By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. For the Web
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Foundation, 2018/11/06
Tim Berners-Lee has launched a petition-pledge website calling on people to endorse a set of principles for the open web. I find that the principles he is asking people to sign fall far short of the web he is trying to support. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vision 2030: Redesigning Education for the Future
Stephen Downes, Nov 06, 2018, Asbar World Forum 2018, Riyadh, Saudia Arabia
In this presentation I outline three ways education needs to adapt to the future, by becoming more relevant, engaging and personal, and then describe the technologies and approaches we will need to develop and use in order to support this. (Note that long portions of the video are blocked by a camera operator sitting down in front of my camera and doing nothing in particular).
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lumen Seeks Continuous Improvement of OER in Two-Prong Approach
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/11/08
According to this article, Lumen Learning "has launched the 'Learning Challenges Leaderboards' ... as well as RISE and Shine, a community effort to improve the OER." The leaderboards "provide a fine-grained view into the specific skill-level outcomes students struggle with the most." RISE and Sine is "a community-based continuous improvement process." What I find interesting is the vague phrasing of the learning objectives on the leaderboard, using verbs like "explain" and "describe" and "determine" (which at best require a rote response) rather than performance-based objectives, such as "calculate" or "measure" or "model". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Spitball's Blockchain Student Economy Disrupts The Global E-Learning Market
John Welsh, Forbes, 2018/11/05
I think this project mistakes the reason why people share resources. Here it is: "Spitball 2.0, a new version of the platform, allows students to earn a cryptocurrency by sharing content or answering questions to buy study resources and possessions, as well as place advertisements for tutoring and student accommodation." If you have to be paid to share, you aren't really sharing. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Levels
Wired, YouTube, 2018/11/02
I'm enjoying the '5 Levels' series of videos from Wired. The idea is that a specialist explains the same concept at five distinct levels of complexity, beginning with an explanation to a young child, and progressive to discussing it with another specialist. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Server to Client
Ali Alabbas, A List Apart, 2018/11/01
This article, the first in a series, is a very detailed explanation of how a web page gets from a remote server to your browser. If you have never heard of HSTS lists or service workers, this article is for you; it explains these concepts so clearly you'll think they're obvious. It also gets into DNS, caching, and CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) (a big deal for people writing web applications). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On Distributing Distributed Technology, Long Tails, and Scaling
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2018/11/01
In any technology cycle (including learning technology) "Long tail forming as an adoption pattern is a good way then to see if broad distribution is being achieved," writes Ton Zijllstra. This is the proposition he asserts of Mastodon, which has a big head (or a big spike) of a few very large instances, but only a stubby tail of very few small-scale adopters. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education
Shane Dawson, Kristen Eshleman, George Siemens, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/11/01
I think longtime readers of OLDaily will find most of the core concepts discussed here pretty familiar. They include complexity ("many simple parts [that] are irreducibly entwined"), networks, emergence, self-organization and social coordination, feedback sensitivity, and agility. The article gives a brief mid-level definition of each, and then orients to to a management perspective. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Agile training at Jurys Inn– used AI to produce in minutes not months
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/10/31
Some of the things described as AI in this post might be AI, but some of them aren't, and the conflation isn't really helpful. What is? Maybe this: " AI is now being used to create content and add curated resourced at the click of a button. WildFire will take any document, PowerPoint or video and turn it into high retention online learning, in minutes not months." What isn't. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personalization by Paper and Non-Mechanical Teaching Machines
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/10/30
Audrey Watters digs up a fascinating definition of 'teaching machines' (and implicitly, I would say, of what constitutes 'teaching'). Quoted from her text:
I've seen the research supporting explicit practice and immediate feedback. More...
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