Archives

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Some questions to use when discussing why we shouldn’t replace humans with AI (artificial intelligence) for learning
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2019/02/25
"All of our design and most of our assessments are created in an effort to help people know things," writes Dave Cormier, "and yet there is no clear agreement in education on what learning actually is." This point is especially salient when we ask what it would mean for an AI to function as a teacher. What would it need to know? The AI needs to know both the knower and whatever it is that they want to know - in the sense that they want to know it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Ed Tech Hype in Remission?
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/02/25
I'm not alone in seeing the decline in e-learning, but Michael Feldstein holds out hope for at least one part of it: He writes, "The one area in the market where I see something approaching hype, which I would characterize more as 'intense interest coupled with a lot of hand-wringing,' is in the Online Program Management (OPM) space." From where I sit this is pretty niche; the wider world of learning technology has passed beyond online programs (and passed beyond traditional education altogether). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School Your Target Audience with Customer Training Software
Christopher Pappas, MarTech Advisor, 2019/02/22
The case study just briefly mentioned at the beginning - Samsung Nation - is the most interesting part of the article (I will admit that as a Samsung user since the S3 I had never heard of Samsung Nation). The point here is that companies are turning to e-learning for customer support. Not a new story. The purpose of the article is to convince readers that they need an 'eLMS' (Extended LMS) to do this. They are specifically "intended for external partner training. This includes sales channels, vendors, franchisees, and, of course, customers." I wouldn't follow the advice in the article, though. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shift Happens 2
Jamai Blivin, Merrilea Mayo,, Innovate+Education, 2019/02/22
There's a lot happening in this report (48 page PDF) and I have to say that if your focus is traditional higher education then you had better take notice, because if these authors are right (and they probably are) then the outsode wprld is about to overwhelm you. "In this new ecosystem, learning has become incrementalized, increments of different sizes have become credentials, and each increment is both gated and signaled by passing an assessment, rather than a credit hour of seat time or a semester of enrollment." Once we begin down this path, there's no turning back". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Roots of Empathy
Allie Alayan, AACE Review, 2019/02/22
I'm not sure whether a baby counts as educational technology, but I'm going to accept the wide definition in order to link to this short item about the development of empathy being implemented in classrooms. It "is designed for teaching empathy to children between the ages of 5 to 13. Observing the emotional state of an infant is used to promote positive emotional and social development in children". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook Is Killing Onavo, Its Spyware VPN App
Andrew Heinzman, How-To Geek, 2019/02/22
For those who missed it: "Facebook offered a free VPN app called Onavo on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Unsurprisingly, Facebook spied on everyone who used that app. This has been going on for a few years, and it’s had real-world implications. According to Buzzfeed, data obtained by Onovo is the primary reason why Facebook bought WhatsApp". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
Lucinda McKnight, Andy Morgan, Journal of Education Policy, 2019/02/22
I'm not sure how long this SlideShare version of the paper, but you should download it while you can;  Microsoft will ak you login to download, but the ResearchGate download works). Here's the paywall version ($US43/hour, if you can believe it, and they wonder why people hate publishers). Here's the gist: a lot of people are promoting evidence-based education, which is drawn from evidence-based medicine, but they aren't as quick to took at the problems being found in evidence-based medicine. "There is no pure, superior version of scientifically produced truth in the form of the RCT or meta-analysis, as medicine well knows.  EBM has not yet fixed the problems it set out to solve... There is no excuse for education to continue to pretend that this superior truth". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Analysis — What If We Personalized Education Funding? How Routing Dollars to Students Instead of Schools Could Fund a More Nimble System
Travis Pillow, Paul Hill, The 74, 2019/02/27
The idea touted in the title is being floated by a publication created to support the charter school movement. It would also be supported by proponents of a voucher movement. I don't agree with it, but think it's important to look at the argument. As I read it, I consider the provision of other services - health care, say? From where I sit, it makes the most sense simply to fund the services directly and ensure that people can access them as needed, so we don't have the overhead of distrfibuting vouchers (or whatever), collecting payments, and all the rest. And it is moreover not clear what problem the use of vouchers solves. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs and the Master's Degree
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/02/27
You have to read to the end of the second page of this three-page article, but the gist is this: "the MicroMasters effort has become a branding and recruitment coup — whether for career acceleration or master's gateways — that should lay poaching worries to rest." While it may look like a very small number of students pass through the MicroMasters and into the institution, the number is still in the thousands, and moreover, "there was no record of them having ever had interest in UMUC before". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Advancing academia with Wikipedia
Sharon Aschaiek, University Affairs, 2019/02/27
Short description of how universities are designating Wikipedians in residence (WIR) to support the institutional mandate through the coordination of editing and other activities related to the online encyclopedia. "Wikimedia offers free recruitment, training and content creation support to institutions seeking WIRs. According to the organization, these services fall in line with its goal to encourage cultural and educational institutions to share their resources freely on Wikimedia sites". More...