2,073 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2017
    1. Information from this will be used to develop learning analytics software features, which will have these functions: Description of learning engagement and progress, Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress, Prediction of learning progress, and Prescription (recommendations) for improvement of learning progress.

      As good a summary of Learning Analytics as any.

    1. David Smetters (in the G+ locked-in comments):

      A similar article could have been written 10 years ago about QTI 2.x. The vendors had coalesced around QTI 1.x, tweaking it as needed. Then QTI 2.x was created, but not with involvement by the vendors who implemented QTI 1.x. Somewhere along the way, QTI 2.x was pulled from the IMS website, only to reappear many months later, unchanged. There has been little adoption of QTI 2.x in the market and it still causes confusion for newcomers who think it's the "standard" they should be following.

    2. Obviously, securing student data is critical. There are a lot of data sharing services that shouldn’t be offered until that security can be guaranteed.
    1. Better yet, tangerines and oranges.

      Is that about the colours favoured by both platforms? Does sound like it weakens the point (going from comparing fruits to comparing one citrus with another). The point, eventually, is that Canvas and Moodle occupy a similar space: course-based “learning” management systems.

    1. Technology is about trade-offs; understanding those tradeoffs is essential to making informed decisions. There’s never a “right” choice; only a right choice for you.
    1. a Brazilian Portuguese language textbook they’ve written and maintained for more than 50 years

      !! (Wondering about the “but we worked a lot on this” comment against OER.)

    1. if cross-format identifiers like DOIs are used, annotations made in one format (eg, EPUB) can be seen in the same document published in other formats (eg, HTML, PDF) and in other locations.

      Whaa..? This sounds seriously hard. But remarkably clever.

    1. We know that there are few sticky security and implementation issues

      Which is probably why @judell’s tate doesn’t show up in Chrome on my system and there’s weirdness with the scrolling once we accept to load unsafe scripts.

    1. created by people working together on their own.
    2. I see somebody who is not only not talking about pedagogy, I see someone who is trying to destroy open pedagogy, by destroying communities and replacing them with companies

      Strong words.

    3. And I see no good reason why we should require the production of educators and students to be fair game for resellers who want to pluck it for free out of the commons and charge money for it to those not lucky enough to be a part of our community.

      To many a student, the notion that somebody else could profit from their “free labour” is particularly offputting. Including (or especially) those who prepare to become the heads of commercial entities.

    4. This is certainly how the debate about licensing has played out.

      In fact, Rory McGreal adamantly argues that CC-BY-NC material is too restrictive to be called “OER”. We had a short exchange about this. In Quebec’s Cégep system, NC was the rule for reasons which are probably easy to understand. So the focus is on licenses, in this scene, not on practices. Hence the whole thing about Open Textbooks. Often made me wonder if any of these people had compared textbook-based teaching to any of the other modalities. In my teaching, textbooks are a problem, even when they’re open. Sure, some of those problems can be solved when you have access to the code and can produce your own textbook from that. That’s the typical solution offered in the GitHub sphere:

      Just Fork It!

      But the core problem remains: if you’re teaching with a textbook, you may not really be building knowledge with learners.

      (Should probably move this here.)

    5. Wiley (and a cluster of other OER advocates) insist that creators must use a CC-by license, allowing commercial use, if they want their work to be considered open.

      Ha! So that’s where the comment about Rory McGreal should come in.

    6. Lumen Learning is in the same business as  Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education: selling textbooks (directly or indirectly) to students.

      Strong words.

    7. Publishers previously lost a lot of revenue from textbooks because many students bought secondhand, rented, pirated or just skipped buying textbooks altogether. Inclusive-access programs have changed that.
    8. professors

      Here’s one:

    9. Docker eventually sold out to (I believe) Bell and the professors did just fine.

      How times have changed.

    1. A suite of complex online tools was designed to assist with analyzing student behavior in the LMS and with the development of interactive learning objects at the activity level.
    1. When you think the problem to be solved is the high cost of textbooks, inclusive access programs and OER adoption are just two competing approaches to solving the problem.

      There was an interesting example of this during a short conference on digital textbooks, back in late 2014. Cindy Ives interim VP Academic at Athabasca (!) presented the etext pilot project in partnership with publishers. Ives’s approach was quite pragmatic and there’s nothing wrong with doing a pilot project on something like this. By that time, Ives was already involved in OER projects. It still struck a chord with those of us who care about OER, including Éric Francoeur who took an active part in the event and did work to create a free textbook through international and interlinguistic collaboration.

      To me, a key notion from the ‘r’ in “OER” is the distinction with those content bundles we still call “textbooks”. Sure, it’s already in the 5-R model. But the “Remix” idea in music is to a large extent about unbundling.

    2. Students often lose access to their materials at the end of the semester Students also often lose access to their own work as well, in the form of highlights, notes, and other annotations

      Hence the need for #OpenAnnotation to pair up with some of the other opens. Hypothes.is people are doing their part, but still.

    3. Publishers can compete with free textbooks by making their more-restrictive-than-all-right-reserved offerings 70% more affordable.

      Sounds a bit like what Clay Shirky was trying to say about the Napster moment coming to Higher Education, five years ago. Skimmed the critique of Shirky’s piece and was mostly nodding in agreement with it. But there might be a discussion about industries having learnt from the Napster moment. After all, the recording industry has been able to withstand this pressure for close to twenty years. Also sounds like this could be a corollary to Chris Anderson’s (in)famous promotion of the “free” (as in profit) model for businesses, almost ten years ago. In other words, we might live another reshaping of “free” in the next 9-10 years.

    4. the way of MOOCs – a few years of wild hype about revolutionary potential followed by inevitable domestication by the academy.

      That sure is one way to put it. Same expectation for #NGDLE?

    5. By focusing on cost, the article takes a page directly from the publishers’ playbook.

      Precisely. To me, this comment also applies to the focus on replacing existing solutions, especially textbooks, but also any kind of content. OER is convenient as a label for a specific thing, related to licenses, but associated with cost (just like “free software” interpreted as no-cost instead of «libre»).

    1. LRSs will typically only have minor data analysis built in as it's specific to the type of information you are trying to track.
    1. “Including open in the list of examples for educational leadership is important because it brings it to the forefront. When I went up for promotion, I took a risk because engaging in open practice was not listed as an example of educational leadership, but not everyone is going to do that. Whereas if it’s strictly laid out it raises the profile for those who haven’t thought about open education and also shows that it is valued by the university as being a form of educational leadership,”
    2. Excerpt from the UBC Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures (RPT): Evidence of educational leadership is required for tenure/promotion in the Educational Leadership stream… It can include, but is not limited to…Contributions to the practice and theory of teaching and learning literature, including publications in peer-reviewed and professional journals, conference publications, book chapters, textbooks and open education repositories / resources.
    1. Note that Speak the Words only works in Chrome. 

      Ugh! Conceivably, it also works in Chromium. But this is the kind of thing which really changes the way a feature is used.

    1. connecting disparate online spaces so they relate to each other in synthesized whole
    2. universal design
    3. understanding how Web applications work “under the hood” and how databases and scripts interact

      Reminds me of a Web version of the Raspberry Pi approach to digital making.

    4. considering the interplay between design and content
    5. organizing and architecting an online space
    6. The things they learn to do in WordPress are generalizable to other systems and other online spaces
    7. The other reason I worry about our dependence on WordPress is that we run the risk of recreating the very dynamic that Domain of One’s Own seeks to challenge
    8. At UMW, the vast majority of our students’ work on Domain of One’s Own happens within WordPress, and increasingly I admit I worry about this.
    9. As you all know, I’m sure, the title Domain of One’s own comes from a long essay published by Virginia Woolf in 1929.

      Did not know that. Sorry, not steeped in Anglophone lit or in DoOO lore. Very interesting, though.

    1. Moodle is a modular authoring tool for courses but at this time does not create SCORM packages.

      Is there something about SCORM authoring in the Moodle roadmap? That could be very interesting.

    1. Link suggestions don’t even have to live in a separate meta box.

      Years ago, link suggestions were pretty high on my wishlist for WP. Did notice early implementations of this feature but haven’t used the improved version. It does sound like the current version is pretty useful and can lead to something interesting. Might also work well with annotations, come to think of it.

    1. Here at Yoast, we are worried about the use of new technology combined with the introduction of big new concepts.
  2. Oct 2017
    1. I'm not being thin-skinned, but imagine if you had a room full of people attacking your music. Well, yeah, I guess that's what being in a band is all about?!
    1. By giving student data to the students themselves, and encouraging active reflection on the relationship between behavior and outcomes, colleges and universities can encourage students to take active responsibility for their education in a way that not only affects their chances of academic success, but also cultivates the kind of mindset that will increase their chances of success in life and career after graduation.
    2. If students do not complete the courses they need to graduate, they can’t progress.

      The #retention perspective in Learning Analytics: learners succeed by completing courses. Can we think of learning success in other ways? Maybe through other forms of recognition than passing grades?

    1. The flexibility and social nature of how technology infuses other aspects of our lives is not captured by the model of Personalized Instruction, which focuses on the isolated individual’s personal path to a fixed end-point. To truly harness the power of modern technology, we need a new vision for educational technology (Enyedy, 2014: 16).
    2. There is no firm evidence that adaptive learning systems are leading to better course grades or course completion.
    3. A look at the Hype Cycle (see here for Wikipedia’s entry on the topic and for criticism of the hype of Hype Cycles) of the IT research and advisory firm, Gartner, indicates that both big data and adaptive learning have now slid into the ‘trough of disillusionment’, which means that the market has started to mature, becoming more realistic about how useful the technologies can be for organizations.
    1. Overall, across the ALMAP trials, adding adaptivity to developmental and gateway courses had no effect on course completion rates after controlling for students’ initial achievement levels under any of the three possible use cases.
    1. It’s precisely to meet these demands that Cegid recently launched a Learning Management System (LMS) specifically dedicated to Healthcare, a sector that is converting more and more to cloud-based systems.

      Norman's Law of eLearning Tool Convergence

      Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

    1. The learning analytics and education data mining discussed in this handbook hold great promise. At the same time, they raise important concerns about security, privacy, and the broader consequences of big data-driven education. This chapter describes the regulatory framework governing student data, its neglect of learning analytics and educational data mining, and proactive approaches to privacy. It is less about conveying specific rules and more about relevant concerns and solutions. Traditional student privacy law focuses on ensuring that parents or schools approve disclosure of student information. They are designed, however, to apply to paper “education records,” not “student data.” As a result, they no longer provide meaningful oversight. The primary federal student privacy statute does not even impose direct consequences for noncompliance or cover “learner” data collected directly from students. Newer privacy protections are uncoordinated, often prohibiting specific practices to disastrous effect or trying to limit “commercial” use. These also neglect the nuanced ethical issues that exist even when big data serves educational purposes. I propose a proactive approach that goes beyond mere compliance and includes explicitly considering broader consequences and ethics, putting explicit review protocols in place, providing meaningful transparency, and ensuring algorithmic accountability. Export Citation: Plain Text (APA
    1. The Handbook of Learning Analytics is designed to meet the needs of a new and growing field. It aims to balance rigor, quality, open access and breadth of appeal and was devised to be an introduction to the current state of research. The Handbook is a snapshot of the field in 2017 and features a range of prominent authors from the learning analytics and educational data mining research communities. The chapters have been peer reviewed by committed members of these fields and are being published with the endorsement of both the Society for Learning Analytics Research and the International Society for Educational Data Mining. We hope you will find the Handbook of Learning Analytics a useful and informative resource.
    1. “Knewton is a Ferrari, but we’re in a Kia market. Ferraris require more maintenance. It’s more complicated to use Knewton.”
    2. “The notion that adaptive technology is the reason why one school should choose one company’s content over OER (open educational resources) or other options” has become a staple of many publisher’s marketing claims, says Trace Urdan, an education market analyst.
    3. Pearson is “investing heavily in product development and is developing its own in-house adaptive learning capability,”
  3. Sep 2017
    1. the LMS is the minivan of education. Everyone has them and needs them, but there’s a certain shame having one in the driveway.
    1. The manager then starts writing a request for proposals. This process often starts with an email asking other campus-technology officers to share their own versions. After getting three or four of them, sometimes from wildly different types of colleges with wildly different needs, the manager may start cutting and pasting together bits from the various documents. There is a lot of pasting, but not so much cutting. Lists of requirements are added together, and then added to based on whatever the selection committee comes up with.
    2. Learning-management systems, like any product, evolve because of a kind of natural selection — or unnatural selection, in this case.
    1. Tsugi is a multi-tenant scalable LTI library and tool hosting environment. It is intended to make it more tractable to implement the Application Store that we will need for the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment.
    1. A Flexible, Interoperable Digital Learning Platform: Are We There Yet? Posted on May 28, 2017 Categories:Ed Tech, Interoperability, Learning Apps, LMS & Learning Platforms Tags:IMS, IMS Caliper, Learning Platform, LMOS, LTI, NGDLE By Michael FeldsteinIn 2005, some colleagues and I had been tasked with identifying a single LMS that could serve the needs of all 64 campuses of the State University of New York—from Adirondack Community College to SUNY Stony Brook to the two medical schools. We came to the conclusion that no single LMS at the time could meet such diverse needs. We proposed instead that SUNY should build a modular system from which each campus, and indeed each educator, could create their own fit-for-purpose digital learning environment. We called this idea the Learning Management Operating System, or LMOS.
    1. Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) As mentioned in the Medium blog, the setup for the commons was described as going in the direction described by the EDUCAUSE NGDLE report. One thing North Carolina is doing is turning the typical LMS-driven procurement approach on its head. When I asked Rascoff how the apps would be pulled together, he said that the primary plan was to set up all accepted apps with Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities. Rascoff described that since the LMS is not where learning occurs for the most part, his team is leaving that decision up to the campuses and focusing their efforts on the learning apps.
    1. Just about every school in the US and Canada, and many across the world, has an LMS, and every LMS has a grade book. While the degree to which faculty utilize it varies greatly, it is typically one of the most utilized tools, at least for the basic purposes of communicating grades to students and the registrar. In fact, many schools require faculty to enter grades in the LMS grade book.
    1. In the mid-1990s, largely unaware of Bloom's challenge, innovative faculty members and students at universities throughout the world began thinking about ways to leverage the Internet and the World Wide Web to improve teaching and learning. The result was the creation of a new category of web-based software: the "course management system" or CMS. Alternatively labeled learning management systems (LMSs), learning content management systems (LCMSs), and virtual learning environments (VLEs), such software has generally been focused primarily on helping teachers increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction (e.g., distribute documents, make assignments, give quizzes, initiate discussion boards, assign students to working groups, etc.). This instructor-centrism comes despite the best intentions and efforts of system designers, early adopters, and instructional support staff who sought to use these systems to transform the dominant learning modality of higher education from traditional, classroom-based instruction to online and hybrid courses. In practice, the vast majority of instructors who adopted the CMS largely ignored Bloom's challenge to make an "educational contribution of the greatest magnitude," instead focusing on increasing the administrative efficiency of their jobs.
    1. Learning paths allow you to assemble two or more courses into a path that students must complete to trigger completion actions.
    2. I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

      Emphasis on “still”. Direction of change?

    1. Learning Analytics researchers have long held that the contexts of learning are critical in making meaningful analyses. With the large data footprint that Blackboard has to analyze, our team is able to look at some of these contexts in depth.
    1. Could different co-teaching and collaborative course approaches or more modern pedagogical practices move the needle more than the latest LMS features? 
    2. LMSs limit the visibility of copyrighted course content to only course participants for the duration that they need it. (Of course, this would become a moot point if using openly licensed OERs.)
    3. Over the course of many years, every school has refined and perfected the connections LMSs have into a wide variety of other campus systems including authentication systems, identity management systems, student information systems, assessment-related learning tools, library systems, digital textbook systems, and other content repositories. APIs and standards have decreased the complexity of supporting these connections, and over time it has become easier and more common to connect LMSs to – in some cases – several dozen or more other systems. This level of integration gives LMSs much more utility than they have out of the box – and also more “stickiness” that causes them to become harder to move away from. For LMS alternatives, achieving this same level of connectedness, particularly considering how brittle these connections can sometimes become over time, is a very difficult thing to achieve.
    1. This implies to me that an even greater cultural change is needed around what it means to be a student than a teacher.
    2. A framework that allows individuals to innovate easily, in a sharable way, without needing permission.
  4. Aug 2017
    1. introduce topic modeling to those not yet fully converted aware of its potential.

      Is resistance futile?

    2. They’re powerful, widely applicable, easy to use, and difficult to understand — a dangerous combination.
  5. mimno.infosci.cornell.edu mimno.infosci.cornell.edu
    1. Using other people's code is an important part of programming, but for group projects the code should be substantially the work of the group members except for standard libraries.
    2. LaptopsIn order to facilitate interactive in-class work, you are allowed to bring a laptop.
    3. "Multitasking" is a myth.
    4. If you have a laptop, you will be expected to use it for relevant work.
    5. Work in pairs will be encouraged.
    6. A typical week
    1. In writing the description of our reverse engineering work below, we deliberately avoid terms that are commonly used in Machine Learning, where labels are "true," "correct," or "gold standard." This linguistic distinction highlights the fundamentally different perspective that humanists have on classification as a tool. Our goal is not to create a system that mimics the decisions of a human annotator, but rather to better represent the porous boundaries between labels and identify the piles on which a story could have been placed over a century ago late on a cold wintry night in a dimly lit schoolhouse in eastern Jutland. We note the contrast between our use of computers to problematize existing distinctions and the common concern in the Humanities that computers deal only with binaries and black-and-white distinctions.

      Valuable insight and eloquently phrased.

    2. Our goal is not to treat existing classifications as "ground truth" labels and build machine learning tools to mimic them, but rather to use computation to better quantify the variability and uncertainty of those classifications.
    3. Our goal with this classification method can be seen as the inverse of usual machine learning classifiers.
    1. Analytics for Learn allows the analysis of teachers’ performance as well, something that will prove controversial in many institutions but will be increasingly of interest to senior managers who wish to monitor the quality of teaching in ways that were never possible in traditional classroom settings.
    1. Bottom-up mining of patterns may reveal phenomena that nobody was predicting based on formal theory, and to which we are therefore blinded. It will be an exciting moment when an unexpected pattern in the data, discovered by an algorithm as an apparent anomaly, leads to a theoretical breakthrough.
    1. Be the skunk at the party. Because it’s intelligent skunks, not cheerleaders, that this field needs right now.
    1. learning analytics are processes or procedures used to analyze student data to algorithmically predict outcomes, intervene in the learning process, and uncover patterns of learning behavior
    1. This has much in common with a customer relationship management system and facilitates the workflow around interventions as well as various visualisations.  It’s unclear how the at risk metric is calculated but a more sophisticated predictive analytics engine might help in this regard.

      Have yet to notice much discussion of the relationships between SIS (Student Information Systems), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and LMS (Learning Management Systems).

    1. watching videos of people making claims that seem odd and then executing some Google searches to see if primary materials support the claims made by smug TED lecturers

      Sounds like an exercise for a course.

    1. The most obvious pathway is the stepping stones aproach. Sequential in nature, it involves doing one step at a time in a prescriptive manner. See for example, Doug Belshaw’s kanban badges using Trello. Another option is where badges are a part of a collection. Like the game Trivial Pursuit, this is where several achievements are grouped together in a non-linear manner. Perscriptive in nature, collections can be linked with the completion of standards or levelling up. In contrast to perspective badge ecosystems, constellations offer a more open-ended approach where users can choose from a range of possibilities, carving out any number of pathways. This is conducive to life-long learning and offers the potential to write your own learning story. Open to borrowing from different providers, it is for this reason that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
  6. Jul 2017
    1. What is important about learning pathways, is that any individual can learn what they want, when they want, how they want. In professional development and conference planning, we would talk about a common assured/shared experience. Basically, what is the one thing that someone will definitely get from this their time with us. Learning pathways takes this a step further and tries to document how and what you should learn. The purpose is that a learner might want to some guidance on what this all means, but not want a scripted curriculum.
  7. Jun 2017
    1. Anyone working with the latest generation of MIDI musical instruments – like the Eigenharp, LinnStrument, ROLI Seaboard, Haken Continuum and the Madrona Soundplane – has probably encountered the work of Belgium-based programmer & electronic musician Geert Bevin.

      My thoughts exactly.

      And it carries over to much of the world of expressiveness in electronic music, centred around the emerging MPE standard: Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression.

      Let me geek out a minute. ;)

      Coming late to this MPE game, been really taken by the fact that Bevin’s name is everywhere. Given his work with many manufacturers, it’s no exaggeration to say that this type of musical expressiveness wouldn’t have expanded the way it did if it weren’t for Geert Bevin. Of course, MPE isn’t that mainstream, yet. You could even say that it’s a bit of a niche, in terms of the already peculiar world of electronic music. Besides, it’s just an implementation of some things which have been in the MIDI specifications from the start, over 30 years ago. But there’s more than smoke, here.

      A few days ago, ROLI has announced the Seaboard Block, which might be the most affordable MPE device as of yet. It’s also the missing piece of the puzzle in ROLI’s lineup, linking the Seaboard line of highly expressive keyboards with the Blocks line of modular controllers. Some have been saying that the Seaboard Block is the point at which the Blocks line starts to make sense. Both there are more dots to connect. One is that ROLI also owns JUCE, which is fast becoming the tool of choice to develop music apps on multiple platforms, including mobile. Not sure how sophisticated JUCE’s MPE support is, but it does have some MPE-specific classes. Another point, mentioned in the comments on this interview, is that Bevin was instrumental in the MPE support in Moog’s Model 15 and Animoog synths on iOS. As these apps are quite influential, their continued development can have a big impact on the iOS part of the MPE scene.

      Speaking of iOS, the fact that the latest version of Audiobus can route MIDI could open up interesting possibilities. Jesse Chappell, developer of two MPE-savvy iOS apps (ThumbJam and DrumJam) has been teasing a forthcoming app which would somehow deal with MPE in a thorough way.

      And there’s a broader context for all of this. Hardware and software devices for electronic music (controllers, synthesizers, loopers, etc.) have been integrating into complete solutions. Several manufacturers have been doing both hardware and software. There aren’t that many hardware solutions for the sound output from MPE, but it’d only take a fairly simple box (maybe Arduino-based?) to allow much of the hardware synth world to receive MPE in an appropriate way (something which is already possible in software).

      So it really is a fascinating time to be getting into musical expressiveness through digital means.

  8. Feb 2017
  9. Dec 2016
    1. Given all of this, it might only be a matter of time before watchmaker Fossil (FOSL) takes a write-down on its $260 million 2015 purchase of wearables firm Misfit. And unless its non-smartwatch products prove very successful, Nokia  (NOK) might struggle to make its $191 million spring acquisition of French wearables/fitness hardware maker Withings pay off.
  10. Nov 2016
    1. make the things that you want to see in the world

      Much more appropriate than the apocryphal Gandhi quote.

    1. Best piece I’ve seen on last week’s announcements.

      Gruber had linked to Michael Tsai’s roundup of the backlash, calling it “must-read stuff”. In this case, though, Gruber is “throwing his hat in the ring”. And the ring now feels like the site of a burgeoning flamewar. Issue is, here, that the “war” is happening about people who actually enjoy Apple’s products. This isn’t the “religious wars” between Macs and PCs or between Fandroids and Apple fanbois. It’s a whole argument between people who have been purchasing Apple computers and wanted updated ones. A well-known lesson from social psychology is that group polarization deepens divides by encouraging extreme positions. Chuq Von Rospach’s piece contains several comments which could be qualified as “extreme”. And it puts the blame on those who disagree. There are similar pieces on the other side of the equation, surely. Tsai’s roundup should make it possible to identify them. But Gruber has yet to link to them (apart from arguing about specific points like Tim Cook’s quote on the irrelevance of “PCs” and trying to set the record straight on Apple and Intel sharing responsibility for the 16GB limits on new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro desktop replacements).

      As an example of the effect of group polarization: my own perspective is that disappointment is real. Wasn’t impressed by what transpired from last week’s announcement. Feeling a bit more excited about the Microsoft Surface Studio than about the Touch Bar, but will likely not buy either any time soon. Because polarization forces me to take sides, my vote would go for the “there’s a serious problem, here”. Not saying Apple is doomed or that each of the problems discussed is a tragedy. But, to me, what is being thrown around sounds quite reasonable, not “trivial and petty”. Can’t be on Von Rospach’s side if that’s where the line is drawn. “You’re either with us or against us.” If you force me to choose, well, bye bye!

    1. uncertainty is bad news for the user base

      People are reacting to this uncertainty. Trying to prove them wrong achieves polarization instead of insight.

  11. Oct 2016
    1. most importantly, the co-worker is not white.

      Well… Is that the most important thing? Is it so unproblematic?

    2. The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.
    1. That's why BI Intelligence has spent months creating the most exhaustive resource on not just education, but the entire IoT: The Internet of Things: Examining How The IoT Will Affect The World.
    2. But education is far from the only area of our lives that the IoT will transform. Transportation, energy, homes, healthcare, and more will all feel the touch of the IoT in the coming years.
    3. With figures like those, it's clear that the education system isn't going away anytime soon.

      How so?

    4. company sinking its hooks into the U.S. school system

      Interesting choice of words.

    5. SMART boards changed the way teachers and students interacted in the classroom by moving lessons away from the dusty chalkboards that dominated education for decades.
    6. Capterra notes that an average school spends an average of $30,000 to $50,000 per year just on paper, but reusable tech would completely eliminate that cost.
    7. Outside of the classroom, universities can use connected devices to monitor their students, staff, and resources and equipment at a reduced operating cost, which saves everyone money.
    8. 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. Other smartwatches force you into nightly charging.

      Honestly, this has been a major point for me not to go with Apple Watch (even before knowing about the Pebble 2+ Heart Rate). Such small things but smart alarms and sleep tracking really do help me quite a bit.

    1. recording of a phone call from Apple (without their consent, which is illegal in California, but apparently not in Romania).

      The legality of recording phone conversations in Romania takes special meaning in historical context.

    1. Trump had less “fleeting interjections” this debate than the first round, and slightly more interruptions. Clinton had slightly less fleeting interjections, and the same amount of interruptions. The moderators, however, were much more active in this debate than in the first. They interjected (usually to let the candidate know they were running out of time) 41 times throughout the 90 minute debate.
    2. In 2015, 24 percent of the oil we used was imported, but we get more of that from Canada than from all the OPEC countries combined.
    3. The president is not a prime minister — it’s an individual making decisions, sitting atop an entire branch of government.

      So, Prime Ministers don’t make decisions, sitting atop an entire branch of government?

    4. (I’m not condoning the stigmatization of mental illness, btw.)

      Phew!

    1. In the end, your assessment of Trump’s chances comes down to the same consideration as with a falling stock: How sound are the fundamentals? Is Trump the equivalent of a beleaguered blue-chip that still has lots of hard assets?
  12. remikalir.com remikalir.com
    1. (Holden, 2016a; Kalir, forthcoming)

      Might be a good time to ask about the name change. Hope it’s not too indiscreet.

    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.

    1. You can’t say the Nexus phones don’t count just because they never succeeded.

      No, but you can say they don’t count because they were made by other manufacturers. They were Google-branded and had some Google-specific features (or, at least, lack of bloatware). But they weren’t Google’s handsets.

    2. Google has been going head-to-head against the iPhone ever since the first Android phone debuted.

      Sure. At least, Android has. But the idea is that these are Google’s first handsets.

    1. How does the heart rate monitor work? The Pebble 2 and Time 2 will use optical heart rate monitors that will monitor heart rate constantly during a workout.  When at rest or sleeping, heart rate will be monitored every 10 minutes, ensuring your resting heart rate is monitored with little to no battery life impact. The monitor will have no problem with sweat, but won’t provide heart rate readings when submerged in water. Please note:  Pebble devices with a heart rate (HR) monitor are intended to be a valuable tool that can provide an accurate estimation of the user’s heart rate. Pebble smartwatches are not medical devices and you should not rely on the accuracy of heart rate data for any purpose, especially for medical or health purposes.

      Straight from the horse’s mouth. We now know that heart rate monitoring on the Pebble smartwatches is as infrequent as the Apple Watch. Ah, well… What remains to be known is what “constantly” means, for workouts. Every second, as with Fitbit?

    1. Once you pay for 12 full MiWay fares during any one-week (Monday to Sunday) using your PRESTO card, you can then ride free on MiWay for the remainder of that week!

      Those loyalty programs are pretty interesting. Wish the same existed for day and monthly passes.

    1. Were he to become president, his casual remarks — such as saying he wouldn’t defend NATO partners from invasion — could have devastating consequences.Trump has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, a thug who has made it clear he wants to expand Russia’s international footprint.Trump suggested Russia engage in espionage against Hillary Clinton — an outrageous statement that he later insisted was meant in jest.

      The Cold War isn’t over.

    2. SB 1070, the 2010 “show me your papers” law that earned Arizona international condemnation and did nothing to resolve real problems with undocumented immigration.

      Public opinion matters.

    3. Endorsement: Hillary Clinton is the only choice to move America ahead

      Hillary Clinton: Not a Loose Cannon Shooting Verbal Spit Wads.

    1. USA TODAY's Editorial Board: Trump is 'unfit for the presidency'

      Strong (written) language. In the video, the paralanguage makes things sounds quite a bit more difficult. Fear of reprisals? Unwilling shift to clickbait?

  13. Sep 2016
    1. In terms of hardware, before Apple Watch debuted in 2014, there were a lot of rumors about the wearable including a multitude of health sensors that could track things like blood glucose or blood oxygen.

      A lot of these rumours appeared on 9to5mac, of course…

    1. (Crazy app uptake + riding data + math wizardry = many surprises in store.)

      Like Waze for public transit? Way to merge official Open Data from municipal authorities with the power of crowdsourcing mass transportation.

    1. heart disease, diabetes and cancer

      Not the best source or argumentation. But these are the key ones we may remember from Eaton, Konner, and Shostack

    1. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn GooglePlus jQuery(document).ready(function() { "use strict"; $ = jQuery; var decal = $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').parent().width(); $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').css({'margin-left':decal+5}); $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').fadeIn(); $(window).scroll(function() { socialbar.scroll(); }); }); var socialbar = (function(jQuery) { var timeOutId = 0; var jitterBuffer = 20; return { scroll:function() { var offset = $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').parent().offset(); var top = offset.top -150; //alert(offset.top); if ($(window).scrollTop() > top) { $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').addClass('fixed'); } else { $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').removeClass('fixed'); } } }; })(); Message from the president: 'This is a victory for academic freedom'
    1. "The university is thankful that the tireless efforts of governments, diplomats and colleagues across Canada and internationally were successful. The Concordia community — in particular faculty and staff members and unions — played a critical role in securing her release. This is a victory for academic freedom."
    1. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    2. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    1. The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
    2. associate professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research

      Somewhat surprising that (apparently US-based) NBER would have involvement from a professor at a Canadian university. Typically, those “national bureaus” focus on “nationals”.

    3. “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”
    4. Machines are learning to do things that once could only be done by humans, and I see no obvious endpoint to their progress.
    5. learn how to access information
    6. Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Loser in the Age of Smart Machines
    7. which skills they’d focus on if they were about to start their first year of college this fall
    8. It is by now close to certain that there are millions of people currently in high school and college who are fine-tuning their skills for steady-looking careers that will, following technological breakthroughs, dissipate by the time they retire.
    1. Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., 2K and Firaxis Games Partner with GlassLab Inc., to Bring CivilizationEDU to High Schools Throughout North America in 2017
    1. Finally, in order for data-driven interventions to be wide-spread, institutions must sustain a culture that embraces the use of data, and create incentives for data-driven activities amongst administrators, instructors and student support staff. Large-scale, data-driven policy changes are implemented with minimal friction and maximal buy-in when leaders demonstrate a commitment to data-informed decision-making, and create multiple opportunities for stakeholders to make sense of and contribute to the direction of the change. Users not only need to be trained on the proper ways to use these tools and communicate with students, they also require meaningful incentives to take on the potentially steep learning curve.[40]

      Thankfully, this paragraph isn’t framed as a need for (top-down) “culture change”, as is often the case in similar discussions. Supporting a culture is a radically different thing from forcing a change. To my mind, it’s way more likely to succeed (and, clearly, it’s much more empowering). But “decision-makers” may also interpret active support as weaker than the kind of implementation they know. It’s probably a case where a “Chief Culture Officer” can have a key role, in helping others expand their understanding of how culture works. Step 1 is acknowledging that culture change isn’t like a stepwise program.

    2. Users not only need to be trained on the proper ways to use these tools and communicate with students, they also require meaningful incentives to take on the potentially steep learning curve.[40]
    3. Application Modern higher education institutions have unprecedentedly large and detailed collections of data about their students, and are growing increasingly sophisticated in their ability to merge datasets from diverse sources. As a result, institutions have great opportunities to analyze and intervene on student performance and student learning. While there are many potential applications of student data analysis in the institutional context, we focus here on four approaches that cover a broad range of the most common activities: data-based enrollment management, admissions, and financial aid decisions; analytics to inform broad-based program or policy changes related to retention; early-alert systems focused on successful degree completion; and adaptive courseware.

      Perhaps even more than other sections, this one recalls the trope:

      The difference probably comes from the impact of (institutional) “application”.

    4. the risk of re-identification increases by virtue of having more data points on students from multiple contexts

      Very important to keep in mind. Not only do we realise that re-identification is a risk, but this risk is exacerbated by the increase in “triangulation”. Hence some discussions about Differential Privacy.

    5. the automatic collection of students’ data through interactions with educational technologies as a part of their established and expected learning experiences raises new questions about the timing and content of student consent that were not relevant when such data collection required special procedures that extended beyond students’ regular educational experiences of students

      Useful reminder. Sounds a bit like “now that we have easier access to data, we have to be particularly careful”. Probably not the first reflex of most researchers before they start sending forms to their IRBs. Important for this to be explicitly designated as a concern, in IRBs.

    6. Responsible Use

      Again, this is probably a more felicitous wording than “privacy protection”. Sure, it takes as a given that some use of data is desirable. And the preceding section makes it sound like Learning Analytics advocates mostly need ammun… arguments to push their agenda. Still, the notion that we want to advocate for responsible use is more likely to find common ground than this notion that there’s a “data faucet” that should be switched on or off depending on certain stakeholders’ needs. After all, there exists a set of data use practices which are either uncontroversial or, at least, accepted as “par for the course” (no pun intended). For instance, we probably all assume that a registrar should receive the grade data needed to grant degrees and we understand that such data would come from other sources (say, a learning management system or a student information system).

    7. 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.

    1. Steven Mintz is Executive Director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformational Learning and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

      Sounds like MOOCs have been part of his role, at least in UT’s collaboration with edX. Which brings an interesting context to the piece, especially in view of what we might call “the end of the MOOC moment”.

    2. commenting

      From one of the Disqus comments:

      Which piece did you read?

      Though seemingly innocuous, this comment gets much closer to an ad hominem attack than to a throughtful conversation. The rest of the comment is ok, but it’s with slips like these that we get into flamewars.

    3. One of postmodernism’s key insights is that many practices that seem natural or inevitable are anything but. 

      Somewhat unexpected nod to critiques of essentialism. Makes sense in context.

    4. Faculty, in such contexts, demonstrate skills less apparent in conventional classroom environments. In team-based courses, faculty must serve as learning architects, mentors, and instructional scaffolders, as well as content experts and providers of feedback and evaluation.
    5. Formalized course sharing and cross-registration arrangements

      There are examples of this in Ontario. But such arrangements require a significant shift in the way people conceive of enrollment.

    6. We might also blur the lines separating the campus from the outside world, by integrating more experiential learning into educational pathways, whether in the form of internships or e-internships, clinical or field experiences, or service learning, and further blur the line between high school and post-secondary education by integrating foundational courses, tightly aligned with college expectations, into secondary school.

      A fair amount to unpack, here. But it sounds like the core idea of the piece relate to “The Great Unbundling of Education”, with nods to informal learning and cross-sector training.