OLDaily

Influence analysis in social networks: A survey
Sancheng Peng, Yongmei Zhou, Lihong Cao, Shui Yu, Jianwei Niu, Weijia Jia, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2019/12/12

I found this while looking for something else, but felt compelled to pass it along. It is an excellent summary of influence insocial networks (circa 2018) providing a comprehensive typology of social networks and influence models.It then describes evaluation metrics for social influence, summarizes  existing evaluation models and existing methods for influence maximization. Not to be missed; it is a detailed and authoritative listing. I think it's open access (but I can't always tell from the office) but if not it would be one of those very rare cases where the article is good value for money.

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“Link In Bio” is a slow knife
Anil Dash, 2019/12/12

I'm not a fan of the title of this post, but I agree with the message: links to a wide range of contents are good, and locking users into a linkless site is wrong. "We’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like," writes Anil Dash. "We’re almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity is an absurdly coercive behavior." That's why I consider the service I perform with this newsletter to be uniquely valuable.

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Supporting learners' self-regulated learning in Massive Open Online Courses
Renée S.Jansen, Anouschkavan Leeuwen, Jeroen Janssen, Rianne Conijn, Liesbeth Kester, Computers & Education, 2019/12/12

This post addresses the issue of drop-outs in MOOCs via an 'intervention' was based on Zimmerman's model of self-regulated learning (SRL) and " presented to learners as the ‘preparation phase’, the ‘action phase’, and the ‘reflection phase’." Each phase consisted of a short video of a peer model offering "three or four different suggestions", followed by a quiz where the learner assesses the usefulness of the suggestions. It was a good idea, but the problem is, it's just another part of the course, and as a result, many students did not comply with the intervention and ended up dropping out of the course. So while the authors conlcude "ven a small intervention, as implemented in the current MOOCs, positively affects learners course completion," it seems to me that the intervention would need to be applied outside the course, prior to the course, and possibly even in person.

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Introduction to Creating Interactive 360-degree Videos in Unity
Matt Sparks, Jennifer Gallegos, Learning Solutions, 2019/12/12

I like this: "Be prepared to make plenty of mistakes as you sleuth around for tips on your path to building interactivity into your immersive experiences." It's nice to see some honesty in a how-to page. Unity is a development engine for 3D interfaces that would be used with devices such as Oculus or Hololens. It's still pretty niche, because the devices are expensive. It can also be viewed in the browser using WebGL. For a 360 degree image or video, you also need a 360 camera - this article uses a Vuze, but there are several others available.

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Open Learning Bingo: Zines as Open Pedagogy
Nate Angell, 2019/12/12

Nate Angell applies his Open Learning Bingo to zines ('zines' were underground magazines distributed and distributed openly in pre-internet days; they evolved into e-zines, a forerunner of blogs). The specific application is to Zines as Open Pedagogy by Elvis Bakaitis. "The bingo cards end up displaying a sort of 'heat map' of openness," he writes. Perhaps, but it's not clear what it tells us. We get a detailed account for each dimension of openness, but are left wanting an overall picture. Does the alignment of spaces in the bingo card mean anything? Do gaps or clusters signify anything? If not, well, then it's just a rubric, and not really a map in any significant sense.

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Bluesky
Twitter, 2019/12/12

In a series of tweets Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the company is hiring a team "of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media." There has been a lot of discussion. Doug Belshaw writes (as did many in the Twitter thread) that the proposed network already exists in the form of ActivityPub. Ben Werdmuller also points to them, but suggests that while they were created by hobbiests, it may be time for a corporate leader to push the project through. Others, such as Dave Winer, suggested that Twitter could simply reopen the API ist closed a number of years ago. The time is definitely ripe for such an initiative, but I don't really see a team of five people as constituting a commitment. So the sceptic in me wonders whether Twitter is merely trying to undermine existing distributed networks who have been bleeding traffic from the centralized social network. 

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