OLDaily

Twitter EDU
David Truss, 2018/01/19

David Truss has published an eBook on using Twitter in education. According to the blurb, "If you follow along and tweet as you learn, this book will make your entry into Twitter much easier, and enjoyable! It has best practice tips, tricks and explanations that will assist you in building a great network much faster than you could do on your own." The book can be downloaded for free (and there are no signup forms or anything, so I'm already a fan). Available in ePub only. Via Alistair Creelman., who writes, "the real key to success with Twitter is engagement. To get something out you have to contribute. If you show that you provide useful information, ideas and tips then people will follow you."

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No, machines can’t read better than humans
James Vincent, The Verge, 2018/01/19

This is a counter to a post published earlier this week suggesting that robots can now read better than humans. Technically, the headline wasn't wrong, but the problem lies in the test. "The test is actually a dataset, compiled by a group of Stanford university computer scientists," explains the author. "It’s called the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (or SQuAD for short)." It poses a set of questions based on a set of Wikipedia articles. But this sort of test is easy, says James Vincent. It's just a pattern matching test, and doesn't require inference or comprehension. 

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MOOC Trends in 2017: Content Paywalls
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2018/01/19

Class Central has been running a series of articles on MOOCs in review in 2017. It reads to me like a description of "how MOOCs stopped being MOOCs in 2017". The articles cover content paywalls, MOOC monetization, and corporate learning. But the series also attests to the continued strength of MOOCs in general. "To date, over 800 universities around the world have launched at least one MOOC. The total number of MOOCs that have been announced stands at 9,400, up from 6,850 last year." That adds up to about 78 million students. 

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Innovations for Educators: IBM’s Teacher Advisor
Luis Flores, Christensen Institute, 2018/01/19

The premise of this story is that instead of replacing teachers AI might help teachers. As an example, the author uses IBM’s Teacher Advisor. "Teacher Advisor is a free online resource that helps elementary school teachers plan math lessons," writes Luis Flores. "It houses a library of K-5 math open education resources (OERs)—including activities, lesson plans, and supporting materials—from organizations such as EngageNY, [Massachusetts], CPALMS, and UnboundEd." Additionally, "The AI technology in Teacher Advisor allows teachers to search for resources and create lesson plans in a fraction of the time it would take them to do it alone." 

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