OLDaily

Finding Open Content Tutorial
OER Africa, 2019/02/01

As the website says, "The tutorial is designed to offer a simple, quick way to acquire skills necessary to search for open content, decipher Creative Commons rights and permissions and evaluate the usefulness of open content." It provides search strategies for finding open materials on Google, YouTube and Creative Commons, as well as a section on evaluating open resources.

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Matching Instruction with Modality-Specific Learning Style: Effects on Immediate Recall and Working Memory Performance
Karoline Aslaksen, Håvard Lorås, Education Sciences, 2019/02/01

This is one for the learning styles sceptics. According to this small (22 students) study, the aim of which was "to examine the association between modality-specific learning style, immediate recall, and working memory performance," "the results failed to support the matching hypothesis or any association between modality-specific learning style and working memory." In other words, "tailoring instruction towards modality-specific learning styles does not enhance learning outcomes." Best to read the 'limitations' section in this article pretty carefully.

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Browse state-of-the-art Papers with Code
Papers With Code, 2019/02/01

This website is daunting, to say the least. It's a branch of Papers With Code, a challenge in its own right. The idea here is to collect papers that are accompanied with computer code (which is freely accessible on GitHub). But more, the papers are grouped into categories, and each category is subgrouped into tasks, and then the papers are sorted by their approach to that task, and 'state-of-the-art' is defined as the most successful approach currently. So basically, what you have are problems, proposed solutions, and benchmarks, all out in the open. This is what open science looks like, and I'd love to see what an application of the same idea in the domains of learning, inference and discovery would look like. Via Reddit.

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DFINITY is the Cloud 3.0 that Marries Crypto Valley with Silicon Valley
Michael K. Spencer, Medium, 2019/02/01

First there was blockchain, characterized by digital coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then there were smart contracts and distributed applications (dApps) that could represent and manipulate more than just money. What this article portends is a third wave of distributed computing. DFINITY "is building an open, decentralized blockchain that runs smart contract software systems with vastly improved performance, capacity, and algorithmic governance." How much stock do I put into this concept? Some. This article probably won't convince you; it's a bit of a puff piece. But the thinking behind DFINITY is pretty solid.

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