The Gates Foundation And Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Want Your Ideas On The Future Of Education
Fast Company, Jim Shelton, 2018/05/11
Fast Company, Jim Shelton, 2018/05/11
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have opened a Request for Information (RFI) about work that can help increase student success in math, non-fiction writing, and "executive function (the skill set concerning memory, self-control, attention, and flexible thinking)" (I couldn't help but giggle a bit when I read the third one). "The RFI represents an invitation to researchers and practitioners to deepen public understanding of where the most important, ambitious, and innovative work is being done in a variety of disciplines." I found the submission process a bit off-putting. They note that "All responses generated by this RFI become the property of BMGF and CZI" and they ask for a lot of biographical information up front. all what a to be a closed online form.
The conversion from a sales model to a subscription model may well have worked for software vendors, but as the trend has taken hold it is becoming clearer that it is unsustainable. "Netflix. Spotify. Newspapers. Office365. Dropbox. Everything is a subscription now, but how many services can people afford?" This (very) short article suggests that bundles may be the answer ("Microsoft, Google, and Apple seem intent on copying the Amazon Prime model, likely for this reason: they want to be the one subscription their customers pay for." But I can't imagine that this is what customers want.
This report "is an effort to draw with broad strokes the nature of education that defines the technological research university of the year 2040 and beyond." The core outcome, I think, is in the initiatives section (here are the links, because the page deign obscures them: Whole-Person Education, New Products and Services, Advising for a New Era, A.I. and Personalization, A Distributed Worldwide Presence). Just as interesting (maybe more so) are the seven trends outlined on the initiatives page. There's a comparison of MOOCs to "early twentieth century Chautauqua, the traveling tent shows that moved across the plains of the American Midwest to bring interesting lectures, performances, and novel cultural experiences to families," and the blunt assessment that "most analysts agree that transactional pricing (tuition per credit hour) is not a sustainable model."
Educational Technology and Education Conferences for June to December 2018
Clayton R Wright, Stephen's Web, 2018/05/11
Clayton R Wright, Stephen's Web, 2018/05/11
Clayton R. Wright offers the 39th version of the Educational Technology and Education Conference list. It comprises 1,782 confirmed events between May-December 2018. MS-Word Document. He writes, "The events for May and June have been updated since distribution of the previous list. During the last 20 years, as I have compiled the list, I have viewed tens of thousands of conference, symposium, and workshop websites. I am still amazed at the number of event organizers who do not link one year's website to the next or who think of the website as a treasure hunt.
"The leading page of an event should be attractive, but it should also be informative. It should provide basic information such as the title, an alphanumeric date (including the year), and the specific location while using few abbreviations so those who are not in the 'in-crowd' can figure out what the conference is about and where it will be held. Using 'code' or shorthand may be acceptable for those who attend an event regularly or attend an event held in the same place each year, but how does this presentation style successfully attract interest from others, especially those new to a field? How does the lack of easily accessible information help a person decide among several professional development opportunities?"
The title should be "How bad questions misdiagnosed one of my students." And it's something that long predates the current digital age. In this case, the student is expected to pick up on some satire, but understanding satire requires background knowledge the student might not have. I remember in grade seven (this would be in the 1970s) being given what turned out to be a test of my reading speed. It consisted of short instructions to follow. I didn't know it was a test of reading speed so when I encountered questions like "draw a cross" I sat and thought about whether I was expected to draw a Christian cross or an x. I finally settled on the former, but the time it took me to think through what they were asking for led to my diagnosis as a slow reader. At the time, though, I had previously been measured as reading 600 words per minute, and reading speed has always been one of my strengths.
I have to confess that I'm really uncomfortable with the whole idea of PixelMags. The company, which styles itself as the "the Netflix of magazines", released an Android version of its Readr app today. For publishers, the product is "distribution as a service" and publishers have to pay to be included. The Readr app gives you 20 minutes worth of reading per month; after that you pay. So it's a controlled sandbox, you have to pay to play, and play is measured by the minute. Is this the internet we want?
What does innovation look like in complex environments? This article looks at a "grassroots" effort involving the leaders of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Michigan, and others (grassroots? really?) that became a network called Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learners (HAIL). The article misses (I think) the importance of complexity for innovation and management. It's as though it wants to embrace the idea but not change any existing beliefs or practices. For example, while captures the idea that autonomous agents are able to self-organize, it still seeks to impose order on the outcome. "We can describe successful future states, but we cannot predict the path forward," writes Kristen Eshleman. "Adapting a variation on the build-measure-learn model of innovation, colleges and universities can generate and explore ideas faster and can develop a portfolio of options." I don't think so. In a complex system, what worked in the past doesn't work in the future, because the work in the past has changed the state of the complex environment, and new rules now apply.
This is a report from a survey asking respondents "to rate the importance of particular channels for gaining information about new attacks and novel approaches, and we asked how willing they would be to share information across these channels." Even looking at the research it's hard to get a sense of who the participants were, save that (I assume) they were higher education information security experts (see this paper (61 page PDF) starting at page 5). Not surprisingly (I think) given the population, "the most important channels were relationships within organizations and interpersonal trust relationships formed with peers in other organizations." Which creates a dilemma. How do you meet the increased demand for security using only "tightly bounded and controlled information sharing environments within organizations and between trusted individuals?" If the institutions aren't trusted, how can we create trustworthy institutions?
Weak demand forces Springer Nature to cancel 3.2 billion euro float at last minute
Arno Schuetze, Reuters, 2018/05/09
Arno Schuetze, Reuters, 2018/05/09
This is a really interesting story, not simply because it shows the weakness of established publishers today, but because the prospectus (426 page PDF) paints a clear picture of the market today. I was most interested in the list of risks (pp. S16-S18 and expanded in much greater detail after p. S54). Among them: declines in subscription renewals, open access publishing, and even the potential failure to attract editorial board members and editors. In an email Joseph Greene points to the statement that "Accordingly, revenues stemming from Article Publication Charges (APC) are in the short- to medium-term supplementary to the subscription business," and do not, therefore "simply reflect the cost of publishing." It also depicts (p.88) a $7 billion academic publishing market, with open access accounting for $344 million of that (pictured).
The core message here is that it's not difficult to create video lessons, especially if you follow a few simple guidelines. The first is to have a plan - your video should have a point and you should have some idea why you're creating it. Next is to keep it simple - "Start simple with a screencast of you explaining a problem or introducing an idea and go from there. Also, don't make any videos longer than 2-3 minutes." Don't worry about making mistakes. " Your students aren't going to care if you make a mistake and correct yourself on a video. Just keep going!" And use the proper device - "doing math with a computer touch mouse is punishment... use a tablet and a stylus." Need more? There are many videos to help you out.
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The headlines today are being made by Google through a series of announcements at its IO conference. More interesting items include a new human-sounding Google Duplex AI interface, a new camera-based scavenger hunt (try it here), and a new interface design with Material Theming. Or you could just go for the obligatory cool stuff overview.
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MOOCs Are Global. So Where Do They Stand With New European Privacy Laws?
Sydney Johnson, EdSurge, 2018/05/09
Sydney Johnson, EdSurge, 2018/05/09
One of the happy side-effects of Europe's new privacy law is that it impacts companies that are not European. Among these are MOOC providers who, whether or not they are based in Europe, want to do business in Europe, and so need to comply with the regulations. Coursera, for example, is "overhauling its terms of use, privacy policies, and creating a new cookies policy to let learners know how we are using their data. This also meant introducing new product features including consent tracking, data portability, and the right to be forgotten." Less clear is the impact on universities hosting MOOCs, as they have previously been able to simply mine MOOC data with impunity. Now: not so much.
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OLDaily isn't simply about educational technology. It takes a philosophical perspective, which means that readers benefit (I hope!) from some deeper analysis that "Look what's cool!" This post identifies four major benefits of philosophy: critical thinking, scientific criticism, ethical reasoning, and wisdom (here defined as "knowing how to live a good life. Knowing what's valuable in life and what's not," which speaks to the outcomes and benefits of education). Though each post stands on its own, and refers to a specific resource or point of view, the posts (more than 30,000 of them) are also intended to be taken together as a unified whole, an extended philosophical discussion of learning, technology, and wisdom. P.S. I love the thermometer example.
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This is a good discussion of the place of research in education. Benjamin Doxtdator takes Tom Bennett's researchED conference as a point of departure, noting that "Bennett's argument for evidence-based education has also largely been an argument to shore-up traditional practices in the face of new fads." It's not that we don't need a defense against fads. It's that we need a better defense. "Rather than carefully dissect errors in sociological studies of education, he (Bennett) takes incoherent pot shots," writes Doxtdator. The careful dissection is needed because it's not just fads that need to be criticized, but many of the assumptions inherent in traditional education and education research. This is a good intelligent read and the links (to Vince Ulam, to Nicki Lisa Cole, to Yong Zhao) are worth following.
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According to this article, "there are three elements to a culture: behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values." Issues arise when there are gaps between them, for example, "Maybe your company tells people to be consensus-builders, but promotes people who are solely authoritative decision makers (behavior-practices gap)." What I like about this characterization is that members of the culture don't need to share an objective, a common language, set of beliefs, or single ethic - the culture is built on actions, not attitudes. Behaviors, systems, and practices are all about how to interact, not how to think or believe. Maybe that wasn't the intent of the article, but that is the outcome.
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Remember Klout? It is a service that collects your activity on impact on various social media and gives you a ranking - your 'klout score'. Anyhow, Klout is being shut down. The explanation: "The Klout acquisition provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities but Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy." Because the Lithium page will probably disappear, here's the Metafilter story which will exist (for a while?) to provide historical context to those of you reading this post in the 2020s.The Metafilter author notes that "It's unknown what Klout's parent company will be doing with all that data."
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This is the debate in a nutshell: "online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it's started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits." So how can advertising possibly work online? "The Pi-hole team recommends a renewed focus on subscriptions, affiliate links, and curated endorsements for products and services that might truly interest users." As described in the article, Pi-hole is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi (that) blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps." The development of ad blocking technology is depicted in this article as being motivated by "resentment", but I think this really is the wrong word. They probably said "resistance."
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Here's the entire post in eLearning Africa: "EPICA, funded by the European Union research programme Horizon 2020, is a project 2018 - 2020 coordinated by ICDE with 4 partners from Africa and 4 partners from Europe. The project will develop and implement ePortfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa. For more information about the project: www.epica-initiative.africa." Related: The Learning Portfolio in Higher Education (40 page PDF).
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Transformative Learning and Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Systematic Review
Joshua P. DiPasquale, 2018/05/08
Joshua P. DiPasquale, 2018/05/08
A paper published last fall by William Hunter in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology called 'Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Systematic Review' caught my eye. It was is behind a paywall so I'm not even linking to it. But I wanted to follow up and conducted a search hoping to find a free copy of the paper. No luck, but I did find a 2017 dissertation by Bill Hunter's student called 'Transformative Learning and Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Systematic Review', which I reference here (74 page PDF). After a longish discussion of literature reviews in general, the core of the findings are presented after page 51, looking for (following Anderson, et.al.) indicators of instructional design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction. DiPasquale concludes "The presence of the instructor as a designer and facilitator is an imperative for ensuring that the type of critical thinking and reflection that are necessary for transformative learning are promoted during AODs." I think this goes beyond the evidence, but it's certainly discussed in the literature.
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Graphene: The next S-curve for semiconductors?
Gaurav Batra, Nick Santhanam, Kushan Surana, McKinsey, 2018/05/08
Gaurav Batra, Nick Santhanam, Kushan Surana, McKinsey, 2018/05/08
Good article on the future of graphene technology, a longish read but worth the time. Graphene is a one-atom tick layer of carbon atoms and it's "ideal for a range of applications, from battery technology to optoelectronics such as touch screens." But with technical and market issues prevailing, its widespread commercialization could take as much as 25 years. This report predicts "graphene adoption and market growth to come in three phases - enhancer, silicon replacement, and revolutionary electronics." Personally I see the greatest application coming in power technology, and this may be as little as a decade away.
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Copyright 2018 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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