Today is the final day to get the discount rate if you are planning on coming to E-Learn in Vancouver this year (US$455 today vs US$495 from tomorrow onwards).
It promises to be quite a big event this year, with an estimated 900+ concurrent sessions, 100+ posters, and three lunchtime SIGs (including a new one on sustainable learning technologies), not to mention some fine keynotes and networking events. Annoyingly, it clashes with ICDE in Toronto this year but, IMHO, E-Learn is a better conference for those working and researching in online education, and it’s a much better location. I may be a little biased, being both a resident of Vancouver and local co-chair of the conference, but there are some very good reasons I chose to be both those things!
I have attended almost all E-Learn (and its predecessor, WebNet) conferences for nearly 20 years now because it tends to attract some great people, provides an excellently diverse and blended mix of technical and pedagogical perspectives, gives plentiful chances to engage with both early-career researchers and those at the top of the field, usually picks great locations, is well-organized, and focuses solely on adult online learning (mainly higher education but also some from industry, healthcare, government, etc). The acceptance rate (1-in-3 to 1-in-4) is high enough to attract diverse papers that can be off the wall and interesting (especially from younger researchers who don’t know what’s impossible yet so sometimes achieve it), but low enough to exclude utter rubbish. If that kind of thing interests you, this is the conference for you!
I hope to see you there.
Address of the bookmark: https://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/registration/
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The always wonderful Dave Cormier is writing a book (open, of course) about rhizomatic learning and, as you might expect given Dave’s eclectic and rich range of skills (from uber-tech-guru to uber-learning-guru) not to mention his cutting edge knowledge (this is someone so far ahead of trends that he actually invented the term ‘MOOC’) it’s brilliant stuff. Though it is a work in progress and still a bit raw in places, there are clues that this is not your common or garden e-book right from the opening chapter, Why we work together – cheating as learning which introduces the radical idea that people are pretty good at helping other people to learn while, in the process, learning themselves. Other chapters are equally charmingly named: Learning in a Time of Abundance, Five tips for slackers for keeping track of digital stuff and One person’s guide to evaluating educational technologies. What comes through most strongly in this is a vision of where we are going – where we must be going – in a world of increasing connection and increasingly connective technologies. In all, it provides an extremely practical, achievable, and pragmatic way of going about that without breaking everything in sight, very well grounded in theory, and very entertainingly (and very clearly) presented. I’d not noticed this work in progress till now and am very glad that I found it. Highly recommended reading for anyone in education, edtech, or who is simply interested in learning or how technology changes us, and how to manage that change. I really look forward to seeing the finished or, at least, the published product. My sense is that this will always be an evolving book because that’s pretty much the nature of the beast, and so it will continue to be relevant for a long time to come. Address of the bookmark: https://davecormier.pressbooks.com/ “Who does not know the problems with the driving test or studies testing? You have not time to learn and have more important things to do! And suddenly, the date for the exam or test in a few days.If your exam is important to you and you do not know what you should do otherwise, then you are right with us! Do not despair, we have something for you that can help you! “ This fabulous offer from dron.si (who knew that my surname was a thing in Slovenia?) allows you, for a mere €374.17, to be the proud owner of the SpyStudent kit, a camera, mic, earpiece, and wireless transmission system made for “those who do not like to learn for the test”. You can easily and undetectably shove the various bits of transmitter down your underpants, assuming you weigh more than 300 kilos, you wear exceptionally baggy clothing, and you have no fear of numerous forms of radiation in your nether regions. You might be a little challenged to find a way to shove the ‘wireless spy earpiece’ that, from the picture, seems to be made for elephants, down into your ear canal, let alone ever hope to get it out again (I hope it holds its charge!) but that’s part of the fun. Anyway, I am sure you can put up with a little inconvenience for a device that enables you (with the aid of your BMW-owning accomplice outside the building who you really hope knows the answers) to cheat on any exam or test with impunity. Obviously, exam invigilators have never seen microphones before so you’re fine on that count, and they never bother to look for people muttering into their shirts, holding up exam papers to their chests, or tilting their heads as though listening to large black objects shoved into their ears. And exams are normally taken in open fields, so the range won’t be a problem The man in the illustration is taking a break from his more usual activities of molesting small children/terrorism/voting for Trump, to enjoy cheating on his driving test. Sadly, he also cheated on the ‘holding your pen’ test, so it’s not going to end well: Don’t forget this crucial advice, though… You go into the examination room and you try to keep quiet as if nothing had. I hope nothing had. Address of the bookmark: http://www.dron.si/en/brezzicne-ip-kamere/i_424_hidden-wireless-video-live-transmission-camera-spystudent-button-camera-power-pack An interview with me by Graham Allcott, author of the bestselling How to be a productivity ninja and other books, for his podcast series Beyond Busy, and as part of the research for his next book. In it I ramble a lot about issues like social media, collective intelligence, motivation, technology, education, leadership, and learning, and Graham makes some incisive comments and asks some probing questions. The interview was conducted on the landing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, last year. Address of the bookmark: http://getbeyondbusy.com/e/35495d7ba89876L/?platform=hootsuite I had the pleasure to gatecrash the HCI 2017 conference in Vancouver today, which gave me the chance to see Dr Ali Dewan present three excellent papers in a row (two with his name on them) on a variety of themes, as well as a great paper written and presented by one of our students, Miao-Han Chang. Both did superb jobs of presenting to a receptive crowd. Ali got particular acclaim from the audience for the first work he presented (Combinatorial Auction based Mechanism Design for Course Offering Determination Athabasca, and especially the School of Computing and Information Systems, has made a great showing at this prestigious conference, with contributions not just from Ali and Miao-Han, but also from Oscar (Fuhua) Lin, Dunwei Wen, Maiga Chang and Vive Kumar. Kurt Reifferscheid and Xiaokun Zhang also had a paper in the proceedings but were sadly not able to attend to present it. Jon and Ali at the Vancouver Conference Centre after Ali’s marathon presentation stint. I detect a look of relief on Ali’s face! Papers This is a well thought-through response to a recent alarmist NYT article about cheating among programming students. The original NYT article is full of holy pronouncements about the evils of plagiarism, horrified statistics about its extent, and discussions of the arms wars, typically involving sleuthing by markers and evermore ornate technological fixes that are always one step behind the most effective cheats (and one step ahead of the dumber ones). This is a lose-lose system. No one benefits. But that’s not the biggest issue with the article. Nowhere does the NYT article mention that it is largely caused by the fact that we in academia typically tell programming students to behave in ways that no programmer in their right mind would ever behave (disclaimer: the one programming course that I currently teach, very deliberately, does not do that, so I am speaking here as an atypical outlier). As this article rightly notes, the essence of programming is re-use of code. Although there are certainly egregiously immoral and illegal ways to do that (even open source coders normally need to religiously cite their sources for significant uses of code written by others), applications are built on layer upon layer upon layer of re-used code, common subroutines and algorithms, snippets, chunks, libraries, classes, components, and a thousand different ways to assemble (in some cases literally) the code of others. We could not do programming at all without 99% of the code that does what we want it to do being written by others. Programmers knit such things together, often sharing their discoveries and improvements so that the whole profession benefits and the cycle continues. The solution to most problems is, more often than not, to be found in StackExchange forums, Reddit, or similar sites, or in open source repositories like Github, and it would be an idiotic programmer that chose not to (very critically and very carefully) use snippets provided there. That’s pretty much how programmers learn, a large part of how they solve problems, and certainly how they build stuff. The art of it is in choosing the right snippet, understanding it, fitting it into one’s own code, selecting between alternative solutions and knowing why one is better (in a given context) than another. In many cases, we have memorized ways of doing things so that, even if we don’t literally copy and paste, we repeat patterns (whole lines and blocks) that are often identical to those that we learned from others. It would likely be impossible to even remember where we learned such things, let alone to cite them. We should not penalize that – we should celebrate it. Sure, if the chunks we use are particulary ingenious, or particularly original, or particularly long, or protected by a licence, we should definitely credit their authors. That’s just common sense and decency, as well as (typically) a legal requirement. But a program made using the code of others is no less plagiarism than Kurt Schwitters was a plagiarist of the myriad found objects that made up his collages, or a house builder is a plagiarist of its bricks. And, as an aside, please stop calling it ‘Computer Science’. Programming is no more computer science than carpentry is woodworking science. It bugs me that ‘computer science’ is used so often as a drop-in synonym for programming in the popular press, reinforced by an increasing number of academics with science-envy, especially in North America. There are sciences used in computing, and a tiny percentage of those are quite unique to the discipline, but that’s a miniscule percentage of what is taught in universities and colleges, and a vanishingly small percentage of what nearly all programmers actually do. It’s also worth noting that computer science programs are not just about programming: there’s a whole bunch of stuff we teach (and that computing professionals do) about things like databases, networks, hardware, ethics, etc that has nothing whatsoever to do with programming (and little to do with science). Programming, though, especially in its design aspects, is a fundamentally human activity that is creative, situated, and inextricably entangled with its social and organizational context. Apart from in some research labs and esoteric applications, it is normally closer to fine art than it is to science, though it is an incredibly flexible activity that spans a gamut of creative pursuits analogous to a broad range of arts and crafts from poetry to music to interior design to engineering. Perhaps it is most akin to architecture in the ways it can (depending on context) blend art, craft, engineering, and (some) science but it can be analogous to pretty much any creative pursuit (universal machines and all that). Address of the bookmark: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/05/30/lets-teach-computer-science-students-to-cheat/#.tnw_FTOVyGc4 Hat-tip to Tim Terry (@tterry) for sharing this one from Phil Hill. tldr; – Blackboard and its acquisitions continue to shrink (great!), Canvas continues to grow (good), Moodle continues to thrive (very good), partly driven by Blackboard’s hosted version in MoodleRooms (not so good). Of the rest (a tiny fraction of the big three), Desire2Learn is still growing market share and Sakai trundles along as it has for over a decade. Homegrown solutions have dwindled to a neglible fraction of the whole, though it is worth noting that Moodle (especially), Canvas (to an extent), and Sakai are highly customizable as they are open source (or, in Canvas’s case, open core), and that all allow use of plugins of some form or another, so the fact few are running systems built from scratch does not imply that everyone is running baseline systems. The battle between open and closed source systems looks fairly evenly matched right now, on the surface, but that is largely due to Blackboard’s slowly-decreasing momentum. When you take into account that, up to 10 years ago, it and its acquisitions held a large majority of the market, it looks like open systems are the big winners. However, a note of caution is needed here. Canvas’s ambivalent approach and an increased move to cloud hosting, usually with proprietary pieces sneaking in through the back door (especially in Blackboard’s MoodleRooms foray), cast a shadow on that. The big commercial players are starting to notice that it only takes a little bit of lock-in to trap people in a system, so they can benefit from the reduced need for development that the use of open source entails for them, while still trapping their users as they have always done with relatively small, closed, euphemistically named ‘value-added’ services that, in the long run, are anything but. Cloud systems only make sense when they can be directly replaced with alternative cloud (or self-hosted) systems, with little or no disruption, lost functionality, or data loss. That largely limits the options to those that use open source and/or exclusively open protocols, or those that are more or less completely ephemeral and that store no significant data. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the direction cloud hosting is taking right now. I predict that there will be an increasing demand in coming years for migration specialists that are able to negotiate the complex business, legal, social, and technical problems of moving between cloud providers. They will be able to charge through the nose because they will save large fortunes for trapped companies. There are also killings to be made by cloud hosts that can successfully suck everything from other cloud hosts, though buyers should beware that they may just be moving from the frying pan into the fire. Long-time masters of lock-in, like Blackboard and Microsoft, will do everything in their power to prevent migration away from them, shifting formats, obfuscating data, subtly breaking protocols and standards, adding unnecessary but desirable tools, retiring systems that are too easy to back out of, and adjusting their prices to make it just a bit more expensive to leave them than to stay. Such techniques have worked for them for years even before the cloud got to be a big thing, but it is so much easier for them now they have their hands on actual company data. Smart companies will avoid falling prey to them in the first place. Address of the bookmark: http://mfeldstein.com/state-higher-ed-lms-market-us-canada-spring-2017-edition/ Oh good grief. I wonder why students would be taking such risks? Oh, right… “Modup, a website selling Modafinil, told the Guardian that during exam time the volume of Modafinil shipped to the UK doubles.” Funny that, in the whole article, there is no mention of the possibility that universities might be doing something outrageously wrong to their students, something that is easily fixable, something that just might just be the cause of the problem in the first place. Address of the bookmark: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/may/10/universities-do-more-tackle-smart-drugs-say-experts-uk-exams Learnium is yet another attempt to overlay a cloud-based social medium on institutional learning, in the same family as systems like Edmodo, Wikispaces Classroom, Lore, GoingOn, etc, etc. I deliberately exclude from this list the far more excellent, theoretically grounded, and innovative Curatr, as well as dumb bandwagoners like – of all things – Blackboard (not deserving of a link but you could look up their atrocious social media management tools if you want to see how not to do this). Learnium has a UK focus and it includes mobile apps as well as institutional integration tools. It looks slick, has a good range of tools, and seems to be gaining a little traction. This is trying to do something a little like what we tried to do with the Landing, but it should not be confused with the Landing in intent or design philosophy, notwithstanding some superficial similarities. Although the Landing is often used for teaching purposes, it deliberately avoids things like institutional roles, and deliberately blurs such distinctions when its users make use of them (eg. when they create course groups). It can be quite confusing for students expecting a guided space and top-down structure, and annoying if you are a teacher trying to control the learning space to behave that way, but that’s simply not how it is designed to work. The Landing is a learning space, where everyone is a teacher, not an institutional teaching space where the role is reserved for a few. Learnium has a far more institutionally managed, teacher/course-oriented perspective. From what I can tell, it’s basically an LMS, cut down in some places, enhanced in its social aspects. It’s closer to Canvas than Moodle in that regard. It might have some value for teachers that like the social media tools but that dislike the lack of teacher-control, lack of privacy, deeply problematic ethics, and ugly intrusions of things like Facebook, and who do not want the cost or hassle of managing their own environments. It is probably a more congenial environment for social pedagogies than most institutional LMSs, allowing learning to spread beyond class groups and supporting some kinds of social networking. There is a lot of scope and potential for vertical social networks like this that serve a particular kind of community in a tailored fashion. This is very much not Facebook, and that’s a very good thing. But Learnium is an answer to the question ‘how can I use social media in my courses?’ rather than ‘how can social media help to change how people learn?’ It is also an answer to the question of ‘how can Learnium make money?’ rather than ‘how can Learnium help its users?’ And, like any cloud-based service of this nature (sadly including Curatr), it is not a safe place to entrust your learning community: things like changes to terms of service, changes to tools, bankcruptcy ,and takeovers are an ever-present threat. With the exception of open systems that allow you to move everything, lock stock and barrel, to somewhere else with no significant loss of data or functionality, an institution (and its students) can never own a cloud-based system like this. It might be a small difference from an end user perspective, at least until it blows up, but it’s all the difference in the world. Address of the bookmark: https://www.learnium.com/about/institutions/ Researchers analyzing millions of posts across an assortment of popular social media assert that 63% of antisemitic posts were to be found on Twitter. The writers suggest: “The larger proportion of such hate speech found on Twitter could be because it’s easier to search for comments than other social sites – as many Facebook pages will not be public – and it’s easy for individuals to open and run multiple accounts.” Maybe so, but that’s not the whole story. There is no information given about the methodology used for this, but the nature of the social software systems being studied means that any pronouncement over relative percentages of antisemitic content in these different systems must be inherently flawed. The only thing that the researchers could really have been looking at here was not the extent of antisemitism on different social media, but the ease with which they could find it. Twitter discourse is predominantly public and set-based (only partly network-based), so finding stuff is not just easy but a design feature, notwithstanding Twitter’s own restrictions on quantity of data returned. There is no reliable way to query the entire blogosphere, nor even a significant or representative part of it, so the fact that 16% of antisemitic comments were found on blogs is neither here nor there and, even if it were, there would be no way to reliably gauge the numbers of individuals affected. Similarly, there is no ethical way to find such things in predominantly closed social networks like Facebook: access rights and the uneven nature of the social graph mean that much must remain hidden from researchers’ eyes (unless they are Facebook themselves). There could well be clusters of millions of anti-Semites that are entirely invisible to them, so the figure of 11% is equally spurious. The study’s sponsors use the results to say, “We hope this serves as a wake-up call to all internet forums to maintain moral standards, rid themselves of offensive content, and make the digital world a safer place for all.” This really doesn’t follow. It is horrible and shocking that antisemitism still occurs at all. I don’t know the solution to that, but I am pretty certain that it is not crass censorship. You don’t kill hatred by hiding it: quite the opposite. You kill it by confronting it, with education, with compassion, with reason, with opposing sentiment, by example, and so on. To use a flawed study like this as a means to promote censorship seems at best contrived, at worst a means to frame the problem as an ‘us vs them’ war that exacerbates an already horrendous problem. I came across a wonderful example of how to deal with hatred online the other day, at philosopher Dave Webster’s ‘Dispirited’ book blog. In response to Dave’s sensitive, open, and spiritual discussion of his own atheism, a person calling themselves Sheila Hale shockingly wrote: “What confused and empty views you have of faith in the One true God. Not surprising you present as a sad and miserable person.“ I was stunned to read this, especially knowing Dave (a thoroughly nice fellow). How unkind, how unchristian, how full of hate. It must be so tempting to mute the response, or to respond angrily, or to highlight the hypocrisy of the comment, or at least to throw in a witty riposte from her One true God to tell her he is angry with her now and will smite her mightily. But Dave didn’t do any of that. He left it as it is, to speak for itself, and it makes a more profound and eloquent point than any other response could hope to achieve. By leaving this hate act visible, raw and jarring in a context of gentle and supportive discourse, Dave lets the comment itself do all the heavy lifting, and rises above it by choosing to both show it and ignore it. Yes, some things need to be censored: I have removed a ton of junk from my blogs over the years, mostly advertising dubious sex sites, Canadian meds vendors, or fake Rolex sellers. Sure, if it offends you, don’t feel bad about getting rid of it. If it is illegal, report it. If it breaks your terms and conditions, by all means do what you see fit with it. I don’t have a problem with individuals making their own moral or pragmatic choices in their own literal and figurative domains. And I accept that there are some complex issues involved: Trump’s continuous barrage of blatant lies, for instance, seem to benefit from repeated exposure even when self-evidently false. But censorship is not always the right response, and it is often the wrong response. If we are going to change the world for the better, we need to acknowledge the evil in it and, at least sometimes, to face it directly. And we really have to stop using what Richard Feynman calls cargo-cult-science to back up our choices. Address of the bookmark: http://www.alphr.com/social-media/1005634/study-reveals-scale-of-antisemitism-onlineMaking the community the curriculum | Dave Cormier
SpyStudent: hidden wireless video live transmission camera
Professor Jon Dron | Beyond Busy
SCIS makes a great showing at HCI 2017, Vancouver
by Anton Vassiliev, Fuhua Lin & M. Ali Akber Dewan) for its broad applicability in many areas beyond scheduling courses.
Anton Vassiliev, Fuhua Lin, M. Ali Akber Dewan, Athabasca University, Canada
Kurt Reifferscheid, Xiaokun Zhang, Athabasca University, Canada
Yang Yan, Changchun Normal University, P.R. China; Dunwei Wen, M. Ali Akber Dewan, Athabasca University, Canada; Wen-Bo Huang, Changchun Normal University, P.R. China
Jinrun Yu, Yujuan Si, Xin Liu, Jilin University, P.R. China; Dunwei Wen, Athabasca University, Canada; Tengfei Luo, Jilin University, P.R. China; Liuqi Lang, Zhuhai College of Jilin University, P.R. China
Miao-Han Chang, Athabasca University, Canada; Rita Kuo, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, United States; Fathi Essalmi, University of Kairouan, Tunisia; Maiga Chang, Vive Kumar, Athabasca University, Canada; Hsu-Yang Kung, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, TaiwanComputer science students should learn to cheat, not be punished for it
State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2017 Edition
Universities must do more to tackle use of smart drugs, say experts
Learnium
Study reveals scale of antisemitism online (tldr; no it doesn't)
