OLDaily
by Stephen Downes
May 5, 2014
MOOCopoly: The Game
Alan Levine,
CogDogBlog,
May 5, 2014
Just for fun (and as part of the Daily Create challenge 486 - make a board game) Alan Levine created this fun version of MOOCopoly. "I came across a Monopoly template in Photoshop," he writes, "found within a 2008 blog post by Brad Frost. Yep, a self hosted blog strikes again. This is quite the template; every element of text on the board is editable; and he even provides fonts. He apologizes a bit for much about how much is left out, but it is cleanly organized into folders within the layers palette, and was super easy to modify." I like how you pay $12 to land on ds106 - whether it has one, two, three or four houses (I guess if there's a hotel the Bava's at a conference).
Mass Customization of Education by an Institution of HE: What Can We Learn from Industry?
Robert Schuwer, Rob Kusters,
International Review of Research in Open, Distance Learning (IRRODL),
May 5, 2014
So this seems like a good time to restate a distinction I've been using for some time now:
- personalized - a common product is adapted for use by an individual
- personal - a unique produced is created for and possibly by the individual
A similar distinction appears with similar terms. So, for example, a custom car is one that was built especially for you, while a customized car is a production-line car with features adjusted to your specification. And so on. That's why I say I am working on 'personal learning' rather than 'personalized learning'.
Why is this important? Because if you're not careful you'll fall into the error made by the authors of this paper as they try to create personal learning in the mould of mass customization (as, they say, it has been practised in other industries for years). So we get a picture of 'customized' learning where you, the learner, are essentially creating a learning design by picking from a menu of customization options. That's fine if you basically wanted to learn the same way as everyone else. But what if you wanted to improvise? Sorry, no options for that.
How to Know When Your Great Idea is Ready for the World
Tim Kastelle,
The Discipline of Innovation,
May 5, 2014
Over the last couple years as I have been more involved in things like business plans the abbreviation TRL made an increasingly frequent appearance. It stands for 'Technology Readiness Level' and is a scale devised by NASA and the US Department of Defence to rank innovations; it ranges from 1 - 'basic principle observed and reported' - through to 9 - 'flight tested'. This post also introduces a corresponding 'investment readiness level' from Steve Bank that ranges from 1 - 'first-pass canvas' to 9 - 'validated metrics that matter'. Anyhow, in my world these days, you can't escape the concept of TRL, for better or for worse.
Learning from Seymour Papert
Mitchel Resnick, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky,
MIT Media Lab,
May 5, 2014
Recent MIT Media Lab event on the life and lessons of Seymour Papert, with contributions from Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and Marvin Minsky and Mitchel Resnick. 61 minute video. There's a Japanese translation. The Media Lab model of "projects and peers and passion and play" grew out of Papert's work, we are told. Mitchel Resnick introduces the panel.
Emerging tech is transforming the workplace
Dion Hinchcliffe,
ZD Net,
May 5, 2014
In this post Dion Hinchcliffe has a nice graphic illustrating the process described in the following (probably correct) prediction: "Combine ambient data on just about any physically manufactured object — from car tires and milk cartons to shipping containers and test tubes — with pervasive wearable technologies that constantly present us with dashboards, notifications, analyses, and visualizations of all this data, and you have a workplace that will rapidly turn into a contemporary cybernetic amagamation that was previously only the purview of science fiction." Via Harold Jarche.
A world of pervasive networks
Harold Jarche,
May 5, 2014
Harold Jarche applies McLuhan's tetrad to the world of pervasive networks. McLuhan's original model (not a 'lens') suggests each new technology has the potential to: first, extend a human property, second, obsolesce a previous technology, third, retrieve an older technology, and fourth, have the opposite effect when pushed to its limits. So, viewed from this perspective, pervasive networks can enhance democracy, subvert hierarchy, revive the art of the handshake deal, and result in ubiquitous surveillance.
Writing Instructor, Skeptical of Automated Grading, Pits Machine vs. Machine
Steve Kolowich,
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
May 5, 2014
It's one of those stories the Chronicle loves to print - grizzled gadfly argues against computers in education - but in this case the critic has a point. Les Perelman, who in the past has had heated exchanges with promoters of automated essay grading, has authored a computer program that writes essays composed of gibberish but which score well in automated essay graders. The sentences his program produces are grammatically correct but incoherent. Of course, there's no reason why both sides might not be right - the papers may be gibberish, but the computer programs may be accurately reflecting the grading by human professors, as they're designed to do.
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