OLDaily

Feature Article
From technology enhanced learning to technology enhanced learner
Stephen Downes, 2019/06/24

Though its focus is on the current status of technology enhanced learning, the story it tells is of a learner, capable and even eager to use new technologies, accessing and organizing knowledge and learning in new ways, with new media, and as a result, thinking and seeing the world differently, and indeed, becoming a different kind of person.

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China‘s Social Credit System
Verfassungsblog, 2019/06/24

This is a set of short articles analyzing China's social credit system from a variety of perspectives. The idea of the system is that it gives each citizen a ‘score’ based on behaviour and implements a connected system of incentives. The response in western countries is a mixture of fear and hypocrisy - fear that social credit entrenches the surveillance state, and hypocrisy in presuming that nothing like this exists outside China. These essays are great reading even if they take a slightly western perspetcive. And they point to some of the issues that will surround social recognition of learning achievement, something I've been projecting for a while now. Image: Wired.

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Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun Deliver Turing Lecture
Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, 2019/06/24

It's hard to get a higher level set of talks than this, but they are also very accessible. Hinton's talk is entitled, "The Deep Learning Revolution" and LeCun's talk is entitled "The Deep Learning Revolution: The Sequel." Hinton: "One model is what I call 'intelligent design' and you call 'programming'." Some good comments - for example, language translation is a great task for neural networks, because it's symbols in and symbols out - but it works best when it's all vectors in between. And on the future of understanding reasoning - but not with inferences and rules, because that's enpty of any content. And the explanation of short-term memory - short-term changes in synapse weights. Great stuff.

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Personal Learning Environments: An Interview with EdMedia Keynote Speaker Linda Castaneda
Allie Alayan, AACE Review, 2019/06/24

There isn't a lot to this interview of Linda Castaneda, who teaches at Universidad de Murcia in Spain. There's some cookie-cutter intoductory information about PLEs, and then this: "A vision of PLEs as a posthumanistic proposal: a techno-social reality that embodies the socio-material entanglement with which people learn; and at the same time, an image of PLEs as a practical techno-pedagogical approach that enacts contemporary ideas about how people learn and how the learning must be personal and socially oriented rather than tech-personalised." I also checked out her home page and her most recent blog post, A different exam…, which describes how she required to create a public online video as their final submission.

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User-Generated Content’s Impact on the Sustainability of Open Educational Resources
Janani Ganapathi, Open Praxis, 2019/06/24

This article is a bit less focused than I would like to see, but it's an interesting case study looking at one OER publisher in India and its Storyweaver platform, and has some useful insights. I found myself nodding in agreement reading this: "The problem lies with people judging OERs’ quality based on other products in the market, where quality is determined by the price paid. That being said, where children have poor levels of literacy and limited or no access to education, the mere availability of any resource can be beneficial to their development." The question of sustainability takes centre stage, even with the help of user-generated content and community-based reviewing. But one wonders why basic education is a task being undertaken by private companies and NGOs, when surely it should be one of the primary responsibilities of the community as a whole.

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Proposed governance structure
Solid, 2019/06/24

Some interesting dialogue in Tim Berners-Lee's Social Linked Data (Solid) project. As the community has increased in size, governance has become more of an issue. It doesn't help that aspects of the project have bogged down, with decisions being left unresolved for years, while at the same time there are numerous depreciated and obsolete implementations. This proposal posits three major elements - a development team, a panel, and a decision-making mechanism. Long-time developers aren't exactly happy about the idea of a panel, but it does raise the question, "who represents the users?" See also this issue and this comment in Gitter that drew my attention to the issue.

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