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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
December 23, 2008

Edupunk

So. Edupunk is one of the The Buzzwords of 2008 in The New York Times. Nice to see the world is, um, watching. Jay Cross, Informal Learning, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Edupunk] [Comment]

Joe Kincheloe
Take a moment to celebrate the life of Joe Kincheloe, a leader in the field of critical pedagogy, driving force behind the Friere website at McGill, the Counterpoint series, and inspiration to many. Wikipedia article, Everyday Literacies website, Edubabbler, Vanessa Paradis. It is fitting that his last post would be one of thanks. Kinchloe died this week at the age of 58. Various Authors, Website, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Wikipedia] [Comment]

The Synthese Recommender System
Daniel Lemire writes, "Andre Vellino has just opened his Synthese Recommender System: a recommender for journal articles. Andre works for one of the largest scientific libraries in the world (CISTI). You can read all about his project on his blog." See also Jonathon Richter, who reviews Scholarship in the Digital Age by Christine Borgman. Daniel Lemire, Weblog, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Wikipedia, Project Based Learning, Web Logs] [Comment]

2009 Predictions
A cogent and comprehensive set of predictions for 2009 that may relieve me of the task of producing such a document - I'll just refer to this. Raj Boora, EDITing in the Dark, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

The Pirate Hoax
There's commentary on this in various places, including behind the Chronicle's subscription wall, but Michael Feldstein summarizes the case quite well. Basically, a professor had his students create a fake Wikipedia page to show that it could be done, and then made sure the Chronicle knew that Wikipedia is (consequently) unreliable. Feldstein: "By deliberately planting a hoax article-and inviting the Chronicle to write about how he and his students got away with it-he deliberately infected the entire garden with a credibility bug... what he did was malicious and showed a careless disregard for the effort that Wikipedians put in." See also Michael Korkuska. Michael Feldstein, E-Literate, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Subscription Services, Wikipedia] [Comment]

Students Using Speed Cameras To Frame Other Kids
I'm sure there's a lesson in this: "Slashdot points out a story of students in Maryland making fake license plates matching other students' plates, slapping them on their cars and speeding by speed cameras in order to get other students slapped with fines." Mike Masnick, Techdirt, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

The Latent Relation Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Experiments
Without going into the very very heady deatails of this paper: "Analogy is the core of cognition. We understand the present by analogy to the past. We predict the future by analogy to the past and the present. We solve problems by searching for analogous situations (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995). Our daily language is saturated with metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and metaphor is based on analogy (Gentner et al., 2001). To understand human language, to solve human problems, to work with humans, computers must be able to make analogical mappings." Yes. Exactly. Peter Turney, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Quest for Expertise
This is a fabulous bit of academic sleuthing as Alexandre Enkerli looks for the source of the claim that "it takes ten years to become an expert in anything." He uncovers a number of suggestive works and traces a plausible timeline for the claim, but nothing in history showing it as having been definitively proven. He also notes that Malcolm Gladwell has been acting as though he is the source of the claim: "it doesn't seem that Gladwell himself has done anything to 'set the record straight.' He does quote Levitin in Outliers, but I heard him reply to questions and comments as if the research behind the 'ten years or ten thousand hours' claim had some association with him." Alexandre Enkerli, Disparate, December 23, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Research, Academia] [Comment]

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