Facebook gives users trustworthiness score
Leo Kelion, BBC News, 2018/08/21
There's a long history of trying to rank things according to the credibility of the source, and an equally long history of these systems being gamed, being too diffocult to use, or being fundamentally unreliable, and then failing. Even the most trusted publisher may run advertising. More...

With Employers in the Mix, Can Badges Become More Than a Fad?
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/08/21
As Audrey Watters would inform us, the answer to this question is "no". But Goldie Blumenstyk makes the best case she can for "yes" in the light of work by the Education Design Lab. "I recognize the potential value of badges that students from all sorts of institutions could use to prove their abilities in communication, critical thinking, resilience, and other so-called soft skills that employers claim to want," she writes. More...

Could this be the worst piece of online learning ever? Let me explain why it may well be…
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/08/20
The example makes this worth passing along, though I'm not sure someone who laces text with profanities should be trusted to talk about what constitutes appropriate e-learning (it's not that I'm a prude, it's that some people do find the language offensive, and pointlessly offending readers makes for bad e-learning). More...

Reclaiming Educational Reform
Benjamin Doxtdator, Long View on Education, 2018/08/20
Benjamin Doxdator gives a testy review of Ted Dintersmith's book on education reform, What Schools Could Be. "When people like Dintersmith spin the myth that high school doesn’t give students any hirable skills, it isn’t a neutral description of the economy, but rather part of an agenda to absolve corporations for stagnating wages and precarious work." This reminds me of something else I read today, It's not technology that disrupts our jobs, it's the change in society that precedes the technological change and makes it possible. More...

The Need for Revolutionary Networks
Chris Unger, Getting Smart, 2018/08/20
When NorthEastern talks about networks, it appears from this article that they're talking about broadcasting networks, not human networks. "Ultimately," writes  "the power of revolutionary networks is to first clearly and powerfully point out a need (in short, intellectually and viscerally manifest a call to action), then to imagine new possibilities, and then to connect one another so that we can collectively create a new reality." No, that's not how it should work. More...

Coming Home: Returning to a Pedagogy of Small
Tanya Elias, Here to There, 2018/08/20
We know what the problem is. "What happens when software engineers begin to believe that they can solve complex social problems in which they have neither background nor context? What happens to us, to our world, when we start to believe that they can too?" But where does the problem originate. More...

Architecture of the Mouse Brain Synaptome
Fei Zhu, Mélissa Cizeron, Zhen Qiu, Ruth Benavides-Piccione, Maksym V. Kopanitsa, Erik Fransén, Noboru H. Komiyama, Seth G.N. Grant, Neuron, 2018/08/22

This ground-breaking paper makes it pretty clear that knowledge consists of patterns of connectivity in the brain. These patterns now have a name: the synaptome. More...

“You Can’t Be What You Can’t See”
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2018/08/22
The key message in this post is that researchers should look beyond the typical data collected in educational studies. In particular, they should "take a broad view of impact" and "take the long view". More...

I attended an academic conference and didn’t go to any sessions
Jennifer Polk, University Affairs, 2018/08/22
I've done this. Not on purpose, but I've had conferences get away from me, and I spend the entire time talking to people, doing interviews, working the trade show floor, and doing my own talks. But it's unusual and I really do try to see at least a representative sample of talks. More...

Algorithm beats humans for sniffing out fake news
Gabe Cherry-Michigan, Futurity, 2018/08/22
I'll stop harping on this soon. But again, I want to stress, using linguistic (or other) cues in the article itself is a poor way to identify fake news. That's what both the humans and the AI systems do as described in this article, and yet we find they're both wrong a quarter of the time. More...