3,033 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2017
    1. Frankly, it didn't really make an impression on me at all until I started writing this retitled post spurred by Frances Bell's "Reflections on Community in #Rhizo14 - more questions than answers."

      nonlinear connection emergence

    1. Res ear ch often isolates particular pieces of the complex puzzle in order to study them in detail. However useful this may be, it obscures the dynamism of the actual teaching and learning work that goes on, and cannot show the emergent and contingent nature of that work

      So is one example of this the teaching of vocabulary and grammar out of context of authentic reading and conversation?

    2. There must be room in a learning environment for a variety of expressions of agency to flourish.

      Love this.

    3. However, in order to make significant progress, and to make enduring strides in terms of setting objectives, pursuing goals and moving towards lifelong learning, learners need to make choices and employ agency in more self-direct ed ways.

      This is just what Naoko is doing by allowing students to choose their topics of research within the context of a language learning course.

    4. Agency is therefore a central concept in learning, at many levels an in many manifestations. It is a more general and more profound concept than the closely related terms autonomy, motivation and investment. One might say that autonomy, motivation and investment are in a sense products (or manifestations) of a person’s agency.

      Interesting.

    5. the multilayered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting, not only at the social level, but also at the physical and symbolic level

      Does this map to literary theory in any way?...

    6. any utterance can carry several layers of meaning

      And all those layers can be visualized through annotation: vocabulary, cultural context...

    7. “layer ed simultaneity.”

      Love that phrase.

    8. I like to use this image to illustrate that any utterance has a number of layers of meaning. It refers not only to the here and now, but also to the past and the future of the person or persons involved in the speech event, to the world around us, and to the identity that the speaker projects.

      Wow. Annotation fits quite nicely here as helping to visualize these layers in a slightly more user-friendly way than Escher.

    9. and they are dynamic and emergent, never finished or absolute.

      Come on, "not-yet-ness" (Collier).

    10. ecologically valid contexts, relationships, agency, motivation and identity.
    11. ecological perspective,

      Everything is inter-related. Language cannot be learned out of context, out of community.

    1. Learningto complete a whole task involves four levels ofinstruction: (a) the problem, (b) the tasks re-quired to solve the problem, (c) the operationsthat comprise the tasks, and (d) the actions thatcomprise the operations. Effective instructionshould engage students in all four levels of per-formance: the problem level, the task-level, theoperation-level, and the action-level.

      Steps is learning to complete a whole task. This could be an extension of our matrix.

    2. Van Merriénboer (1997) recommendedthat the first problem in a sequence should be aworked example that shows students the type ofwhole task that they will learn to complete.

      This is a great way to communicate/model a learning outcome.

    1. Adaptive Learning is data-driven and continually takes data from students and adapts their learning pathway to “change and improve over time for each student”.
    1. Consequently, our advice is simple: continue to train your networks on a single machine, until the training time becomes prohibitive.

      一定要对 数据加载时间、参数通信时间、计算时间有个明确的评估,不能为了并行而并行。能单机解决的问题就不着急上多机。

    2. odel parallelism can work well in practice, data parallelism is arguably the preferred approach for distributed systems and has been the focus of more research

      why ?

  2. Feb 2017
    1. Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, and Trump.

      “The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

      “It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

      -- Jonathan Rust, Cambridge University Psychometric Centre

    1. this kind of assessmen

      Which assessment? Analytics aren't measures. We need to be more forthcoming with faculty about their role in measuring student learning. Such as, http://www.sheeo.org/msc

    2. mastery of content that engages students in critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and self-directed learnin

      It's not "mastery of content" it's mastery of the skills to engage with content.

    1. professional forums

      I'm curious how platforms like Hypothesis, and more broadly the social practices afforded by open annotation, help create the conditions for new types of professionally-relevant (online) forums. I think a stance toward engagement with the political dimensions of learning is complementary to the work organizations like Hypothesis who are building tools and partnerships for a more democratic, peer-reviewed web. https://youtu.be/QCkm0lL-6lc

    2. to prompt and engage a dialogue

      One means of engaging such dialogue is through the public annotathon scheduled for February 27th through March 3rd, and which will occur right here - in the margins of this pre-print turned blog post. See my post for more information about the annotathon, and how to join and use Hypothesis.

    3. This pre-publication version of "The Learning Sciences in a New Era of U.S. Nationalism" is the featured text of an annotathon, scheduled for Monday, February 27th through Friday, March 3rd, in collaboration with The Politics of Learning Writing Collective and Cognition & Instruction. Thanks to Thomas Phillip, Susan Jurow, Shirin Vossoughi, Megan Bang, and Miguel Zavala for graciously agreeing to participate in the annotathon of their article, and to Noel Enyedy and Jamie Gravell for their assistance in organizing and promoting the event.

      Questions can be addressed here via Page Notes (a type of annotation attached to an entire document/URL, and not in-line), or via Twitter (@remikalir).

    1. Morris Pelzel on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

      the presentation and arrangement of symbolic data is crucial, and any given arrangement may be more or less conducive to discovery. That is why Engelbart’s observation about “playing” with and “rearranging” the materials we are dealing with strikes such a resonant chord. Even if we are only dealing with text, the ease of recombining and manipulating our words and phrases enables our writing to more quickly reach a suitable form of expression.

      as we are social animals, our intellects work most effectively, not in isolation but in connection with others. When thoughts and ideas are externally represented, they thereby enter to some degree a public space,

    1. Gardner Campbell on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

      even as modes of comprehension increase for some, modes of incomprehension increase for others. The person who sits with “Joe” as Joe demonstrates his new symbol-manipulating capacities reacts in ways that many of us may recognize

      ...

      It takes humility, and hospitality, to spend time with new ideas ... to go deep and go long with concepts that ask us to re-examine many things we take for granted.

    1. A reflective writing technique that encourages personal reflection, provides opportunities for all voices to be heard, and leads to deeper, more thoughtful conversations

      Shared Writing: This seems particularly useful for online conversations that are asynchronous, as it is based on reading statements, commenting on them, and passing the comments around.

    2. Hatful of Quotes

      Like this one, particularly if quotes are well-chosen, especially in a larger group that otherwise has not done much reading/thought about questions of privilege, discrimination, and marginalized experiences.

    3. circLE oFobJEcts

      I like this activity if the aim is to make personal connections and get to know the individuals involved in a learning group. As a result, probably best for a small group. Requires some preparation as participants have to be asked to bring an object to the meeting.

    4. 80Identity Groups

      Interesting activity. Question: Is this useful in a larger group, or only in a smaller group? The calling-out portion enables people to participate without talking, which accommodates larger numbers; but the exposure can be intimidating – particularly for students, who then may just stay put. Maybe start with "easy" identity groups – sports team supporters? – that people are willing to show? Or would this undermine what the conversation should be about?

      The discussion portion may get out of hand in a larger group; may need subgroup formation.

    1. re-lievo,

      Nice ¢25 word, here. Means "raised," as in embossed letters or bas relief. Pronounce "reh-LEE-vo," in case you, like me, need to pepper your conversation with unnecessary ornateness because you, like an Athenian, like to dazzle through "showy but false eloquence."

    1. Just as young children learn by comparison,

      I'm not picking up the meaning of this sentence. Thinking back to my younger years and different child studies, I assumed children learned by seeing, not comparison. If they are comparing, what are they comparing?

  3. Jan 2017
    1. Whether you're a student, parent, or teacher, this book is your key to unlocking the aha! moments that make math click -- and learning enjoyable.

      You had me already at the Coffee Cup picture over the equations! :)

    1. We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing, and cooking, as methods of life not as distinct studies.

      YES! Why are they taken away? We can add to this list coding, programming, renewable energies, and maybe even gardening. These will be the sustainable skills of the future.

    2. It keeps them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more useful, more capable

      Entirely because they are able to make neural connections which solidify and anchor learning in long-term memory. Student attention spans and interest have skyrocketed in classrooms with coding, robotics, music production, invention and innovation to solve a genuine problem in our society or world. I remember not wanting to teach my students without providing these opportunities because I felt I was doing such a disservice to their futures. Why do we allow non-relevant learning to continue? When will students need derivatives in their lives? When will they need factoring on a daily basis? They shouldn't be forced to learn them unless they are part of the solution to the problems they are faced or challenged with.

    3. Consciousness of its real import is still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused, and unrelated way

      This is what happens when we treat students and teachers as statistical data and numbers. If they aren't allowed to think for themselves and create relevant learning which addresses real-world problems, there isn't genuine challenge and application. I see many classrooms where content is 5-10 years old and is instantly disengaging because it's out of date. Why aren't more classrooms talking about and exploring our current political situation, possible trips to mars, renewable energy, how technology advances impact our society? I'm sure consciousness would be much stronger in these environments and half-heartedness would nearly disappear.

    4. There is little order of one sort where things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from activity. But out of occupation, out of doing things that are to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and coöperative way, there is born a discipline of its own kind and type.

      This is what my classroom looks like everyday, all day long. Students are in my art classes to produce, problem solve, learn from mistakes, learn from one another. They are actively engaged, the room gets messy. If an admin were to walk in, I'd hope they'd take a moment to observe and realize that what they are seeing is learning! Luckily I do have great admins so they do.

    5. with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses

      Learning with purpose! Where has this gone? Why is there no longer a greater purpose in most K-12 classrooms? It may have never been there to begin with but I believe if there is a purpose tied to social necessities, greater world good, solving cultural/global problems, many students would be more engaged and motivated to learn as well as rising stars.

    6. manual training

      Dewey spoke about this long before now and we still adhere to it, why is this? True innovations doesn't come from manuals nor does critical thinking and great problem solvers. Do we really still need manuals with the web and open source?

    7. an effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming

      What kind of society is being formed now? Conformist or free thinkers? It seems we are headed in the wrong direction if we don't offer choice to teachers and students about their learning and growth.

    8. it destroys our democracy

      The same could be said about standardized testing. Not that it's not important but it can't be the emphasis nor the entire focus.

    9. the progress made by the individual child

      Are we back in an age of educational individualism with our "personalized learning" etc? Should we be talking more about communal learning?

    1. PBL is the ongoing act of learning about different subjects simultaneously. This is achieved by guiding students to identify, through research, a real-world problem (local to global) developing its solution using evidence to support the claim, and presenting the solution through a multimedia approach based in a set of 21st-century tools.

      Interesting look at PBL and 21st century learning

    2. PBL is the ongoing act of learning about different subjects simultaneously. This is achieved by guiding students to identify, through research, a real-world problem (local to global) developing its solution using evidence to support the claim, and presenting the solution through a multimedia approach based in a set of 21st-century tools

      Interesting look at PBL AND 21st century learning.

    1. Paulo: “But we can also create space inside of the subsystem or the schooling system in order to occupy the space.” (p.203)

      In terms of music space, I think of rehearsal, but rehearsal is made possible by the discipline of practice. They are same coin.

      I live in the composition classroom both online and face-to-face. Are they rehearsal spaces? Yes. What other kinds of space can they be likened to?

      improv? studio? prompt? daily exercises?

    1. AI criticism is also limited by the accuracy of human labellers, who must carry out a close reading of the ‘training’ texts before the AI can kick in. Experiments show that readers tend to take longer to process events that are distant in time or separated by a time shift (such as ‘a day later’).
    2. Even though AI annotation schemes are versatile and expressive, they’re not foolproof. Longer, book-length texts are prohibitively expensive to annotate, so the power of the algorithms is restricted by the quantity of data available for training them.
    3. In most cases, this analysis involves what’s known as ‘supervised’ machine learning, in which algorithms train themselves from collections of texts that a human has laboriously labelled.
    1. Asking questions via social media that are intentionally designed to elicit responses can provide a plethora of useful responses. Why wait until an end-of-year survey to find out about an issue when you can poll/question students throughout the year via social media?

      It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

  4. Dec 2016
    1. Key points:

      1. Scale of data is especially good for large NNs
      2. Having a combination of HPC and AI skills is important to have optimal impact (handle scale challenges and bigger/complex NN)
      3. Most of the value right now comes from CNNS, FCs, RNNS. Unsupervised, GANs and others might be future but they are research topics right now.
      4. E2E DL might be relevant for some cases in future like speech -> transcript, Image -> captioning, text -> image
      5. Self driving cars might also move to E2E, but none of us have enough data image -> steer

      Workflow:

      1. Bias = Training error - Human error. Try Bigger model, run longer, New model architecture
      2. Variance = Dev error - Train error. Try More data, Regularization, New model architecture.
      3. Conflict between bias and variance is weaker in DL. We can have bigger model with more data.

      More data:

      1. Data synthesis/augmentation is becoming useful and popular: OCR (superpose alphabets on various images), Speech (Superpose various background noises), NLP(?) But does have drawbacks, if it is not representative
      2. Unified data warehouse helps leverage data usage across company

      Data set breakdown:

      1. Dev and test should come from same distribution. As we spend a lot of time optimizing for Dev accuracy.

      Progress plateaus above Human level performance:

      • But there is theoretical optimal error rate (Bayes rate)

      What to do when bias is high:

      • Look at examples of the ones machine got it wrong
      • Get labels from humans?
      • Error analysis: Segment training - identify segments where training error is higher than human.
      • Estimate bias/variance effect?

      How do you define human level performance: Example: Error of a panel of experts

      Size of data:

      1. How do you define a NN as small vs medium vs large?
      2. Is the reason large NN can leverage bigger data is because it would not cause overfitting unlike on smaller NNs?
    1. The team on Google Translate has developed a neural network that can translate language pairs for which it has not been directly trained. "For example, if the neural network has been taught to translate between English and Japanese, and English and Korean, it can also translate between Japanese and Korean without first going through English."

    1. This is not easy. Well-designed educational technology has often lacked a learning sciences base, and many research-based education products have lacked a compelling user-centered design. How can world-class user experience (UX) design— grounded in a fail-fast culture—and educational research— grounded in rigor—peacefully coexist?

      In this Pearson sounds more like an edtech company than a content publisher. I wonder at what point will Pearson release a full LMS product that competes directly with BB, D2L, etc?

      The tension in that last line on the cultural environments of technology vs academia is an important -and real-tension.

    1. Ninety-five percent of 12- to 17-year-olds already go online on a regular basis. They use social networks, and create and contribute to websites. Our work is focused on taking full advantage of the kinds of tools and technologies that have transformed every other aspect of life to power up and accelerate students’ learning. We need to do things differently, not just better.

      Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

    1. Skill Trees

      No representation of skill trees captures the concept completely, but what I hope is evident on this page is that any Badge, with its related Playlist, should be connected to other Badges and Playlists that come before (in this case, above) it, and it should be one of a few available choices (represented in this case by other Badges and Playlists on the same row), and that it leads to other Badges and Playlists (below it), and that what comes next has choices as well.

    1. I do sometimes get a lot of value out of my math or hardware skills, but I suspect I could teach someone the actually applicable math and hardware skills I have in less than a year. Spending five years in a school and a decade in industry to pick up those skills was a circuitous route to getting where I am.

      Wrong. If you just explained your skills to other people, like a textbook does, no one would understand, unless they have accumulated personal experience similar to yours -- which they would call, after the fact, "a circuitous route" to learning the textbook content.

  5. Nov 2016
    1. Speech, writing, math notation, various kinds of graphs, and musical notation are all examples of cognitive technologies. They are tools that help us think, and they can become part of the way we think -- and change the way we think.

      Computer interfaces can be cognitive technologies. To whatever degree an interface reflects a set of ideas or methods of working, mastering the interface provides mastery of those ideas or methods.

      Experts often have ways of thinking that they rarely share with others, for various reasons. Sometimes they aren't fully aware of their thought processes. The thoughts may be difficult to convey in speech or print. The thoughts may seem sloppy compared to traditional formal explanations.

      These thought processes often involve:

      • minimal canonical examples - simple models
      • heuristics for rapid reasoning about what might work

      Nielsen considers turning such thought processes into (computer) interfaces. "Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and operations does a principle suggest?"

    1. The technologies in learning the physics are:- To bring improvements in the students’ physics ability. To bring improvements in the negative reactions of students towards physics.

    1. Deep neural networks use multiple layers with each layer requiring it's own weight and bias.

      Every layer needs its own weights and bias. And in tensorflow, it is a good practice to put all weights inside a dictionary, which is easier for management.

    1. expected to generate more questions than answers

      I think any good course would do this. The deeper you look, the more there is to see.

    2. lifelong learning skills will serve liberal arts graduates

      Lifelong learning is essential for everyone, not just liberal arts grads. People in healthcare or engineering have to be able to adapt to changing times and technologies just like anyone else.

  6. Oct 2016
    1. On-Site Work

      This work was in schools with teachers, right? When foundations and funders of after school programs ask about how to "spread and scale" the work, it baffles me that they don't begin to answer their questions by turning to how to effectively bring the innovative after school work to teachers and students in schools. Working on the connections between in school and out of school learning is important!

    1. Devices connected to the cloud allow professors to gather data on their students and then determine which ones need the most individual attention and care.
    1. 这里要求,输入的数据时成对存在,每一对都有一个公共的label,是否是同一个类别。

      Verification signal

    1. In machine learning, the term "ground truth" refers to the accuracy of the training set's classification for supervised learning techniques.

      Ground truth in machine learning

    1. are parents seeking a quality education for their children and the real-life costs of English-only education

      parents wanting better education because of the developing system of teaching

    2. We are trying to go forward

      improve learning

    3. bring languages into our schools—our Native languages and many more; it spreads our language around

      its true they need to preserve the languages so more ppl learn it and so it won't die

    4. allowing it to offer dual-language instruction

      offering more instruction=more children to learn

    1. For G Suite users in primary/secondary (K-12) schools, Google does not use any user personal information (or any information associated with a Google Account) to target ads.

      In other words, Google does use everyone’s information (Data as New Oil) and can use such things to target ads in Higher Education.

  7. Sep 2016
    1. design this class, I found I was seeking an experience of learning

      Just highlighting and annotating the obvious, lest we forget. There is so much of design = pathway to objectives that I want to linger over, signal boost, Mia's fundamental point: design = the learning experience. A crucial distinction.

    1. When educators are actively experimenting in the classroom, students in turn are more likely to confidently take creative risks themselves. It is also important that educators provide opportunities for students to take ownership of their learning and depart from teacher-defined outcomes without being penalized

      Why isn't this in the Horizon HE report? It's more applicable to HE students who have greater opportunities and resources for experiential/self-directed learning.

    1. Regarding the major obstacles for higher education, blending formal and informal learning is considered one of the solvable challenges
    1. learn the meanings of all these things

      learn others culture from their stand point

    2. The naive realist assumes that love, snow, marriage, worship, animals, death, food, and hundreds of other things have essen-tially the same meaning to all human beings

      Set aside belief in native realism to understand essential meaning. Be in others shoes to understand perspective.

    3. Discovering the insider’s view is a different spe-cies of knowledge from one that rests mainly on the outsider’s view, even when the outsider is a trained social scientist

      have an inside view rather than watch from the outside

    4. Rather than studying people, ethnography means learning from people

      involves making inferences and knowing back round knowledge

    5. ethnography means learning from people

      Enthrography is when you learn from the people in the culture. You don't study how they are in their culture but they teach you something

    1. Data sharing over open-source platforms can create ambiguous rules about data ownership and publication authorship, or raise concerns about data misuse by others, thus discouraging liberal sharing of data.

      Surprising mention of “open-source platforms”, here. Doesn’t sound like these issues are absent from proprietary platforms. Maybe they mean non-institutional platforms (say, social media), where these issues are really pressing. But the wording is quite strange if that is the case.

    2. Activities such as time spent on task and discussion board interactions are at the forefront of research.

      Really? These aren’t uncontroversial, to say the least. For instance, discussion board interactions often call for careful, mixed-method work with an eye to preventing instructor effect and confirmation bias. “Time on task” is almost a codeword for distinctions between models of learning. Research in cognitive science gives very nuanced value to “time spent on task” while the Malcolm Gladwells of the world usurp some research results. A major insight behind Competency-Based Education is that it can allow for some variance in terms of “time on task”. So it’s kind of surprising that this summary puts those two things to the fore.

    3. Research: Student data are used to conduct empirical studies designed primarily to advance knowledge in the field, though with the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions. Application: Student data are used to inform changes in institutional practices, programs, or policies, in order to improve student learning and support. Representation: Student data are used to report on the educational experiences and achievements of students to internal and external audiences, in ways that are more extensive and nuanced than the traditional transcript.

      Ha! The Chronicle’s summary framed these categories somewhat differently. Interesting. To me, the “application” part is really about student retention. But maybe that’s a bit of a cynical reading, based on an over-emphasis in the Learning Analytics sphere towards teleological, linear, and insular models of learning. Then, the “representation” part sounds closer to UDL than to learner-driven microcredentials. Both approaches are really interesting and chances are that the report brings them together. Finally, the Chronicle made it sound as though the research implied here were less directed. The mention that it has “the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions” may be strategic, as applied research meant to influence “decision-makers” is more likely to sway them than the type of exploratory research we so badly need.

    1. The queue of electronic hands could take so long to get through that some students abandoned hope and lowered their hands while others got into the habit of raising their hand pre-emptively just so they’d have a spot in line if an idea came into their head later on.
    1. often private companies whose technologies power the systems universities use for predictive analytics and adaptive courseware
    2. the use of data in scholarly research about student learning; the use of data in systems like the admissions process or predictive-analytics programs that colleges use to spot students who should be referred to an academic counselor; and the ways colleges should treat nontraditional transcript data, alternative credentials, and other forms of documentation about students’ activities, such as badges, that recognize them for nonacademic skills.

      Useful breakdown. Research, predictive models, and recognition are quite distinct from one another and the approaches to data that they imply are quite different. In a way, the “personalized learning” model at the core of the second topic is close to the Big Data attitude (collect all the things and sense will come through eventually) with corresponding ethical problems. Through projects vary greatly, research has a much more solid base in both ethics and epistemology than the kind of Big Data approach used by technocentric outlets. The part about recognition, though, opens the most interesting door. Microcredentials and badges are a part of a broader picture. The data shared in those cases need not be so comprehensive and learners have a lot of agency in the matter. In fact, when then-Ashoka Charles Tsai interviewed Mozilla executive director Mark Surman about badges, the message was quite clear: badges are a way to rethink education as a learner-driven “create your own path” adventure. The contrast between the three models reveals a lot. From the abstract world of research, to the top-down models of Minority Report-style predictive educating, all the way to a form of heutagogy. Lots to chew on.

    1. I wonder what would have happened if someone I trust had provided me with a list of resources and people she admired when I started out in online learning and open education four years ago.

      Interesting scenario. Sounds quite a bit like the role of this one person in grad school who gives you the boost you need. Usually not your director, who’s more of a name than a resource. Possibly someone with a relatively low status. It becomes something of an “informal advisor” role. “Trust” is indeed key, here. My first reaction reading this was to balk at the “trust” part, because critical thinking skills warrant other methods to gather resources. But this is a situation where trust does matter quite a bit. Not that the resources are necessarily better. But there’s much less overhead involved if rapport has been established. In fact, it’s often easy to get through a text or to start a conversation with someone using knowledge of the angle through which they’ve been recommended. “If she told me to talk to so-and-so, chances are that this person won’t take it the wrong way if we start discussing this issue.”

  8. Aug 2016
  9. Jul 2016
    1. In addition, the discontinuity between classroom theory and practical learning had implications for both the quality of learning and the learners' levels of motivation.
    1. what do we do with that information?

      Interestingly enough, a lot of teachers either don’t know that such data might be available or perceive very little value in monitoring learners in such a way. But a lot of this can be negotiated with learners themselves.

    2. E-texts could record how much time is spent in textbook study. All such data could be accessed by the LMS or various other applications for use in analytics for faculty and students.”
    3. Alexandra “Sasha” Milgram, is played by Winona Ryder, and she serves as the on-screen stand-in for the film audience
    4. not as a way to monitor and regulate
    5. Internet of Things as a space

      Only partially built up.

    1. Large lecture classes may go through the content too quickly for the typical student to understand. That's why so many schools follow the practice of breaking the class cohort into smaller sections led by teaching assistants.
    1. which applicants are most likely to matriculate
    2. Data collection on students should be considered a joint venture, with all parties — students, parents, instructors, administrators — on the same page about how the information is being used.
    3. "We know the day before the course starts which students are highly unlikely to succeed,"

      Easier to do with a strict model for success.

    1. focus on teaching, not learning

      Heard of SoLT? Or of the “Centre of Learning and Teaching”? Been using that order for a while, but nobody has commented upon that, to this day. There surely are some places where learning precedes learning in name and/or in practice. But the “field” is teaching-focused.

    2. real world, authentic purpose

      Going back to the “projects” in the Maker Movement. Not “project-based learning” with projects set through the curriculum. But the kind of “quest” that allows for learning along the way and which may switch at a moment’s notice.

    3. real learning that sticks with us over time
    1. Set project work with explicit networking goals and a phil project as part of it. Mandate that students find off campus resources which they curate and present to class (either online, on a collab blog, or in class), reward students with facetime on their blog – good posts and comments get lecturer feedback,.

      Great ideas here.

  10. inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
    1. half-spaces sepa-rated by a hyperplane19.

      传统算法的局限,在图像和语音领域,需要对不相干的钝感和对几个很小地方差异的敏感

    2. Deep learning

      四大金刚中的三个

    3. The key aspect of deep learning is that these layers of features are not designed by human engineers: they are learned from data using a general-purpose learning procedure.

      深度学习的最重要的一方面就是多层特征自动学习

    4. most practitioners use a procedure called stochastic gradient descent (SGD).

      随机梯度下降算法,讲的很好

    5. , The chain rule of derivatives tells us how two small effects (that of a small change of x on y, and that of y on z) are composed.

      我擦!原来如此!!!

    6. The backpropagation procedure to compute the gradient of an objective function with respect to the weights of a multilayer stack of modules is nothing more than a practical application of the chain rule for derivatives.

      反向传播过程来计算一个具有多层模块权重的目标函数的梯度其实不过是求导链式规则实际应用。

    1. 根据评论区 @山丹丹@啸王 的提醒,更正了一些错误(用斜体显示),在此谢谢各位。并根据自己最近的理解,增添了一些东西(用斜体显示)。如果还有错误,欢迎大家指正。第一个问题:为什么引入非线性激励函数?如果不用激励函数(其实相当于激励函数是f(x) = x),在这种情况下你每一层输出都是上层输入的线性函数,很容易验证,无论你神经网络有多少层,输出都是输入的线性组合,与没有隐藏层效果相当,这种情况就是最原始的感知机(Perceptron)了。正因为上面的原因,我们决定引入非线性函数作为激励函数,这样深层神经网络就有意义了(不再是输入的线性组合,可以逼近任意函数)。最早的想法是sigmoid函数或者tanh函数,输出有界,很容易充当下一层输入(以及一些人的生物解释balabala)。第二个问题:为什么引入Relu呢?第一,采用sigmoid等函数,算激活函数时(指数运算),计算量大,反向传播求误差梯度时,求导涉及除法,计算量相对大,而采用Relu激活函数,整个过程的计算量节省很多。第二,对于深层网络,sigmoid函数反向传播时,很容易就会出现梯度消失的情况(在sigmoid接近饱和区时,变换太缓慢,导数趋于0,这种情况会造成信息丢失,参见 @Haofeng Li 答案的第三点),从而无法完成深层网络的训练。第三,Relu会使一部分神经元的输出为0,这样就造成了网络的稀疏性,并且减少了参数的相互依存关系,缓解了过拟合问题的发生(以及一些人的生物解释balabala)。当然现在也有一些对relu的改进,比如prelu,random relu等,在不同的数据集上会有一些训练速度上或者准确率上的改进,具体的大家可以找相关的paper看。多加一句,现在主流的做法,会在做完relu之后,加一步batch normalization,尽可能保证每一层网络的输入具有相同的分布[1]。而最新的paper[2],他们在加入bypass connection之后,发现改变batch normalization的位置会有更好的效果。大家有兴趣可以看下。

      ReLU的好

    1. Unsupervised Learning of 3D Structure from Images Authors: Danilo Jimenez Rezende, S. M. Ali Eslami, Shakir Mohamed, Peter Battaglia, Max Jaderberg, Nicolas Heess (Submitted on 3 Jul 2016) Abstract: A key goal of computer vision is to recover the underlying 3D structure from 2D observations of the world. In this paper we learn strong deep generative models of 3D structures, and recover these structures from 3D and 2D images via probabilistic inference. We demonstrate high-quality samples and report log-likelihoods on several datasets, including ShapeNet [2], and establish the first benchmarks in the literature. We also show how these models and their inference networks can be trained end-to-end from 2D images. This demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of learning to infer 3D representations of the world in a purely unsupervised manner.

      The 3D representation of a 2D image is ambiguous and multi-modal. We achieve such reasoning by learning a generative model of 3D structures, and recover this structure from 2D images via probabilistic inference.

    1. When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning as standard practice for improved new task performance.

      Learning w/o Forgetting: distilled transfer learning

    1. encourages students to “steal” and cite ideas from each other’s hypothes.is annotations

      This is a neat idea, but do you think that this inhibits some of the students from annotating to their full potential? If I had a great idea, I might save it for myself instead of having someone else "steal" it.

  11. Jun 2016
    1. If only 2% – 5% of all faculty and their students (who are doing renewable assignments) were active creators and improvers of OER, that would likely be sufficient.
    1. «Les professeurs qui publient dans une revue disciplinaire n'ont pas toujours le temps, ni la reconnaissance, pour publier dans d'autres publications sur leurs projets ou leurs innovations pédagogiques, explique Anastassis Kozanitis. S'ils le font, ces publications hors discipline ne sont pas reconnues pour leurs demandes de subvention. C'est un frein majeur à la diffusion des recherches dans le domaine au Canada.»
    1. Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist

      How can we modernize our current education to fit the unknown needs of the future?

    2. but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”

      Or even a better question: How do we use these tools to help children learn, and acquire skills that they need?

    1. nothing we did is visible to our analytics systems

      If it’s not counted, does it count?

    1. In this Discussion blog you will find: #DevtIDEAS Debates videos and summaries (a series of live online ‘webinars’ that brought several practitioners and researchers to debate and share new ideas), editorials from key global international development researchers and and practitioners, and a collection of posts that feature multimedia videos and graphics.

      Development as a field continues to evolve. Ideas that turn into experience generate new ideas and lessons. New ideas inform new experiences, and these are typically debated by those involved in development work.

      You can read and watch the debates and discussions that took place over the past two years complementing the IDRC publication International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects.

    1. Volunteer Coaches recruit teams of girls to work with female mentors.

      A lot hinges on those mentors. Apparently, they’re not exclusively technical, which might be an important point. The mentoring is a big part of the learning experience, surely. But there’s a certain level of complexity involved when we start discussing mentorships.

    1. It shifted its work to faculty-driven initiatives.

      DIY, grassroots, bottom-up… but not learner-driven.

    2. learning agenda on learning analytics
    3. Learning analytics cannot be left to the researchers, IT leadership, the faculty, the provost or any other single sector alone.
    4. An executive at a large provider of digital learning tools pushed back against what he saw as Thille’s “complaint about capitalism.”

      Why so coy?

      R.G. Wilmot Lampros, chief product officer for Aleks, says the underlying ideas, referred to as Knowledge Space Theory, were developed by professors at the University of California at Irvine and are in the public domain. It's "there for anybody to vet," he says. But McGraw-Hill has no more plans to make its analytics algorithms public than Google would for its latest search algorithm.

      "I know that there are a few results that our customers have found counterintuitive," Mr. Lampros says, but the company's own analyses of its algebra products have found they are 97 percent accurate in predicting when a student is ready to learn the next topic.

      As for Ms. Thille's broader critique, he is unpersuaded. "It's a complaint about capitalism," he says. The original theoretical work behind Aleks was financed by the National Science Foundation, but after that, he says, "it would have been dead without business revenues."

      MS. THILLE stops short of decrying capitalism. But she does say that letting the market alone shape the future of learning analytics would be a mistake.

    5. a debate over who should control the field of learning analytics

      Who Decides?

    1. What teachers want in a data dashboard

      Though much of it may sound trite and the writeup is somewhat awkward (diverse opinions strung together haphazardly), there’s something which can help us focus on somewhat distinct attitudes towards Learning Analytics. Much of it hinges on what may or may not be measured. One might argue that learning happens outside the measurement parameters.

    2. timely

      Time-sensitive, mission-critical, just-in-time, realtime, 24/7…

    3. Data “was something you would use as an autopsy when everything was over,” she said.

      The autopsy/biopsy distinction can indeed be useful, here. Leading to insight. Especially if it’s not about which one is better. A biopsy can help prevent something in an individual patient, but it’s also a dangerous, potentially life-threatening operation. An autopsy can famously identify a “cause of death” but, more broadly, it’s been the way we’ve learnt a lot about health, not just about individual patients. So, while Teamann frames it as a severe limitation, the “autopsy” part of Learning Analytics could do a lot to bring us beyond the individual focus.

    1. While generally misused today, analytics can (theoretically) be used to predict and personalize many facets of teaching & learning, inc. pace, complexity, content, and more.
    1. educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies

      This Systems or "factory farming" approach to education seems antithetical to (and virtually guaranteed to flummox) a community-based, engaged, serendipitous and spontaneous learning explosion in traditional Higher Ed. Where are some cracks and crevices where the System has failed to snuff out the accidental life of learning?

    2. more student engagement beyond the walls of a school.

      Guest users in Moodle - can we make it easier to get them into the space to engage with students? No more boring forums when the community members or guest speakers in a f-2-f class can contribute. What about a Google form for requests? Is there a way to limit guests to only one forum?

    1. I have Serious Rant-y Thoughts on requiring that students inhabit public spaces in professional contexts, and I do wonder how much a class hashtag is useful beyond self-promotion of the course and its amazing instructor.

      You may consult input from amazing people like @GoogleGuacamole and @actualham who have very intentionally integrated (not just mentioning or requiring) Twitter use in their courses and implicated its value in students' connections with their professional network.

    1. Atl=xtifl= 0MAXPOOL(RELU(CONV(Etl1)))l >0(1)^Atl=RELU(CONV(Rtl))(2)Etl= [RELU(Atl^Atl);RELU(^AtlAtl)](3)Rtl=CONVLSTM(Et1l;Rt1l;Rtl+1)(4)

      Very unique network structure. Prediction results look promising.

    1. the LMS is a platform students will never again use outside of school

      Unless we integrate such a platform in something else.

    2. similar to picking texts for the course well in advance

      Though the advice makes a lot of sense, leaving it aside makes for a very empowering experience.

  12. May 2016
    1. “learners must be actively engaged in learning” to achieve deep understanding (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005, p. 10).

      This might be a useful reference for further study into active learning

    1. the algorithm was somewhat more accurate than a coin flip

      In machine learning it's also important to evaluate not just against random, but against how well other methods (e.g. parole boards) do. That kind of analysis would be nice to see.

    1. Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click.
    1. Identifying issues important in their lives and community, and deciding on one to address

      Sometimes this takes weeks or even months. I remember taking a walk with an art teacher several years ago, and I asked him how a particular student was doing in his class, and specifically what he was working on because it was hard for me to figure out how to get him connected to my work in English. It was November, just before Thanksgiving, and my colleague said, "I haven't figured out what his project will be yet," he said, before going on to explain a couple of things he had tried without success. I was struck with how patient he was being in letting the project come to the student, and not forcing him into a prescribed curriculum. Waiting is so hard, yet the work produced once there is a "flow" for a student makes it worth the wait. This has strong implications for school structures however! We need to be with students for longer periods of time. It also has implications for how groups work together. Perhaps a student who hasn't found his/her project yet can help others?

    2. High unemployment■■Racial discrimination■■Neighborhood violence■■Deportation of undocumented immigrants■■High cost of college attendance■■Juvenile justice

      Funny thing is, one can imagine that students -- at least my students in the Bronx -- would come up with a similar list. They have! But you can't bring it to them. There are shades and subtleties that are important in any group's list of topics. Like my students wanted to explore why people from the Bronx are not treated the same as people from elsewhere.

    1. To borrow a phrase from libraries and archives, how do we get to a point where we curate connections rather than curating content?

      connections over content. yes!

    1. Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there must be learners. There are only two non-miraculous ways for learners to come into existence: they must either evolve or be designed and built by learners that evolved. Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error — and without the errors the trials wouldn’t accomplish anything.
    1. My experimentation with open pedagogy – and my attempts to guide students’ learning with/in and across open platforms – was a social endeavor that invited reciprocal networking.
  13. Apr 2016
    1. Generally the literatures related to transformational learning hinge on active student engagement in the learning process and on students assuming responsibility for their learning. Transformative learning, self-directed learning, experiential learning, and collaborative learning, each of which aims to enhance students’ engagement,are some of the pedagogical approaches that are widely described and evaluated in the literature. In addition to active student engagement, another key feature of transformational learning is transformational teaching. In order for students’ role to change, the role and responsibility of faculty must change as well.

      Active learning, engaged learning, experiential learning, and owning the learning best happens with transformational teaching.

    1. It is easy to allow technology to replace memorization and other skills. We should be mindful of what we allow it to replace. Martin Luther King had a large store of writings memorized -- and it served him well when he wrote the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

      We need more tools that will aid skill development instead of replacing useful skills. Spaced repetition software to assist memorization is one example. Phrase-by-phrase music training programs are another. The same ideas can be applied to memorization of text.

    1. We should have control of the algorithms and data that guide our experiences online, and increasingly offline. Under our guidance, they can be powerful personal assistants.

      Big business has been very militant about protecting their "intellectual property". Yet they regard every detail of our personal lives as theirs to collect and sell at whim. What a bunch of little darlings they are.

    1. A PLN is a self-directed system meant to support lifelong learning through the development, maintenance, and leveraging of digital networks.
    1. Connected Learning is based on the notion that learning is about expanding the connections between people and information within a learner's personal network
    1. We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that.

      Not only do schools not do that, traditionally they have "taught" creativity and curiosity out of students.