news (external)

Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, Apr 03, 2024

I'm not really going to disagree with any of this, not even the git about the gap between the credentialed class, that focuses on identity issues, and the working class, that focuses on economic issues (though as always a class-based analysis is far too coarse to be useful). "As the 'wealth pump' pushes money to the top of the pyramid, the elite, wealth is pushed from the poor to the rich, accompanied by the disappointment of even middle class aspirants (graduates), who have also become part of the precariat." It's all too easy in this environment to find scapegoats. We need to resist this trend. See also: the Guardian.

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Keith Brown, Zian Zhang, Canadian Journal of Education, Apr 03, 2024

Despite the small number of participants interviewed this paper (27 page PDF) offers an interesting if idiosyncratic look at presence in online learning. It's clear that the interviewees, as the authors say, "wrestle with pre-existing ideas of presence inherited from holistic education theories" and demand "two cornerstones of a holistic notion of presence—undivided attention and embodiment." These, obviously, are a challenge in online learning, and we see the teachers laying down rules and conditions to enforce this in a way that, I think, undermines individual autonomy. The interviews are analyzed according to Aimee Whiteside's social presence model (20 page PDF) and hence discusses affective association, community cohesion, instructor involvement, interaction intensity, and knowledge and experience.

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Jinju Duan, Kui Xie, Qiuhua Zhao, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, Apr 02, 2024

"As a basis of connectivist learning, wayfinding has been the focus of access paths of diverse resources," write the authors. But "most learners are exposed to wayfinding difficulties, such as information overload and technical difficulties." So "wayfinding support is necessary." This article (30 page PDF) explores "a case study to develop a personal social knowledge network (PSKN) and facilitate wayfinding in connectivist learning." There's a lot of detail here covering both the mathematics and mechanics of node distribution and wayfinding path detection, including "differences in wayfinding behavioral patterns between high- and low-performing learners." Most interesting to me is the finding that "creating nodes was an essential wayfinding feature in the PSKN." The best way to make connections is to contribute. "As the connection proceeds, the learner becomes like a teacher, and creating nodes becomes a critical wayfinding behavior in connectivist learning."

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Pascal Vallet, Apr 02, 2024

I'll share Pascal Vallet's new newsletter because it exists, but I'm not a fan of the whole idea of email-only newsletters with subscription plans and no RSS feeds. Anyhow, in this post, he shares the wisdom that "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted," which is why (I guess?) AI-assisted grading is a bad idea. "Perhaps," he writes, "there is a dimension of grading that is inherently bound to the educator's engagement with student work—an engagement that offers insights into the students' understanding, strengths, and potential areas for growth... grading should be seen as an integral process that enhances the educator's comprehension of student needs, rather than just a means to an end."

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Brian Resnick, Vox, Apr 02, 2024

I'll just restate the critically important point: "In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn't how science is supposed to work at all!Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies."

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Marc Husband, Lisa Lunney Borden, Evan Throop Robinson, in education, Apr 02, 2024

"Are you noticing any patterns here?" What would a gesture-based 'language' of mathematics look like? I still don't know, but this paper is an interesting exploration of the relation between gestures and learning math. "Teachers can select tasks that will elicit gesturing, notice how the gesturing signals the thinking, and respond to the dynamic nature of a process conveyed by the gestures to stay with students' own ideas as they guide their mathematical understandings. To stay with student ideas, means we can use students' own ways of thinking to support their learning rather than trying to channel their thinking into some predefined process."

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Nat Levy-UT Austin, Futurity, Apr 02, 2024

No, this isn't the Elon Musk grift. It's real work on brain–computer interface (BCI) control published in PNAS (15 page PDF). Specifically, the research shows "that a decoder trained on the data of a single expert is readily transferrable to inexperienced users via domain adaptation techniques allowing calibration-free BCI training." Technology like this has the potential to assist a wide range of people facing difficult physical challenges.

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Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, Apr 02, 2024

This is an object lesson in why organizations that use open source code should devote resources to supporting and maintaining it. Because if you don't, the actors who fill the gap may well be malicious. That's what happened here when a 'back door' was planed into XZ Utils, a widely-used set of tools used to compress software archives. The resulting code created a vulnerability in key infrastructure, used to secure critical systems such as cloud-based tools. It was caught by an engineer working at Microsoft, though in retrospect the tracks of an unknown bad actor seeding the code were there fir all to see.

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Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, Mar 15, 2024

The highlight of this post is a link to Audrey Watters saying I told you so. But the main point is Martin Weller saying "we should assume that generally tech revolutions in education end in a whimper, not a bang. Set your expectations accordingly." Yeah, there's a lot of "I told you so" going around about the demise of Udacity (though it's easy to forget that Coursera is chugging along) and to be sure there's nothing about the Udacity business model that is particularly attractive. If I had a main message to offer, it would be something like "most edtech revolutions aren't edtech revolutions at all". They're inventions of a fickle press that likes to fawn on elite university stars. No. Real edtech is the tens of thousands of people creating and posing new learning content everyday, not only on institutional platforms but also on blogs, video sites, social media, podcasting platforms, and wherever. Mostly nobody's writing about them nothing real in this field happens without them.

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Rafal Gancarz, InfoQ, Mar 15, 2024

Hashnode is a social network and blogging platform for developers (though of course it could be used for other functions as well). This article describes how Hashnode developers built a scalable event-driven architecture (EDA) for composing feed data for thousands of users. What I found interesting was not only how they composed the feed, but how the feed is actually built ahead of time so it's ready for the users when they login. That makes a lot of sense, actually, though it means your feed is being rebuilt over and over even you don't login. By contrast, it feels (though I couldn't say either way) as though Mastodon only builds the feeds when users login. Less overhead. Slower responses.

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Chip Huyen, Mar 15, 2024

This is a great high-level overview of what's out there in the world of open source AI tools. Even though it covers a lot of ground, it's a quick read. No doubt there's so much more that could be said. Most useful is the introductory description of the 'AI stack' - "4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications." We see the most open source projects at the application layer, and the further down the stack the harder it is for individuals to make contributions. Still, there's a ton of room here for individual innovators. Also from the same author: Machine Learning Developments and Operations (MLOps) Guide. See also: collection of open source and/or local AI tools and solutions.

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Sketchplanations, Mar 15, 2024

Alan Levine shared this link today. At first I was just going to look and move on, but after spending fifteen minutes reading these one-panel cartoon explanations I feel I have to link to it here. Most of the explanations are of phenomena I'm already familiar with, but they could be quite educational for someone with less experience, and they have the virtue of being accurate and illustrative. Recommended; have a look, at least.

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Chris Littlewood, Filtered, Mar 15, 2024

This is advertorial content, so read it with a grain of salt. Still, it raises an interesting question, quoting a LinkedIn post from Nick Shackleton-Jones on why we shouldn't organize content using pathways, and offering a counter in the form of another LinkedIn comment and a study the author (putatively) conducted on his own. For my own part, I don't see why you couldn't do both. A lot of the time (such as when I was trying to use public and private keys yesterday) there's a logical order of things. I follow pathways a lot when I'm learning about tech. What I don't want, though, is to be locked into pathways. Make them a suggestion, not a requirement.

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