By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Distributed Data Mesh as a Solution to Centralized Data Monoliths
Thomas Betts, InfoQ, 2020/01/31
This is a quick summary of a paper and presentation. "Instead of building large, centralized data platforms, enterprise data architects should create distributed data meshes," says Zhamak Dehghani, principal technology consultant at ThoughtWorks. She adds, "as data becomes ever more ubiquitous, traditional architectures of data warehouses and data lakes become overwhelmed, and are unable to scale efficiently." I think that this is especially the case for learning technology and learning resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Reducing Friction and Expanding Participation in the Continuous Improvement of OER
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2020/01/31
David Wiley writes (correctly) that when people find it hard to participate, they don't participate. So, for example, many improvements to open educational resources (OER) never get made, because they're too hard to suggest. So he describes a process where "There’s a new button at the bottom of every page of content. It says 'Improve this page.' When a student or teacher or other user from the public web clicks the button, they’re linked directly to a Google Doc which includes all the content from the page. The Google doc is shared publicly and has Track Changes turned on. So you can just begin typing or commenting immediately." Right. This is good. I've been using Google Docs to write papers recently, sharing my work as I go. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Gentle Introduction to Deep Learning for Graphs
Davide Bacciu, Federico Errica, Alessio Micheli, Marco Podda, arXiv, 2020/01/29
By the second paragraph of the 'high-level overview' (the paragraph titles 'Mathematical Notation') the reader may be forgiven for thinking that this introduction is not so gentle. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Comparative Analysis of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Platforms
Maria Conache, Ramona Dima, Andreea Mitu, Informatica Economică, Paperity, 2020/01/29
As I read through this, I found myself adding gRSShnopper to the list of platforms being compared (not that it would really make sense to compare it with Coursera, Udactoty, Udemy and EdX). Organization type? Not really organized. Partnerships? Not really. Free courses? Always. Paid courses? Never. Etc. It's funny how ther other platforms all seemed to follow the same pattern in the end. Even their connection speeds are about the same. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Brain Is So Noisy
Michael Segal, POCKET, Nautilus, 2020/01/29
This sounds like my brain: "Kaschube and his colleagues... have found a host of features that stand in stark contrast to the circuits that engineers build: spontaneous activity and correlation, dynamic context generation, unreliable transmission, and straight-up noise." It's never quiet in my brain. I suspect it's never quiet in most people's brains. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 5 Myths to Teaching a Choice Curriculum
Janet Taylor, Art of Education University Magazine, 2020/01/15
To be clear, the article is marketing for the Art of Education University, which describes itself as "a university built by art teachers, exclusively for art teachers." It offers access to online professional development resources for a monthly fee. I'm not endorsing them, just noting that they exist. Anyhow, the article specifically discusses offering "choice" in classes, which is what caught my eye. It addresses arguments against choice, for example, "(students) just don’t know what to do when they have full choice", and "you don’t teach any technical skills!". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Smile with your eyes': How to beat South Korea's AI hiring bots and land a job
Sangmi Cha, Reuters, 2020/01/15
CNN has picked up on a line of thought brought up in this Reuters story from  a few days ago. The gist, in a nutshell, is that job interviews are being evaluated, at least in part, by artificial intelligence systems. The Reuters story focuses on the use of AI in Korea. "According to Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI), nearly a quarter of the top 131 corporations in the country currently use or plan to use AI in hiring." The CNN article highlights US-based companies like HireView, Yobs and Talview. What's significant is that they're not testing for knowledge. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Samsung’s Neon Project – Artificial Humans or Chatbots?
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2020/01/15
Though “fictionalized and simulated for illustrative purposes only”, products like Samsung’s Neon are being called ‘artificial humans’, “a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence.” This article talks about the potential and also raises some (much-needed) scepticism. As the author writes, "If you’re going to give us artificial humans, then, by all means, do so. We have enough illustrations from SciFi to tide us over in the interim." If we extrapolate to the world of artificial teachers (and why not?) we should ask, do we want our AI teachers to have feelings and emotions? Does that help them become more sympathetic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the network effect and PLN’s
Clint Lalonde, Ed Tech Factotum, 2020/01/15
Clint Lalonde describes his thinking and efforts to convince people to use Mastodon, noting that it's hard to get a social network off the ground because of the network effect, that is, the idea that networks become much more useful as the number of people using them grow, but which means they can appear less desirable at the early stages. I don't see Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter (which I continue to use as a broadcasting tool) but as an alternative to Facebook (in other words, as a place to form community and chat). Also, I will never overcome "the hesitation around 'using' people." I don't believe in using people. I am happy to contribute to community and to converse with friends, but the minute I start assessing a network based on 'what I can get out of it' my motivation and my relationship with the network is broken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. GODAN Action Open Data Management in Agriculture and Nutrition Course
Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition, 2020/01/15
This is nice. The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) has published course materials from its Action Open Data Management MOOC as a gitbook (a gitbook is an open content authoring and versioning environment). The course "aims to strengthen the capacity of data producers and data consumers to manage and use open data in agriculture and nutrition (and) to raise awareness of different types of data formats and uses, and to highlight how important it is for data to be reliable, accessible and transparent". More...