By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them
Part One, Part Two. Good set of suggestions concerning the founding of social networks (which are interestingly almost the same as the set of suggestions that would apply to the founding of online communities). Baically, the advice amounts to: provide something of value to your members, attend to them personally, and keep focusing on the value to members. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Owning Your Learning Path, The Blame Game
This is a very interesting observation: "On the one end of the spectrum you have the archetypical argument that 'we are/I am too small to change the system'. On the other end of the spectrum you find the archtypical argument that 'I/we could change this, if only all other stakeholders would accept our/my authority'. Both are a fig leaf for inaction. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gorman and Keen Need a Bicycle Built for Two
The ridiculous charade that is the 'discussion' at the Britannica blog continues with the announcement that "Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience-the oldest and earliest type of learning-and they learn from people who know more than they do." One wonders why the second is not merely an instance of the first, but I suspect logic isn't Andrew Keen's strong suit. As for the 'discussion', my experience with the forum is that they simply delete the comments that don't align with the party line. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Can Hum, so I Can Find a Mystery Song
I tried it; it got two out of five. But this is me we're talking about - people have signed petitions to stop m from singing. It's a miracle it got any. So Midomi, I think, is pretty neat. It can, to some degree, recognize tunes, even the ones I mangle. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Training Oneself to Notice
Oh this is a great illusion. I'll let you look at it for yourself without telling you anything about it. What i will say here is that this illusion illustrates not only how our perceptions can shift from one alternative to the next, but how we can train ourselves to switch these perceptions. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Project SWORD Restored My Faith in Educational Technology
A project implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) in EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary would be useful. Atom is like RSS, and the APP is like using RSS to upload and syndicate content. So I'm happy that the project group went with APP rather than inventing their own parochial specification. As David Davies says, "who knows, the web 2.0 revolution in content production may arrive on campus". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada Day
Just another day on the farm. But it was Canada Day, and while out bicycling I snapped this just before getting caught in a downpour. Happy Canada Day, everyone. Stephen Downes, Flickr July 2, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Canada, Flickr]. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could Remixing Old MOOCs Give New Life to Free Online Education?
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2019/03/22
Remixing open educational resources has been invented by a Harvard professor. As EdSurge reports, "The idea comes from Robert Lue, a biology professor at Harvard University who was the founding faculty director of HarvardX, the college’s effort to build MOOCs. He’s leading a new platform called LabXChange that aims to let professors, teachers or anyone mix together their own free online course from pieces of other courses." Until this point, we have not really had any idea what to do with our old MOOCs, and could only rebuild them from scratch. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EthicalML/xai
GitHub, 2019/03/22
From the website: " XAI is a Machine Learning library that is designed with AI explainability in its core. XAI contains various tools that enable for analysis and evaluation of data and models. The XAI library is maintained by The Institute for Ethical AI & ML, and it was developed based on the 8 principles for Responsible Machine Learning." This may all seem pretty esoteric, but I can imagine a student assignment of the (far) future: use your AI to automatically generate a response to a Reddit discussion and them employ the AI to explain the reasoning for your AI-generated response. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Philosophers On a Physics Experiment that “Suggests There’s No Such Thing As Objective Reality”
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2019/03/22
MIT Technology Review recently published an article entitled “A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. Of course, the suggestion fell far short of a proof, but that didn't stop people from speculating. I personally fall into the 'no objective reality' camp, but not because of quantum physics. Anyhow, what's interesting about this set of short articles is that they make clear how important is the interpretation of any objective evidence. More...
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