How to use metaphors to generate badge-based pathways
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2016/06/30

The Periscope video may have expired before you see this (why wouldn't people use Hangounts, which don't expire?) but the overall concept is worth a look. Doug Belshaw describes a workshop that leads people through the use of badhes in the creation of learning paths. "Participants will be expected to come up with as many metaphors as they can which could be used to demonstrate progression," for example, the subway stop metaphor. The metaphors are examined, classified, and (if you're lucky) insights are generated. The point is to reinforce the idea that learning is non-linear, and that there are many (if you will) routes to your destination.

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A neural conversation model
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/06/30

One of the key questions in learning and technology, from my perspective, is whether a neural network needs domain knowledge in order to function effectively. This article summarizes a paper describing an effort to create an effective conversational tool that operates without domain knowledge, "a bot that is trained on conversational data, and only conversational data: no programmed understanding of the domain at all, just lots and lots of sample conversations." As we see from the examples, "The surprising thing is just how well it works." It's far enough from reliable, though, that the author concludes "any real service is going to need to some more complex logic wrapped around it."

You might be asking, why is this question so important? The answer is complex, but in a nutshell, if we require domain knowledge in order to learn, then we require memorization; by contrast, if learning can be accomplished without domain knowledge, then it can be accomplished by practice alone, without memorization. You might say "so who cares? Just memorize some stuff." You could do this, but this makes it a lot harder for the learner to correct memorized stuff that is wrong, and makes them less able to learn on their own or think critically. The learner's knowledge becomes based more on their pre-constructed model or representation of the world, not experience or evidence. So if you can get to the same place without rote memorization, that would be preferable.

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