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Feature Article
12 Deeper Tips for Great Public Speaking
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/05/22

Steve Wheeler posted a nice article called 12 Tips for Great Speaking today.He's had a lot of experience on the public speaking circuit and there's no doubt his tips hit the mark. I've also had some experience on the circuit, so I thought it would be useful to add to his remarks. So, here are his tips (in italic, abridged) with my additions.

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Making Sense of Open Education
OpenLearn Create, 2018/05/22

According to the website, "This will be an introductory-level course designed for global post-secondary educators interested in learning more about open education, open educational resources (OER), and open educational practices (OEP)." You don't have to sign up to view the materials (yay!) and these will be available when the course launches June 1. The course is offered through the Open University's OpenLearn Create service, which currently hosts 384 free courses from various contributors. You can create your own course as well. Though maybe take this course first to get a sense of how the platform works. Via Jenni Hayman.

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What Counts as Student Agency?
Marie Bjerede, Getting Smart, 2018/05/22

I once offered a four-part model of autonomy as my attempt to answer this question (and questions like it). So I find that this two-part model falls a bit short. It includes 'volition' and 'positive action'. But it leaves out epistemic status (that is, the knowledge to act purposefully) and outcome (the idea that your actions actually have an effect). And as so many authors in education are wont to do, the author undermines autonomy even as it is granted: "it is necessary to both create an environment that supports moving motivation to the right and also to support students internalizing learning as a goal."

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On “Fake News”
Scott F. Aikin, Robert B. Talisse, 3 Quarks Daily, 2018/05/22

We normally think of fake news as news that is, well, fake. But efforts to define it this way quickly run into counterexamples. To get at the heart of what fake news actually is this article recommends defining it by source and intent: "Fake news characterizes the activities of institutions that pose as journalistic which by design feed and codify the antecedent biases of a pre-selected audience by exploiting their vulnerabilities (cognitive and otherwise), all with a view towards facilitating some decidedly political objective." This looks good to me, but I note that this will be a lot harder for AI algorithms to detect. The definition is "a supply side account of the phenomenon. But fake news also calls for a demand side analysis (as examples) all play to the political biases, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of pre-identified audiences."

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Surveillance Art?
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/05/22

As part of a course section "to get folk to reflect on how easily tracked we are through our computational devices" Tony Hirst introduces us to this art project called Artificial Senses, which “visualizes sensor data of the machines that surround us to develop an understanding how they experience the world”. If you try the demo version the program will ask for a bunch of access rights, then display raw input from the computer's touchpad, camera, microphone, and GPS. It's raw data; you don't actually see pictures.

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Blockchain applications
Mike Loukides, O'Reilly, 2018/05/22

This is a survey article describing how blockchain is being used for various applications. "The killer application for blockchains is probably something we haven't thought of yet: something new and different that will surprise and astonish us when we invent it." See also: What is a blockchain? Related:Why blockchain isn’t magic and it won’t fix every problem you have.

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