By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Developers, start your engines
Amazon.Com, 2018/11/29
This is one of the more interesting of Amazon's announcements thisd week. 'Deep Racer' is a scale model racing car. Inside, it has a reinforcement learning engine. You train your car to race, and then submit your trained engine to Amazon to compete in actual road races with your self-driving car. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Autograding System Goes Awry, Students Fume
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/11/30
This article describes the failings of an autograding system in use in a computing science class in Berkeley. The use of autograders in computer sciences is a natural development, as programs can be tested by debuggers and efficiency algorithms to determine not only whether they run at all, but also how well they run. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Everything on Social Media Is for Sale
Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 2018/11/30
Everything described in this article is also true of the education social media scene, to more or less a degree. Certainly there are repost and retweet networks, paid placements, 'guest' articles, and more. Microfinance is well-entrenched, with websites (yes, even this one) asking for donations. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education Blockchain Market Map
HolonIQ, 2018/11/30
Though dated last June this market map appeared in my inbox from Holon only today. It reports five sectors of the education blockchain market: credentials and certifications (the largest by far), peer-to-peer ecosystems, payments, knowledge and marketplace. The website describes each briefly and links to some representative startups. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Opensource Apps for Educators
2018/11/30
I explored this after the link was passed along to me on Mastodon. The idea is that you can log into the service and quickly launch any of a large number of open source applications. It was set up by a group of people in British Columbia. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Way to Raise money for Education Technology
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2018/11/26
I'm still waiting for the day when the Air Force needs to run bake sales to fund its operations. This, I guess, is the modern equivalent of those bake sales." Rocket Fund is a crowdfunding platform for schools. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do we really need all of this 'mentoring' malarkey’?
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/11/26
I'm not so quick to call mentoring "malarkey" as Donald Clark, but I share some of his scepticism. Like Clark, I never had a mentor (and would probably have pushed back against one if I had). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beware Of The Great MOOC Bait-And-Switch
Derek Newton, Forbes, 2018/11/20
If you just go by what the large U.S.-based institutions and companies are doing, which is what this article does, then MOOCs look like a scam. "MOOCs are now the free ice cream, the bait in the trap and, as such, it’s normal to wonder what they’re really worth even if they’re free." But outside the bastion, MOOCs are doing what they were intended to do: provide free learning resources to millions of people. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Where Is My Mind?: An Interview with Andy Clark
David Maclean, iAi News, 2018/11/20
Short interview with philosopher Andy Clark. His first book, Microcognition, came out (and was very influential) around the time I was working on my PhD studies on the same topic. He explores connectionism, extended cognition, and the nature of consciousness. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
Jeff Barr, AWS News Blog, 2018/11/27
I'm pretty sure that not every school in every country can do this. But this is what the cool kids are doing. " Today, high school and college students design, fabricate, and launch nano-, pico-, and even femto-satellites such as CubeSats, PocketQubes, and SunCubes." This information comes up in the context of a new Amazon web service called 'Ground Station' that will allow you to contact those satellites. More...
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