OLDaily

A Web3.0-based Intelligent Learning System Supporting Education in the 21st Century
Khaled Halimi, Hassina Seridi-Bouchelaghem, Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2019/12/09

I had a brief surge of excitement when I say this article (21 page PDF) thinking that it addressed connectivism and the new developments of web3, but I was disappointed to find it referred back to the definition of e-learning 3.0 used back in 2011 by people like Steve Wheeler in this presentation to talk about the semantic web applied to e-learning. So what we get here is a relatively straightforward application of semantically-based analytics applied to e-learning. It presents this in the context of an application and framework called i-SoLearn, and reports some experimentation and results. I would rate the results as 'mixed' - students who were disinterested in social networks didn't really benefit, and students who had negative sentiments found the technology difficult.

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Global convention on recognising HE qualifications adopted
Brendan O'Malley, University World News, 2019/12/09

This isn't receiving as much publicity (at least in my communities) as the recent UNESCO motion on OERs, but it could have an even greater importance to the future of education. UNESCO adopted a policy "that establishes universal principles for recognition of studies and degrees and will give signatory states an obligation to recognise studies or qualifications from outside of their region." Here is the final draft text of the agreement. According to the UNESCO page, " the Convention aims to facilitate academic mobility, improve quality of higher education institutions and enhance international cooperation in higher education."

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Why Teachers Shouldn’t Grade Their Own Students
Michael Horn, Forbes, 2019/12/09

This article combines two parts mythology with one part fact to come to a conclusion that is accidentally a good one. The purpose of the mythology (in my view) is to appeal to readers who already believe these things. The myths? Carol Dweck's comment that, “When teachers are judging [students], [they] will sabotage the teacher by not trying." Also, Jessica Lahey's assertion that "parents and teachers have become adversaries." Even more, the assertion that "Teacher grades, for example, are subject to grade inflation." You can paint a picture of who the article is appealing to here.

But the conclusion - that the acts of teaching and evaluation should be separated - is a good one. Not for any of the reasons listed here, but because it allows students to learn in any way they wish. The danger of this model is that it could create a commercial evaluation industry. And this article (whose author is an advisor for one such company) is an example of the spin being produced to support this idea. So we need to be careful about how we separate the functions of teaching and evaluation. There needs to be an ethical standard here that the commercial sector has heretofore failed to demonstrate that it can meet.

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Do We Have Minds of Our Own?
Meghan O’Gieblyn, The New Yorker, 2019/12/09

This article looks at consciousness from the perspective of “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience.” Neuroscientist and psychologist Michael Graziano writes that "consciousness is simply a mental illusion, a simplified interface that humans evolved as a survival strategy in order to model the processes of the brain." I think that the very idea of saying that consciousness is an illusion suggests that there is something else which it actually is, an account that I find difficult to sustain. My own view is that consciousness is real, that it is experience, and nothing more or less.

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Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency
Doug Belshaw, Google Slides, 2019/12/09

It's hard to find a topic that is more current and more entangled in current events. This set of slides (second source here) from Doug Belshaw makes clear the need to get on top of the various problems of surveillance capitalism and misinformation, and recommends an approach to digital literacies as a response. It's hard to argue against that, but it's also hard to say exactly what should be done. Professional trolls (as reported in this Rolling Stone article) are expert at dodging your cognitive defenses. "The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them. Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin." So, what to do then? It's no panacea, but this article in the Verge is better than most. It describes how to check facts, look at sources, and weigh the evidence. It's still not perfect - but it's better than just trusting the authorities.

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W3C Recommends WebAssembly to push the limits for speed, efficiency and responsiveness
Coralie Mercier, W3C, 2019/12/09

Before simply passing on this item, take a look at this demo to appreciate the potential of WebAssembly. This is a big deal. The demo is an image processing library that can run on a live website and do image manipulation in milliseconds - basically real-time for a web user (the full source code in Rust and Javascript is available). Basically the idea of WebAssembly is that you can define low-level functions (like image manipulation) in Rust and JavaScript that compile and run rapidly in a small virtual machine, and access this through Javascript APIs from your web page. Some more demos: Sandspiel (you'll want to play with this), Squoosh photo editor, Pyodide Python notebook in the browser, Video editor (including from webcam), Tanks (a Unity (3D engine) tutorial game; expand to full screen to start),  Figma team-based web-based design (more), a 3D viewer,  Doom3 demo, and much much much more.

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