OLDaily

Apache Superset
GitHub, 2018/02/22

This relates to a large business intelligence project I'm a part of with the School of Public Service. "Apache Superset (incubating) is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application." Scoll down on the GitHub page to see screen shots and documentation. It looks nice. "Easy, code-free, user flows to drill down and slice and dice the data underlying exposed dashboards. The dashboards and charts acts as a starting point for deeper analysis. A state of the art SQL editor/IDE exposing a rich metadata browser, and an easy workflow to create visualizations out of any result set."

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Blockchain and the Promise of an Open, Decentralized Internet
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2018/02/22

Interesting commentary from Steven Johnson, quoted here: “We spent our first years online in a world defined by open protocols and intellectual commons; we spent the second phase in a world increasingly dominated by closed architectures and proprietary databases.  We have learned enough from this history to support the hypothesis that open works better than closed [but] the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain.” I'm not sure I agree with this but I'm not sure I disagree either. Image: Andrena.

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The Future of Testing
William Bryant, Getting Smart, 2018/02/22

This article describes " some directions in which the future of testing may be headed." Included in the list (paraphrased): classroom-based assessment of authentic classroom work ("The anti-standardized testing group, FairTest, has developed a model to help guide state system innovations"); technology-enhanced items pushing testing toward greater real-world fidelity; continuous assessment by immersing students in complex problem-solving activities; inclusion and flexibility in test content and the interpretation and use of standards. As I've said before, I think that eventually we'll move beyond testing and simply base assessment on what students do in the world.

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The media today: ‘This doesn’t look like the gun debate in America’
Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/02/22

The students are the stars in this article describing how jorunalists from The Eagle Eye covered the event in their school as it was happening and have taken the lead in ensuring that the story does not follow the usual 'thoughts and prayers'-'too early for the debate' news cycle following a major shooting. " Almost every journalism textbook says activism and journalism are incompatible. But the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas are busy ripping up that textbook and writing a new one. And some journalists would do well to note how deftly they’ve combined sensitivity and persistence with a clear message." Awesome. Keep ripping up the rulebook. The old one is broken.

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Personalized Learning Meets AI With Watson Classroom
Erin Gohl, Getting Smart, 2018/02/22

"Generally speaking," says Erin Gohl, in personalized learning, "reducing people to a set of numbers overlooks so many factors that are integral to understanding a student, but explainable only as narrative comments." Rather, you need something that can brige the gap between words and numbers, for example, IBM Watson. Watson classroom is being positioned as an assistant, not a replacement, for teachers. " Watson Classroom is not a teacher nor does it replace the teacher, contrary to popular myths about AI. It is the aforementioned teacher’s assistant, data warehouse, personal researcher, note-taker, and constant collaborator brought into the classroom and accessible at a teacher’s fingertips via a mobile tablet."

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Monitoring at Moodle HeadQuarters
Paul Greidanus, Moodle, 2018/02/22

This is the exact text of a presentation by Paul Greidanus at today's Moodle Moot: "What does (Moodle) HQ use (for server monitoring)? UptimeRobot (Freemium SaaS) - runs a basic http(s) GET every minute, alerts if down. Prometheus (Apache 2.0 license) - polls services and instances for metrics. Graylog (GPL v3.0)  centralized log management. Grafana (Apache 2.0 license) - beautiful dashboards and data visualizations. PagerDuty (Paid SaaS) - sends alerts to on-call staff."

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