OLDaily

Approaching E-Learning 3.0
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/09/18

In this article I outline the objectives of my upcoming E-Learning 3.0 course, talk a bit about how the topics are organized, describe how the course will be offered, and offer tips on how participants can learn from this connectivist-style course.

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eBook DRM and Blockchain play CryptoKitty and Mouse. And the Winner is...
Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2018/09/18

I have been investigating Crypto-Kitties as part of my wider work looking at distributed ledger technologies. So I found interesting to read Eric Hellman's discussion of our digital feline friends in the context of digital rights management. "What if were possible to 'CryptoKittify' ebooks?" he asks. "Would that mitigate the sins of DRM, or even render it unnecessary? Would it just add the evils of blockchain to the evils of DRM? Two startups, Publica and Scenarex are trying to find out." Good questions. What is it that we even want to record - the sale of the book? Or the relation between the reader and the content. "Once Publica understands that memorializing readers supporting authors is where their success can come from, I think they'll realize that DRM, by restricting readers and building moats around literature, is counterproductive."

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Should Students Listen to Background Music While They Read?
Daniel Willingham, Science & Education, 2018/09/18

This is interesting because it represents Daniel Willingham backing off a bit from a strict and unthinking application of the cognitive load theory. The idea of cognitive load is that we can only handle so much information at a time, and so in the past we've been told we should eliminate any distraction - extra content, background music, whatever. This would drive me crazy, in no small part because I have tinnitus and have to have background noise. And what's important here is that Willingham explicitly recognizes that sometimes background music, and even background talking, might actually help a person learn. "While mean of the grand distribution may show a small hit to comprehension when background music plays, it's NOT the case that every child reads a little worse with background music on." So, this is great. Understanding individual variability is key to understanding research in education.

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A portal into a decentralised universe
Doug Belshaw, Thought Shrapnel, 2018/09/18

This is one of these thinhgs that has been in development for a number of years and will suddenly arrive everywhere. The IPFS - InterPlanetary File System - is a distributed network of hash-addressed resources that you store and share with your IPFS application. As Doug Belshaw says, it hasn't been easy up to this point to use IPFS. But this is changing as Cloudflare, a well-known content distributiuon network, has launched an IPFS gateway, "an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer."

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