By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Summarising learning materials using AI - paucity of data, abundance of stuff
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2019/03/06
Could we use artificial intelligence (AI) to create open educational resources (OER)? Ignatia asked and I suggested I didn't really know of any (notwithstanding the utility of AI in automatically generating metadata, as I showed in my OER talk). Donald Clark responded with this post pointing to his Wildfire service. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CaImAn an open source tool for scalable calcium imaging data analysis
Andrea Giovannucci, et.al., eLife, 2019/03/06
During the discussion on connectivism Monday someone asked whether we could obtain data to demonstrate the principles at the neural level alongside the social and conceptual level. The consensus was that this wasn't feasible. But here we have, first of all, data that reports neural-level data, so we can see whether a neuron is activated or not, and second, a computer program that can interpret these images in order to compile data sets without massive human effort. So - one step closer, though it may be some time before we can put the data to the purpose of testing the theory. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do we know how to act together?
Jonathan Birch, London School of Economics, 2019/03/06
"Think of a simple act of cooperation: two people pick up a sofa together, carry it into a room, and put it down on the floor." This is a remarkable thing, and while Jonathan Birch wonders why humans can do this and apes can't, I'm more interested in wondering how it can be done at all. What's interesting is that "each person knows how to do their own individual part in a way that actively enables the other person to do the above three things." What do we need in order to make this work? Language? No, the cues can be non-verbal. Shared objective? Well, maybe, though the exact objective is constantly shifting and changing (sure, you want the couch in the room, but where exactly in the room?). Birch says, "what I can’t imagine is joint know-how without any understanding of each other’s thoughts." But suppose your couch-carrying partner is a robot without thoughts, but which behaves the same way your partner would. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
Jordana Cepelewicz, Nautilus, 2019/03/06
According to this article, " In a paper published earlier this month in Science Advances, for instance, a team led by Neil Johnson, now a physicist at George Washington University, demonstrated that a decentralized model performed best under Goldilocks conditions, when its parts were neither too simple nor too capable." The headline of the Nautilus article suggests an explanation for the phenomenon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How UT-Austin’s Bold Plan for Reinvention Went Belly Up
Lindsay Ellis, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/03/05
Project 2021 was a sweeping effort by the University of Texas at Austin to modernize online learning offerings, including fractional credits and the Synchronous Open Online Course (SOOC), in order to extend reach and lower costs. What its designers didn't reckon with is the relentless immobility of the university bureaucracy. Project 2021 was shut down well before its target date, the victim of disappearing funding and changes in university priorities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching Trends in Virtual Education: An Interpretative Approach
Victor F. Pando, Propósitos y Representaciones, 2019/03/05
An English version of this paper is available (21 page PDF) and I thoroughly enjoyed this wide-ranging criticism of connectivism. At the core of the argument is the contention that connectivism dehumanizes education. Victor Pando writes, "The impact of ICT deconstructs some expectations placed upon them for the improvement of teaching-learning processes. This trend has been found little useful: the objectives, the concept, methods, organization, components of such processes avoid the role of the learner as a builder of their own learning or result in spontaneous processes of knowledge apprehension under undefined criteria. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
James Somers, The Atlantic, 2019/03/05
Directly relevant to the talk I gave today (but not read until after I gave it, which figures) this article traces the evolution of scientific papers from dense texts to sequential illustrations (like this vivid reinterpretation of Watts and Strogatz's seminal Nature paper on network theory ) to interactive Jupyter notebooks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Network Analysis and Online Learning Communities in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Shazia K. Jan, Panos Vlachopoulos, Mitch Parsell, online learning, 2019/03/05
This study (16 page PDF) explores "the use of social network analysis (SNA) for investigating learning communities specifically, communities of practice (CoP) and community of inquiry (CoI) in higher education online learning (HEOL)." Enough three letter acronyms (TLA). The literature review is a decent if uninspired presentation of SNA and CoI (you'd think publications would find a way to just assume this and save authors from presenting the same summary in paper after paper). The paper selection is the usual unrepresentative sample from commercial publications. The authors find twn whole papers to study and conclude that there's "a very limited number of studies that bring together constructs from SNA and these community-based frameworks." That is probably not true, but how can you refute the search methodology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Award-Winning Faculty Online Teaching Practices: Roles and Competencies
Florence Martin, Kiran Budhrani, Swapna Kumar, Albert Ritzhaupt, online learning, 2019/03/05
My first reaction was to roll my eyes when I read the title of this paper, because the designation of 'award winning' professors is unscientific at best. I remained sceptical on reading about the "five different roles: facilitator, course designer, content manager, subject matter expert, and mentor," because I know there's a lot more than that. But persisting with it paid off as it turns out to be an interesting and thorough article. There's a good (though not comprehensive) list of competencies (table 4) and an emphasis on the need for quality online instructors to be strong online learners themselves. The authors write, "Our study emphasizes the need for instructors to maintain a strong willingness to learn and grow in their pedagogical and technology skills. More...