My vision for an open textbook
Tony Bates, online learning and distance edcuation resources, February 20, 2014

Tony Bates is always interesting and therefore so is his vision for an open textbook ("a personal vision for what I want to do, he writes. "There are innumerable alternative visions one could quite legitimately have for an open textbook"). It will be "aimed mainly at faculty and instructors in colleges and universities" and "a model for open textbook publishing, incorporating many of the design principles of ‘good teaching’ – such as active and social learning, use of video and audio, crowd-sourcing, remixing and adaptation."

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An(other Attempt at an) Intro to Data Journalism…
Tony Hirst, OUseful.Info, February 20, 2014

I like this presentation a lot. Science, management and journalism are typically represented as taking an objective stance on objective data. But the data are rarely objective, and as this presentation makes clear, the stance can depend a lot on your point of view. Good science (and management, and journalism) means being able to take a variety of points of view (Hirst talks about 'sensemaking' and 'telling stories' but I think this is loose vocabulary for describing contextualization and perspective). Seen from one angle, a set of points may represent a straight line; from another angle, they may be a curve. The real strength (and meat of the presentation) comes when Hirst describes how we can ask questions and how we can interpret answers: looking for outliers, similarities and differences, trends, patterns and structure.

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Physical Activity Training is Going Digital
Chris Kennedy, Culture of Yes, February 20, 2014

This is really intetresting. It's just a snippet of a story, but it describes how a physical education might use a heartbeat monitor in a phys ed classroom (ie., a gym). "Combined with a GPS, the monitors give a full picture of their activity levels.  It is clearly a growing area in the science of sports and physical activity." Yes it is. A variety of devices is now available. But who should own and/or have access to this data? Especially things like GPS data. I can only imagine what RunKeeper does with my data. Sell it to insurance companies, maybe? I've been doing rigorous spin classes for the last six weeks, but not reporting them to RunKeeper. What is the consequence of that? I think personal data should remain personal, and question the presumption that it should be accessible by teachers or companies or whomever.

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How to Cite Tweets in an Academic Paper
Jummy Daly, EdTech, February 20, 2014

I actually think the format suggested here is wrong. Here's a sample of the MLA version:

Daly, Jimmy (jimmy_daly). "72% of college students own a smartphone: http://t.co/yyZbgVBK00 #highered". 31 Jan 2014, 17:01 UTC. Tweet

I think it should say "Twitter.com" and not "Tweet". Twitter.com is the source. 'Tweet' is a nickname. A person could use identi.ca (which uses pump.io), which would use the same sort of reference, but you would neither call it a 'Tweet' or "Identi' (or whatever). Additionally, each tweet has a unique URL. The Daly tweet cited above can be found at https://twitter.com/jimmy_daly/status/429298436736028674 - but you'll never find it without the actual URL. Not without months or years of endless scrolling.

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Major challenges Chinese MOOCers have on English platforms
Xu Minji, Journey of a Chinese MOOCer, February 20, 2014

Interesting article about the problems faced by the Chinese audience participating in international (ie., English-language) MOOCs. Issues range from internet speeds to the Great Firewall to differing approaches to learening. Also, Chinese MOOC users tend to be much younger, making university-level vocabulary a challenge (related: I always thought the University of Alberta's Dino 101 course should have been less like a university course and more like the NASA website). Should there be a 'MOOC Chinatown?' I'd rather see the great cultures of the world interact through MOOCs, rather than embracing their own solitudes. But it's not something that happens automatically.

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Google's New Glass Credo: Don't Be Creepy
Unattributed, Google Glass Blog, February 20, 2014

Obviously wearing a videocamera on your head everywhere you go will raise some ethical issues (when the cameras are tiny and built into real glasses or tie clips, etc., the ethical issues will be even greater). Google is responding people to follow the rule, "Don't be creepy." They write, "In places where cell phone cameras aren’t allowed, the same rules will apply to Glass. If you're asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers." Maybe - but Google forgot its "Don't be evil" slogan the day after its IPO dropped, and I suspect commercial enterprise will take being creepy in stride just as easily as it takes being evil. So be warned - if you thought government NSA and CSEC-style spying is creepy, just wait for the corporate version. Via PC Magazine.

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Using neural nets to recognize handwritten digits
Michael Nielsen, goodreads, February 20, 2014

I've mentioned deep learning a number of times in the past. It's time to pay attention to this. Michael Nielsen has made available the first chapter of his recent book on deep learning (he adds: "The book’s landing page gives a broader view on the book. And I’ve written a more in-depth discussion of the philosophy behind the book").

So what is deep learning? If you use neural networks to recognize patterns - being able to recognize, for example, that a handwritten number is a '4' and not a '5' - the usual way is to create a large set of correctly identified hand-written numbers and use this to 'train' the neural network (using a method called back-propagation, for example). But in deep learning, you are presented with the handwritten numbers, and the neural network has to determine for itself that there is such a thing as a '4' and then recognize future instances of it.

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No hope and no hype: fear, loathing and learned helplessness at LT2014
suzanneo, LINE Consulting, February 20, 2014

The learning and development guru community was on full display during January’s Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference at Olympia, according to LINE Consulting's 'suzanneo' (please put your name on your blog post, suzanneo!). They were led off by Brian Solis and Marc Presnky, both of whom had the same message, and often, the same slides. The same, ahem, wrong message. "Prensky still bangs on about that old Digital Imigrants / Digital Natives thing, Solis... talks about Generation C – the ‘C’ standing for connected." And "nothing much was done to repair the situation by a double-headed presentation on disruptive technologies." According to the presenters (probably this track, but we aren't told - suzanneo, if you're going to cite someone, tell us who it is!) the failure to adapt can be traced to leadership - "neither of the presenters had read Michael Neilsen’s thoughtful blog post about what (actually) happened."

Suzanneo writes, "This purblindness on the business aspects of disruption was symptomatic in my view of a wider failure in parts of the guru community; an inability or unwillingness to engage with the critical question of exactly why technology innovation in L&D meets so much resistance – and, equally importantly, what can be done to change that attitude." Well, that's one question, but the real issue is the community's unwillingness to engage with changing research and development trends. And it is equally simple-minded to constantly blame PowerPoint for a failure to adapt and learn over ten or so years of presenting at conferences. Maybe the conference itself shares some of the blame - we don't see any of the presentations (no slides, no video) and this just encourages speakers to say the same old thing over and over.

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