Teaching and Learning in a “Post-truth” World
Andrew Campbell, Canadian Education Association (CEA), 2016/11/03

The idea that we are living in a "post-truth world" has become fashionable, but I like Andrew Campbell's take: "There are many historical examples of commonly held beliefs that have little basis in fact. Since the 1700's people have believed in the existence of a plot to control the world by the Bavarian Illuminati. McCarthy's communist witch hunt, the belief in a flat earth, assertions that the Apollo Moon landings were faked and the conspiracy theory that the attacks of September 11th 2001 were an 'inside job' are more modern examples of popular ideas which have no basis in fact, yet still endure." The internet did little to correct this, and if anything, has accelerated it. This creates an onus on us to ensure that the students we teach are aware of filtering algorithms, gather news from multiple sources, and have the ability to understand different perspectives on issues.

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Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!
Sharon Leon, Omeka, 2016/11/03

Via Digital Humanities Now, "Omeka S is the next-generation, open source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation." The source (PHP and Javascript) is available on GitHub. "Omeka S is a free & open source platform for institutions that want to publish linked open data; integrate their collections with the scholarly communications ecosystem; and manage many users & sites from one installation."

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3 Types of College Friendships That Matter For Student Success
Anya Kamenetz, NPR | Mind/Shift, 2016/11/03

Interesting summary of a new book from by Janice McCabe, a researcher at Dartmouth College, on the different types of networks students form in college or university. What's interesting is not the typology but the idea that your network of friends can, as the article says, drag you up or drag you down. "Among the students who said their close group of friends provided academic motivation and support, every one of them graduated. Among the ones who said they lacked this support and their friends distracted them from schoolwork, only half managed to graduate within six years." The usual caveat about sample sizes applies.

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Deep Learning is Revolutionary
Oliver Cameron, Medium, 2016/11/03

Yes, this article is pretty superficial (and a "ten reasons" listicle) but if you haven't been looking at some of the things neural networks are doing you may want to take a look. Also, it makes me feel good, because I always knew they'd perform like this.

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