappear in a flash. In this case, photo sharing site 500px deleted a million Creative Commons licensed photographs with almost no warning. More...

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer
Tovia Smith, NPR, 2018/07/02
The thought of writing an essay that will be read by literally no one feels a bit odd to me, but I guess it's not a great stretch from those essays I wrote which were read by exactly one person. And "with computers already doing jobs as complicated and as fraught as driving cars, detecting cancer, and carrying on conversations, they can certainly handle grading students' essays," writes Tovia Smith. More...

A First Pass At An ISTE Reflection
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2018/07/02
There's a little more from this year's ISTE. In this post, Tim Stahmer  argues that (at 15,000 participants) it's too big, and that it dominated by vendors. And he's still concerned about those smart badges. More...