EdTech is Driving Me Crazy, Too
Will Richardson, Modern Learners, 2018/06/19
The actual tl;dr for this post is probably something like: "Purveyors of ed tech are jumping whole hog on the socio-emotional learning bandwagon, but what if we attacked the mental health issues our kids are experiencing through a different lens, one that starts with the premise that we’re the ones that are broken, not the kids?" It's a good point. More...

Dank Learning: Generating Memes Using Deep Neural Network
Abel L. Peirson V, E. Meltem Tolunay, arXiv, 2018/06/18
I have a longstanding interest in memes as alternative forms of communication, and this paper demonstrating AI generated memes takes the conversation forward another step. The researchers fed the AI a series of images and associated captions, and the AI generated new captions. They are hard to distinguish from the original. More...

https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f
Kate Starbird, Medium, 2018/06/18
This is a detailed and compelling look at the alternative media ecosystem. Educators should pay close attention because there is a parallel underground effort to create an alternative education ecosystem. The core purpose is to prmote an anti-gglobalist and pro-nationalist agenda ("e.g. anti-immigration, anti-Western imperialism, anti-corporation, anti-media") and the tactic is to use botnets and alternative news sites to spread disinformation and sow confusion. More...

https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql
GitHub, 2018/06/18
I'd rather have a jmysql - a one line JSON api. But still, this is a pretty cool concept. "Generating REST APIs for a MySql database which does not follow conventions of frameworks such as rails, django, laravel etc is a small adventure that one like to avoid .. Hence this." More...

Predator and Prey
Mike Bostock, Observable, 2018/06/18
Nicely described in O'Reilly thusly: "a really nice demo of the "what if we didn't publish static text and images, but instead you could interact with the explanation?" You can continue on and look at other examples of Explorables, though note that they get complex quickly. More...

The Make to Learn Electric Motor Design Sequence
Glen Bull, Joe Garofalo, Michael Littman, Matthew Hoffman, Register Login International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2018/06/18
I like this idea."The goal of the project is for students to gain fluency in the process of invention and to understand related science concepts embodied in the inventions." They do this by having students make not just one but a sequence of progressively more advanced electric motors. More...

Free MOOCs Face the Music
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/15

Inside Higher Ed reports very sympathetically on the new EdX subscription fee (covered here yesterday). More...

Educational and Occupational Credentials should be in schema.org
Phil Barker, GitHub, 2018/06/15
The current effort to match credentials to competencies, and digitize credentials, is ongoing. This is a discussion thread on GitHib addressing the question in the title. Of note is the most recent post in which Phil Barker outlines recent work done in the field by a W3C Community Group. More...

Cryptocurrencies Make Their Way to Campus, Bringing Flexibility and Risks
Erin Brereton, EdTech, 2018/06/15

The headline pretty much says it all. The big risk (aside from wildly fluctuating currency values) is currency-mining malware. More...

The Existential Question: Why Do We Measure?
David Vance, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/06/15
My interest in measuring things is pretty minimal, but that's probably because my interest in the six reasons outlined in this article is pretty minimal. The six reasons are: 1) to answer questions, 2) to show results, 3) to demonstrate value, 4) to justify our budget (or existence), 5) to identify opportunities for improvement and 6) to manage results. More...