Internet Trends 2018
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Partners, 2018/05/31
Mary Meeker's annual oracular tome has come out and this year it's a heavy 294 page PDF. What I'm seeing here is a mixed bag - some areas of growth are slowing and even stopping as the market approaches essential saturation. More...
‘Marshmallow test’ may not pick out successful kids, after all
Jordan Bennett, Futurity, 2018/05/31
The 'marshmallow test' is a classic case of what happens when psychologist try to do educational theory. Essentially, they correlated a child's ability to defer gratification (to eat two marshmallows later rather than eat one marshmallow now) with future educational outcomes. More...
The Theranos Story and Education Technology
John Warner, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/05/30
John Warner compares the promises made by AI and personalized learning vendors with tne owner of the blood testing 'vaporware' product Theranos. "Through a combination of secrecy, lies, flattery, and intimidation, she maintained a fiction about having developed a truly revolutionary piece of technology." There was no requirement that the product actually work; her customers were venture capitalists, who only need to be sold on the idea. More...
Can the universities of today lead learning for tomorrow?
Catherine Friday, Lucille Halloran, Ernst & Young Australia, 2018/05/30
The authors offer (36 page PDF) four scenarios for the university of the future: the champion university; the commercial university; the disruptor university; and the virtual university. The context is Australian but the trends are global. "Demand for learning is shifting to a fundamentally new paradigm," write the authors. More...
The American Dream is Dead
Georges Abi-Heila, The Startup, 2018/05/30
Students have been encouraged to invest in education on the ground that it promises, ultimately, a better life. There is a basis in reality for this belief, but it's limited. "No matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end." The point of this article is to remind people (especially the rich) of the role good fortune played in their success, and to encourage them not to think that they are especially gifted or important, and to be less selfish and sanctimonious. More...
The Problem with "Learning Styles"
Cindi May, Scientific American, 2018/05/30
The difference between the study reported here and other studies on learning styles is that this one focuses on learning outside the classroom - in other words, self study. The result reported is that most students don't use the learning style they report preferring, and of those that do, there is no apparent benefit. More...
Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2018/05/30
It's hard to dispute this proposition: "We believe the issue of survivability to be as important as that of privacy and security. As such, we believe that interoperability across blockchain systems will be a core requirement." There are numerous reasons why dependence on one single blockchain system might be a bad idea. More...
Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map
Josh Jones, Open Culture, 2018/05/30
These time-lapse maps are actually a sub-genre of YouTube history videos and I've been watching a lot of them recently. They cover everything from the fall of Bronze Age civilizations in the 1100s BCE to the Syrian War. More...
Implementation of an Intelligent Library System Based on WSN and RFID
Yuping Gao, International Journal of Online Engineering, 2018/05/25
This paper describes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to automate the process of finding, borrowing and returning books at the library. This would be an advance over scanning barcodes, which still require a lot of human intervention." More...
Blockchain technologies face a maturity problem
Dan Swinhoe, IDG Connect, 2018/05/25
The first problem is scalability, which shows up immediately in the amount of time it takes to verify that a transaction is authentic. Visa performs 40K transactions per second, while Ethereum and Bitcoin are capable of between 7-15 per second. You see the issue. The energy cost is another factor, "currently around 180 million KWh for just 200,000 transactions." More...
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