Algorithm beats humans for sniffing out fake news
Gabe Cherry-Michigan, Futurity, 2018/08/22
I'll stop harping on this soon. But again, I want to stress, using linguistic (or other) cues in the article itself is a poor way to identify fake news. That's what both the humans and the AI systems do as described in this article, and yet we find they're both wrong a quarter of the time. More...
The Commons Clause
Heather Meeker, GitHub, 2018/08/24
"Modern open source infrastructure software has created more value over the past decade than we could have ever imagined," write the authors at RedisLabs, makers of open source data management software. "However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings." Cloud providers, in particular, don't support the software developers. More...
Reusable content matters: a learning object authoring tool for smart learning environments
Arif Altun, Mehmet Ali Çinici, Smart Learning Objects, 2018/08/24
As the abstract says, this study "reports the design and evaluation process of an authoring tool that is developed for content developers and/or instructors to be able to reuse and repackage existing learning objects (LOs)". The tool is called ONYA (which stands for Learning object authoring tool in Turkish) and was built using Microsoft Visual Studio. More...
Blockchain for Education and Professional Development
Hristian Daskalov, SlideShare, Source University, 2018/08/24
This is a slide presentation outlining some aspects of OS.University (Open Source University) ad in particular their development of a distributed blockchain application (dApp) to manage such things as certificate verification and resource distribution. More...
New York U.’s School of Medicine Goes Tuition-Free
Teghan Simonton, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/08/17
This is a case of a university looking at its wider mission, and not merely the transactional relationship it has with students. “Overwhelming student debt is fundamentally reshaping the medical profession in ways that are adversely affecting health care,” the university said. More...
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Donella Meadows, Academy for Systems Change, 2018/08/17
Although there's a lot of overlap, there's a difference between systems and networks. The main difference is that systems have purpose and goals, and are typically designed or built rather than grown. But otherwise, the ways to create change in a system are similar to the ways to create change in a network. More...
The Story of Decentralized Identity
Tomislav Markovski, StreetCred, Medium, 2018/08/17
People have been working on this for a long time (remember mIDm?) It still isn't solved but there are suggestions that it might be in the coming years. "What is a decentralized identity? To put it simply, it’s a publicly discoverable identity information... Using crypto technology, identities can be defined as a set of keys used in proving the source and validity of information." Ultimately, I think, we'll all have our own personal key (often on an actual key we plug into our computer). More...
Teaching tools you should know
Amy Kenyon, Duke Learning Innovation, 2018/08/17
This is a bit of a snapshot of the state of play in learning technology at universities. This list provided by Duke is intended to be practical - it's what's in production and in use. So it inmcludes the LMS, WordPress site and e-Portfolios, of course. But there's also Coursera, a lecture capture tool, voice thread and even maker spaces. More...
Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Mike Masnick, TechDirt, 2018/08/14
This post takes a while to get to its central point, and in the process says a bunch of things I don't agree with. But the core statement is correct, in my view. It is this: "we need to move to a world of protocols instead of platforms, in which transparency rules and (importantly) control is passed down away from the centralized service to the end users." Facebook has the problems it has because it wants to be the internet, run centrally. This is what's wrong with it, and this is what should be fixed. More...
Open and Distance eLearning in Asia: Country Initiatives and Institutional Cooperation for the Transformation of Higher Education in the Region
Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria, Journal of Learning for Development, 2018/08/14
This article covers the region in very broad strokes, as is to be expected, but offers a good overview. It lists eight major mega open universities (with links and stats), some cooperation initiatives, and a number of open education initiatives (which are almost invariably based on MOOCs). More...
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