OLDaily

Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/08/10

This short article summarizes four posts from other writers describing how social media (and Facebook in particular) has failed to replicate the idea of the feed as "sustenance" that "nourished critical minds." Here they are:

• Dan Cohen on going Back to The Blog and Going Indie on Social Media
• Mark Sample with Facebook Killed the Feed
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick with Connections along with Feeds and Gardens
• Chris Aldrich responding to Kathleen
• And Mike Caulfield's 2015 post The Garden and The Stream.

These writers, and a number of others, are all part of a new wave of indieweb proponents, and I make sure to follow them and keep up on their work.

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A small team of student AI coders beats Google’s machine-learning code
Will Knight, MIT Technology Review, 2018/08/10

I think that the interesting object lesson to be learned here is that when we consider whether AI will replace humans, we can't just consider humans working as individuals, but we also have to consider humans working cooperatively. Indeed, much of what we can do even as individuals depends on a history of cooperative effort. And while an AI might outdo a human working individually at some tasks, it is not going to be a match for collective human effort fror some time (we're talking decades, maybe centuries). Sure, a computer could fly a plane, maybe. But it couldn't design, launch and run an airline. Now the article doesn't discuss this at all, but it's still worth a thought.

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Pencil Code
2018/08/10

O'Reilly describes this as follows: "a collaborative programming site for drawing art, playing music, and creating games. It is also a place to experiment with mathematical functions, geometry, graphing, webpages, simulations, and algorithms. Programs are open for all to see and copy." I played with it a bit and drew some shapes. I was expecting more pencil and less programming, but it worked OK. I like the way you could make the blocks disappear to show pure text code. Even better, you can make music with it.

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32 Ways AI is Improving Education
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2018/08/10

I would have called this "32 applications of AI in education" or "32 education AI use cases" but I guess those aren't the headlines that get the clicks. As you can imagine, none of these 32 items is described in any great detail, but the article is chock-full of links to companies and startups trying their hand at AI in education. I can't vouch for the results, but there's a lot of activity.

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Key Concepts in a Data-Centric Learning Stack
Yet Analytics, 2018/08/10

This is an overview article from Yet Analytics (which has a vested interest in xAPI and related technologies) introducing the major elements of the analytics workflow: the Learning Record Provider (LRP), Learning Record Store (LRS) and Learning Record Consumer(LRC). There's a link to a 'workbook', though access is blocked by a spamwall(*). I filled out the form to get the direct link (may or may not work) and found a ten-page guide with lots of white space. It's pretty basic, but there are useful bits. (*Note: 'spamwall' =df. noun, a form requiring users submit personal data (which will presumably be used for spam) blocking access to an advertised resource.)

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