OLDaily

Relaunching E-Learn: A magazine and online platform designed for and by the teaching and learning community
Laureano Díaz, Blackboard Blog, 2017/06/23

This should not be confused with eLearn Magazine, which has long been published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and in which my paper E-Learning 2.0 appeared all those years ago. It is the E-learn Magazine, a product of Nivel Siete, a Blackboard company. We read, "Functioning as a cooperative, E-Learn works with contributors to create and share meaningful dialogue, and action, around current topics in education. Topics and trends are determined by the community. E-Learn is built to be a voice for the frontline of education and technology — what’s current, what’s challenging, what’s working?" It's supposed to be "an openness initiative" but I don't see any copyright information beyond the full copyright mark at the bottom of the page.

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Iris.ai
Iris AI AS, 2017/06/23

The idea behind Iris.ai is that you provide it with the URL of a research paper and it provides you with a set or related papers (from a database of 60 million open access papers)  organized by category. For example, I gave it New Models of Open and Distributed Learning and got 259 related papers grouped by concept.Some of them didn't relate directly. Now, given that it didn't ask me to log in, I assume you will get the same results I did. Which raises the question: does the content of a research paper (or anything, actually) determine the best set of associated resources? Probably not. I think that the easy AI question is to associate things based on their properties. That's where we get algorithms like Nearest Neighbor (NN) and the like. But the hard AI question is to associate things based on the already existing set of associations (for example, the fact that I've already read such-and-such a paper, or the fact that George cited it in a paper he wrote in 2014, etc).

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Why EdTech Sucks
Graham Brown-Martin, Learning {Re}imagined, 2017/06/23

Over the last few months Graham Brown-Martin has authored a number of posts critical of the existing education technology (edtech) industry, and it's hard to disagree with his core points. "EdTech today doesn’t really exist," he writes. "At best it’s just education using modern appliances but at worst it’s focus is the reductive standardisation of teaching and learning to 'teacher-proof' content distribution and testing... EdTech as a thing has been hijacked and whilst there has been a period of more investment than at any time I can remember this hasn’t been matched by a commensurate increase in innovation." I think this is true. And while I wouldn't say there is no edtech any more, I think it's harder and harder to find in and among those vendors who treat education as a search problem and technology as a way to force people to ingest the right content.

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The Future of Social Learning: A Novel Approach to Connectivism
Holm Smidt, Matsu Thornton, Kaveh Abhari, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , 2017/06/23

This is an interesting paper seeking to extend and apply connectivism. If I were picky I would complain about the interpretation of connectivism (for example: I don't think it's really true that "Connectivism largely treats technology as a tool independent from its context and its users." But no matter. I like the way the authors define three pillars of the learning model (learning process, learninmg content and learning environment). And I think this is a classic implementation of ARRFF: "(a) find information for hands-on assembly and installation of IoT devices; (b) agglomerate and visualize data for student-initiated reasoning on local energy challenges with the aid of mathematics and data science; (b) simulate, and examine different strategies for reduced energy consumption and improved classroom comfort; (c) discuss and collaborate on strategies using the online platform."

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US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub
Quirin Schiermeier, Nature, 2017/06/23

Most of this is not at all surprising. But I want to raise one point. “Sci-Hub is obviously illegal,” says structural biologist Stephen Curry at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. And so "A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages." But if Sci-Hub is "obviously illegal" then why is the case being ehard in the United States. Elsevier is Dutch; Sci-Hub is Russian. If it's so obviously illegal, why wasn't the case heard in, say, Moscow?

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Drive to get children back to school failing worldwide
Rebecca Ratcliffe, The Guardian, 2017/06/23

This article reports on a UNESCO position paper (16 page PDF) asserting that the number of children not in school is remaining steady. "The effort to get more children into school is grinding to a halt as the numbers are stagnating, according to a new report that warns of grave consequences for world poverty... At the moment, children from the poorest 20% of families are eight times as likely to be out of school as those from the richest 20% in lower-middle-income countries."

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Preparation for Open Ed SIG webinar on shared values of the open community
Teresa MacKinnon, JISC Open Ed Sig, 2017/06/23

In view of the conflicts between open education communities in recent months JISC's Open Ed Sig is planning a webinar. "Currently we are focussing on trying to facilitate discussions between the various manifestations of OPEN," they write, "and we have started to visualise this through this open padlet. Simply sign in to it if you would like to add your community to the collection. We would like to host a webinar which has representatives from as many of these communities as possible in order to share a discussion about the underlying shared values of OPEN." I would participate, but I'm not a community. I'm a presence.

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