3,141 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2016
  2. Sep 2016
    1. design this class, I found I was seeking an experience of learning

      Just highlighting and annotating the obvious, lest we forget. There is so much of design = pathway to objectives that I want to linger over, signal boost, Mia's fundamental point: design = the learning experience. A crucial distinction.

    1. When educators are actively experimenting in the classroom, students in turn are more likely to confidently take creative risks themselves. It is also important that educators provide opportunities for students to take ownership of their learning and depart from teacher-defined outcomes without being penalized

      Why isn't this in the Horizon HE report? It's more applicable to HE students who have greater opportunities and resources for experiential/self-directed learning.

    1. The naive realist assumes that love, snow, marriage, worship, animals, death, food, and hundreds of other things have essen-tially the same meaning to all human beings

      Set aside belief in native realism to understand essential meaning. Be in others shoes to understand perspective.

    2. Discovering the insider’s view is a different spe-cies of knowledge from one that rests mainly on the outsider’s view, even when the outsider is a trained social scientist

      have an inside view rather than watch from the outside

    1. Data sharing over open-source platforms can create ambiguous rules about data ownership and publication authorship, or raise concerns about data misuse by others, thus discouraging liberal sharing of data.

      Surprising mention of “open-source platforms”, here. Doesn’t sound like these issues are absent from proprietary platforms. Maybe they mean non-institutional platforms (say, social media), where these issues are really pressing. But the wording is quite strange if that is the case.

    2. Activities such as time spent on task and discussion board interactions are at the forefront of research.

      Really? These aren’t uncontroversial, to say the least. For instance, discussion board interactions often call for careful, mixed-method work with an eye to preventing instructor effect and confirmation bias. “Time on task” is almost a codeword for distinctions between models of learning. Research in cognitive science gives very nuanced value to “time spent on task” while the Malcolm Gladwells of the world usurp some research results. A major insight behind Competency-Based Education is that it can allow for some variance in terms of “time on task”. So it’s kind of surprising that this summary puts those two things to the fore.

    3. Research: Student data are used to conduct empirical studies designed primarily to advance knowledge in the field, though with the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions. Application: Student data are used to inform changes in institutional practices, programs, or policies, in order to improve student learning and support. Representation: Student data are used to report on the educational experiences and achievements of students to internal and external audiences, in ways that are more extensive and nuanced than the traditional transcript.

      Ha! The Chronicle’s summary framed these categories somewhat differently. Interesting. To me, the “application” part is really about student retention. But maybe that’s a bit of a cynical reading, based on an over-emphasis in the Learning Analytics sphere towards teleological, linear, and insular models of learning. Then, the “representation” part sounds closer to UDL than to learner-driven microcredentials. Both approaches are really interesting and chances are that the report brings them together. Finally, the Chronicle made it sound as though the research implied here were less directed. The mention that it has “the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions” may be strategic, as applied research meant to influence “decision-makers” is more likely to sway them than the type of exploratory research we so badly need.

    1. the use of data in scholarly research about student learning; the use of data in systems like the admissions process or predictive-analytics programs that colleges use to spot students who should be referred to an academic counselor; and the ways colleges should treat nontraditional transcript data, alternative credentials, and other forms of documentation about students’ activities, such as badges, that recognize them for nonacademic skills.

      Useful breakdown. Research, predictive models, and recognition are quite distinct from one another and the approaches to data that they imply are quite different. In a way, the “personalized learning” model at the core of the second topic is close to the Big Data attitude (collect all the things and sense will come through eventually) with corresponding ethical problems. Through projects vary greatly, research has a much more solid base in both ethics and epistemology than the kind of Big Data approach used by technocentric outlets. The part about recognition, though, opens the most interesting door. Microcredentials and badges are a part of a broader picture. The data shared in those cases need not be so comprehensive and learners have a lot of agency in the matter. In fact, when then-Ashoka Charles Tsai interviewed Mozilla executive director Mark Surman about badges, the message was quite clear: badges are a way to rethink education as a learner-driven “create your own path” adventure. The contrast between the three models reveals a lot. From the abstract world of research, to the top-down models of Minority Report-style predictive educating, all the way to a form of heutagogy. Lots to chew on.

    1. I wonder what would have happened if someone I trust had provided me with a list of resources and people she admired when I started out in online learning and open education four years ago.

      Interesting scenario. Sounds quite a bit like the role of this one person in grad school who gives you the boost you need. Usually not your director, who’s more of a name than a resource. Possibly someone with a relatively low status. It becomes something of an “informal advisor” role. “Trust” is indeed key, here. My first reaction reading this was to balk at the “trust” part, because critical thinking skills warrant other methods to gather resources. But this is a situation where trust does matter quite a bit. Not that the resources are necessarily better. But there’s much less overhead involved if rapport has been established. In fact, it’s often easy to get through a text or to start a conversation with someone using knowledge of the angle through which they’ve been recommended. “If she told me to talk to so-and-so, chances are that this person won’t take it the wrong way if we start discussing this issue.”

  3. Aug 2016
  4. Jul 2016
    1. Set project work with explicit networking goals and a phil project as part of it. Mandate that students find off campus resources which they curate and present to class (either online, on a collab blog, or in class), reward students with facetime on their blog – good posts and comments get lecturer feedback,.

      Great ideas here.

  5. inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
    1. The key aspect of deep learning is that these layers of features are not designed by human engineers: they are learned from data using a general-purpose learning procedure.

      深度学习的最重要的一方面就是多层特征自动学习

    2. The backpropagation procedure to compute the gradient of an objective function with respect to the weights of a multilayer stack of modules is nothing more than a practical application of the chain rule for derivatives.

      反向传播过程来计算一个具有多层模块权重的目标函数的梯度其实不过是求导链式规则实际应用。

    1. 根据评论区 @山丹丹@啸王 的提醒,更正了一些错误(用斜体显示),在此谢谢各位。并根据自己最近的理解,增添了一些东西(用斜体显示)。如果还有错误,欢迎大家指正。第一个问题:为什么引入非线性激励函数?如果不用激励函数(其实相当于激励函数是f(x) = x),在这种情况下你每一层输出都是上层输入的线性函数,很容易验证,无论你神经网络有多少层,输出都是输入的线性组合,与没有隐藏层效果相当,这种情况就是最原始的感知机(Perceptron)了。正因为上面的原因,我们决定引入非线性函数作为激励函数,这样深层神经网络就有意义了(不再是输入的线性组合,可以逼近任意函数)。最早的想法是sigmoid函数或者tanh函数,输出有界,很容易充当下一层输入(以及一些人的生物解释balabala)。第二个问题:为什么引入Relu呢?第一,采用sigmoid等函数,算激活函数时(指数运算),计算量大,反向传播求误差梯度时,求导涉及除法,计算量相对大,而采用Relu激活函数,整个过程的计算量节省很多。第二,对于深层网络,sigmoid函数反向传播时,很容易就会出现梯度消失的情况(在sigmoid接近饱和区时,变换太缓慢,导数趋于0,这种情况会造成信息丢失,参见 @Haofeng Li 答案的第三点),从而无法完成深层网络的训练。第三,Relu会使一部分神经元的输出为0,这样就造成了网络的稀疏性,并且减少了参数的相互依存关系,缓解了过拟合问题的发生(以及一些人的生物解释balabala)。当然现在也有一些对relu的改进,比如prelu,random relu等,在不同的数据集上会有一些训练速度上或者准确率上的改进,具体的大家可以找相关的paper看。多加一句,现在主流的做法,会在做完relu之后,加一步batch normalization,尽可能保证每一层网络的输入具有相同的分布[1]。而最新的paper[2],他们在加入bypass connection之后,发现改变batch normalization的位置会有更好的效果。大家有兴趣可以看下。

      ReLU的好

    1. Unsupervised Learning of 3D Structure from Images Authors: Danilo Jimenez Rezende, S. M. Ali Eslami, Shakir Mohamed, Peter Battaglia, Max Jaderberg, Nicolas Heess (Submitted on 3 Jul 2016) Abstract: A key goal of computer vision is to recover the underlying 3D structure from 2D observations of the world. In this paper we learn strong deep generative models of 3D structures, and recover these structures from 3D and 2D images via probabilistic inference. We demonstrate high-quality samples and report log-likelihoods on several datasets, including ShapeNet [2], and establish the first benchmarks in the literature. We also show how these models and their inference networks can be trained end-to-end from 2D images. This demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of learning to infer 3D representations of the world in a purely unsupervised manner.

      The 3D representation of a 2D image is ambiguous and multi-modal. We achieve such reasoning by learning a generative model of 3D structures, and recover this structure from 2D images via probabilistic inference.

    1. When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning as standard practice for improved new task performance.

      Learning w/o Forgetting: distilled transfer learning

    1. encourages students to “steal” and cite ideas from each other’s hypothes.is annotations

      This is a neat idea, but do you think that this inhibits some of the students from annotating to their full potential? If I had a great idea, I might save it for myself instead of having someone else "steal" it.

  6. Jun 2016
    1. «Les professeurs qui publient dans une revue disciplinaire n'ont pas toujours le temps, ni la reconnaissance, pour publier dans d'autres publications sur leurs projets ou leurs innovations pédagogiques, explique Anastassis Kozanitis. S'ils le font, ces publications hors discipline ne sont pas reconnues pour leurs demandes de subvention. C'est un frein majeur à la diffusion des recherches dans le domaine au Canada.»
    1. In this Discussion blog you will find: #DevtIDEAS Debates videos and summaries (a series of live online ‘webinars’ that brought several practitioners and researchers to debate and share new ideas), editorials from key global international development researchers and and practitioners, and a collection of posts that feature multimedia videos and graphics.

      Development as a field continues to evolve. Ideas that turn into experience generate new ideas and lessons. New ideas inform new experiences, and these are typically debated by those involved in development work.

      You can read and watch the debates and discussions that took place over the past two years complementing the IDRC publication International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects.

    1. An executive at a large provider of digital learning tools pushed back against what he saw as Thille’s “complaint about capitalism.”

      Why so coy?

      R.G. Wilmot Lampros, chief product officer for Aleks, says the underlying ideas, referred to as Knowledge Space Theory, were developed by professors at the University of California at Irvine and are in the public domain. It's "there for anybody to vet," he says. But McGraw-Hill has no more plans to make its analytics algorithms public than Google would for its latest search algorithm.

      "I know that there are a few results that our customers have found counterintuitive," Mr. Lampros says, but the company's own analyses of its algebra products have found they are 97 percent accurate in predicting when a student is ready to learn the next topic.

      As for Ms. Thille's broader critique, he is unpersuaded. "It's a complaint about capitalism," he says. The original theoretical work behind Aleks was financed by the National Science Foundation, but after that, he says, "it would have been dead without business revenues."

      MS. THILLE stops short of decrying capitalism. But she does say that letting the market alone shape the future of learning analytics would be a mistake.

    1. What teachers want in a data dashboard

      Though much of it may sound trite and the writeup is somewhat awkward (diverse opinions strung together haphazardly), there’s something which can help us focus on somewhat distinct attitudes towards Learning Analytics. Much of it hinges on what may or may not be measured. One might argue that learning happens outside the measurement parameters.

    2. Data “was something you would use as an autopsy when everything was over,” she said.

      The autopsy/biopsy distinction can indeed be useful, here. Leading to insight. Especially if it’s not about which one is better. A biopsy can help prevent something in an individual patient, but it’s also a dangerous, potentially life-threatening operation. An autopsy can famously identify a “cause of death” but, more broadly, it’s been the way we’ve learnt a lot about health, not just about individual patients. So, while Teamann frames it as a severe limitation, the “autopsy” part of Learning Analytics could do a lot to bring us beyond the individual focus.

    1. educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies

      This Systems or "factory farming" approach to education seems antithetical to (and virtually guaranteed to flummox) a community-based, engaged, serendipitous and spontaneous learning explosion in traditional Higher Ed. Where are some cracks and crevices where the System has failed to snuff out the accidental life of learning?

    2. more student engagement beyond the walls of a school.

      Guest users in Moodle - can we make it easier to get them into the space to engage with students? No more boring forums when the community members or guest speakers in a f-2-f class can contribute. What about a Google form for requests? Is there a way to limit guests to only one forum?

    1. I have Serious Rant-y Thoughts on requiring that students inhabit public spaces in professional contexts, and I do wonder how much a class hashtag is useful beyond self-promotion of the course and its amazing instructor.

      You may consult input from amazing people like @GoogleGuacamole and @actualham who have very intentionally integrated (not just mentioning or requiring) Twitter use in their courses and implicated its value in students' connections with their professional network.

  7. May 2016
    1. Identifying issues important in their lives and community, and deciding on one to address

      Sometimes this takes weeks or even months. I remember taking a walk with an art teacher several years ago, and I asked him how a particular student was doing in his class, and specifically what he was working on because it was hard for me to figure out how to get him connected to my work in English. It was November, just before Thanksgiving, and my colleague said, "I haven't figured out what his project will be yet," he said, before going on to explain a couple of things he had tried without success. I was struck with how patient he was being in letting the project come to the student, and not forcing him into a prescribed curriculum. Waiting is so hard, yet the work produced once there is a "flow" for a student makes it worth the wait. This has strong implications for school structures however! We need to be with students for longer periods of time. It also has implications for how groups work together. Perhaps a student who hasn't found his/her project yet can help others?

    2. High unemployment■■Racial discrimination■■Neighborhood violence■■Deportation of undocumented immigrants■■High cost of college attendance■■Juvenile justice

      Funny thing is, one can imagine that students -- at least my students in the Bronx -- would come up with a similar list. They have! But you can't bring it to them. There are shades and subtleties that are important in any group's list of topics. Like my students wanted to explore why people from the Bronx are not treated the same as people from elsewhere.

    1. Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there must be learners. There are only two non-miraculous ways for learners to come into existence: they must either evolve or be designed and built by learners that evolved. Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error — and without the errors the trials wouldn’t accomplish anything.
  8. Apr 2016
    1. Generally the literatures related to transformational learning hinge on active student engagement in the learning process and on students assuming responsibility for their learning. Transformative learning, self-directed learning, experiential learning, and collaborative learning, each of which aims to enhance students’ engagement,are some of the pedagogical approaches that are widely described and evaluated in the literature. In addition to active student engagement, another key feature of transformational learning is transformational teaching. In order for students’ role to change, the role and responsibility of faculty must change as well.

      Active learning, engaged learning, experiential learning, and owning the learning best happens with transformational teaching.

    1. It is easy to allow technology to replace memorization and other skills. We should be mindful of what we allow it to replace. Martin Luther King had a large store of writings memorized -- and it served him well when he wrote the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

      We need more tools that will aid skill development instead of replacing useful skills. Spaced repetition software to assist memorization is one example. Phrase-by-phrase music training programs are another. The same ideas can be applied to memorization of text.

    1. We should have control of the algorithms and data that guide our experiences online, and increasingly offline. Under our guidance, they can be powerful personal assistants.

      Big business has been very militant about protecting their "intellectual property". Yet they regard every detail of our personal lives as theirs to collect and sell at whim. What a bunch of little darlings they are.

    1. networked discovery of connections would be at the center of both the learning environment as designed by faculty and the learning environment as experienced by students

      Would love to hear Campbell or Kuh elaborate on this. Identifying "connections" as more important than identifying content/information? A new way for searching the Internet? Mining connections among content/people? Mining the connections I've made among content/people on the Internet?

    1. Koranic school

      My understanding of what happens in Koranic schools is very limited but friends in Mali have described a process by which they had learnt the Koran by heart before they knew the meaning of any of the words. Something similar has been discussed in terms of the Bhagavad Gita.

  9. Mar 2016
    1. Do adults (and which adults) have the resources necessary to pursue learning opportunities?

      An opportunity for library outreach? Public libraries offer access to lifelong learning resources already. Could they go further with offering assistance & promoting advantages?Problem is that their resources are very limited.

    1. As Fung explains, wicked problems require “multi-sectoral problem-solving” and ways to remove the barriers to “pooling knowledge and coordinating action” through the formation of networks that connect organizations.7

      Can't be solved without being "connected."

    1. And this leads me to another thought- it seems like in our field there is this desire to go big, to scale, to teach hundreds of thousands, to affect an entire sector. Scale at the dimension is really only achieved by a process of mass duplication where the level of heart-felt connectivity is probably low.
    1. True personalized learning calls for a "rethinking and redesign" of schools, which could require them to overhaul classroom structures and schedules, curricula, and the instructional approaches of teachers, Mr. Calkins of EDUCAUSE argued. For instance, in an effective personalized learning model, teachers' roles are more like those of coaches or facilitators than "content providers," he said.

      Of course, no mention of curriculum

    2. "Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."

      And that is the problem, right...the "how they're going to learn a lesson" part. It's still "our" lesson being personalized for them. The agency piece is choosing how they get to "our" lesson. That misses the point.

    1. Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.

      So powerful to look at people engaged in networked learning "in the wild" in order to design interest-driven learning in classroom settings.

      I like to think of this type of experiment as a form of "blended learning," where you're blending elements of 3rd space learning into formal schooling.

  10. Feb 2016
    1. Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
    1. “Search is the cornerstone of Google,” Corrado said. “Machine learning isn’t just a magic syrup that you pour onto a problem and it makes it better. It took a lot of thought and care in order to build something that we really thought was worth doing.”
  11. Jan 2016
    1. Theprincipleismerelythisthatdifferentsubjectsandmodesofstudyshouldbeundertakenbypupilsatfittingtimeswhentheyhavereachedtheproperstageofmentaldevelopment.

      You would think that this was obvious, but in some schools and universities we are as far away from that as we can be. Learning is not a treatment to be undergone, yet...

      This is the entry point for everyone's oscillating learning wave.

    1. Dweck’s message is that we can’t just adopt a growth mindset and forget about it, and simply praising effort regardless of actual progress is completely counterproductive. Successfully cultivating a growth mindset is an ongoing process that consists of teaching strategies for growth and praising effort thoughtfully, rather than regardlessly.

      "Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It's the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement." -- Carol Dweck

    1. Offering students the possibility of experiential learning in personal, interactive, networked computing—in all its gloriously messy varieties—provides the richest opportunity yet for integrative thinking within and beyond "schooling."

      Yes, yes, yes. Networked learning IS experiential. I am always on the lookout for opportunities to facilitate those experiences - for my students and myself, and consider every embrace of glorious messiness a significant victory.

    2. Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.

      With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.

      This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...

      Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.

      The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.

      Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.

    3. Go into your nearest college or university library. Ignore the computer stations and the digital affordances. Enter the stacks, and run your fingers along the spines of the books on the shelves. You're tracing nodes and connections. You're touching networked learning—slow-motion and erratic, to be sure, but solid and present and, truth to tell, thrilling.

      What a beautiful and evocative series of sentences!

    1. The whole organic nature of learning experience through the #walkmyworld learning events meant that I learned what I needed to learn as I needed to learn it. It wasn’t a top down dictate of learning outcomes because the outcomes were determined by the process. It is a revolutionary concept — yet as ancient as Aristotle. Learning should never be measured solely by standard outcomes; people learn, and I mean really LEARN, when they discover for themselves what they know, what they want to know, and how they want to know it.
  12. Dec 2015
    1. constructivism (Jean Piaget) - Learners must actively construct their body of knowledge, their schema, through experience and reflection. When we encounter a new idea, we can do one of three things:

      • decide that it's irrelevant, and ignore it
      • assimilate it into our existing schema
      • accommodate it by modifying our schema

      social constructivism (Lev Vygotsky) - emphasized that building knowledge is a social process

      constructionism (Seymour Papert) - Learning works best when we are publicly building artifacts -- of any kind whatsoever. While communicating with others, we get valuable feedback, and learn to put thoughts in various concrete forms.

    1. “The key is deliberate practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”

      Peter Norvig's definition of deliberate practice, from "Teach Yourself to Program in 10 Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html

  13. Nov 2015
    1. a study by Stephen Schueller, published last year in the Journal of Positive Psychology, found that people assigned to a happiness activity similar to one for which they previously expressed a preference showed significantly greater increases in happiness than people assigned to an activity not based on a prior preference. This, writes Schueller, is “a model for positive psychology exercises similar to Netflix for movies or Amazon for books and other products.”

      The study.

    1. elementary school children become increasingly inattentive in class when recess is delayed. Similarly, studies conducted in French and Canadian elementary schools over a period of four years found that regular physical activity had positive effects on academic performance. Spending one third of the school day in physical education, art, and music improved not only physical fitness, but attitudes toward learning and test scores. These findings echo those from one analysis of 200 studies on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning, which also suggests that physical activity promotes learning.
    1. TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. Think of TPOT as your “Data Science Assistant”: TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines, then recommending the pipelines that work best for your data.

      https://github.com/rhiever/tpot TPOT (Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool) Built on numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, and deap.

    1. Nanodegree Program Summary Machine learning represents a key evolution in the fields of computer science, data analysis, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. It has quickly become industry's preferred way to make sense of the staggering volume of data our modern world produces. Machine learning engineers build programs that dynamically perform the analyses that data scientists used to perform manually. These programs can “learn” based on millions of experiences, all rigorously and numerically defined.