Saturday, December 22, 2018

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

  • tags: blockchain emerging-economies developing-countries india africa emerging-technologies

    • However, many laws in both developing and developed countries have not kept pace with digital advancements, and they continue to require paper-based documentation, preventing participants from taking full advantage of the technology,
    • “The challenge is not the technology; it’s the issues involved relating to implementation, organization and trust.
    • The panelists stressed that bitcoin merely happens to be one of blockchain’s earliest and most prominent applications, and that blockchain has a far greater potential lying in wait.
    • We are much more excited about the underlying blockchain technology and how it relates to transactions, especially, than we are about cryptocurrencies.
    • India is a frontrunner among emerging economies in embracing the blockchain
    • managing land ownership records
    • allows for the tracking of all state level financial services on one platform and prevents corruption once records are entered.
    • The project we are implementing allows you to track land ownership history over time, and do verified land titling registration with background checks on who paid [the property] taxes.
    • In supply chains, Mumbai and Visakhapatnam ports are using the blockchain to create tamper-proof methods that track incoming shipments and shippers
    • “Don’t start with what you need to tweak for blockchain. Start with what you need to allow entrepreneurs to innovate.”
    • Gupta had some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and users in the blockchain space. “Don’t use blockchain when you don’t need it,”
    • Businesses considering using blockchain need to recognize that the technology is still in its early stages.
    • There are still very basic questions about the scalability of these networks that are going to take time to unfold,

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, December 8, 2018

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

  • tags: MOOCs moocs MOOC edX

  • tags: credentials digital badges microcredentials micro-masters higher education career

    • ground discussions of the nondegree landscape in some numbers rather than the speculation and hyperbole that often surrounds it.
    • Specialization programs generally cost students between $39 and $79 per month, offering a certificate at the end of completion after a few months, but no academic credit toward a further degree.
    • Results on student demographics, motivations and preferences offer a look at the types of students who enroll in nondegree courses and hint at the potential for these offerings to play a vital role in improving Americans’ career prospects
    • Close to 80 percent of respondents reported already having an undergraduate degree, and 40 percent also had a master’s degree. Only 16 percent of enrolled students had no prior degree, suggesting that massive open online courses appeal mainly to students with prior academic credentials -- perhaps those looking to acquire new skills or advance their careers in new directions.
    • this market mainly appeals to students as a vessel for lifelong learning.
    • The report’s findings around motivation lend credence to those theories. From a provided list of possible benefits, surveyed students most frequently indicated they’re looking to improve performance in their current job
    • Other oft-cited motivations included needing help to start a new business, seeking new knowledge and wanting to improve applications for new jobs
    • The report shows that students enroll in MOOCs hoping that the substance of the courses will make them better at their jobs -- not purely as a résumé item that could lead to a promotion or a new job, “which takes perhaps more investment in something like a degree,” Gallagher said
    • Only 30 percent of the micromasters students and 40 percent of the specialization students said they planned to earn the alternative credential at the end of the course or program. One quarter of respondents said they would enroll in all of the courses in the series without earning the credential.
    • Nina Huntemann, senior director of academics and research at edX, told “Inside Digital Learning” that the report reinforces the company’s plan to provide “modular, flexible credentials that provide career advancement.
    • Gallagher believes future reports could shed more light on the stackability of credentials into degrees -- a phenomenon that only started taking off after the initial round of surveys began.
    • These microcredentials that stack into degrees are slowly beginning to remake the online degree market,” he said. “A lot of these motivations -- certainly the [return on investment] and the outcomes that students have -- could potentially shift.
  • tags: gamification game-based-learning gaming

    • Gamification is more than a buzzword; it is a trend that is shaping how content providers connect with users and keep them engaged in the long-term. In the world of e-learning, people use game mechanics and game design elements to create a new learning experience adapted to the expectations of today's learners.
    • One of the goals can be motivating learners to engage with the content and helping them play a more active role instead of passively consuming the content.
    • To gamify the learning program and provide clear objectives for the learners, you can introduce rewards and collectibles to online learning
      • Organize learning content into levels so learners can keep track of their progress and advance to the next level.
      •  
      • Allow learners to set the difficulty of certain elements, such as quizzes.
      •  
      • Keep things interesting by unlocking more content as learners progress.
    • Game-based learning is often confused with gamification. Game-based learning is about acquiring new knowledge and applying new concepts by playing games.
    • Game-based learning can also be applied by designing trivia questions directly related to the job skills.
  • tags: AI artificial-intelligence coursera

  • tags: digital badges future-of-jobs jobs

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

  • tags: openbadges IP credly digital-credentials

    • During this shift, Pearson filed two patents called “Generation, management, and tracking of digital credentials”.
    • Yet, this summer both patents were granted and with Credly’s purchase of Pearson’s Acclaim this past spring, they have now become the assignee.
    • This means that ALL implementers of the IMS Open Badges v2.0 (OBv2) standard are licensed to any necessary claims under the patent that relate directly to the implementation of the standard.” This should stand with Credly as the assignee as well.
    • The patents do contain information about ownership of templates, receiver acceptance, sharing, tracking views, and other technical functionality related to similar content management type of web systems. These functionalities are outside of the specific open badges specification although, without some of it, especially the content and data management aspects, it would be challenging to implement an Open Badges System
  • tags: ethical data sharing

  • tags: ethical data sharing principles community

  • tags: hofstede cultural multicultural multinational culture

  • tags: open data

  • tags: Google AI artificial intelligence machine learning machine-learning

  • tags: data ethics in IT ethics

    • We are in the midst of a “data revolution,” where individuals and organizations can store and analyze massive amounts of information. Leveraging data can allow for surprising discoveries and innovations with the power to fundamentally alter society: from applying machine learning to cancer research to harnessing data to create “smart” cities, data science efforts are increasingly surfacing new insights — and new questions.
    • Working with large databases, new analytical tools, and data-enabled methods promises to bring many benefits to society. However, “data-driven technologies also challenge the fundamental assumptions upon which our societies are built,
    • “In this time of rapid social and technological change, concepts like ‘privacy,’ ‘fairness,’ and ‘representation’ are reconstituted.” Indeed, bias in algorithms may favor some groups over others, as evidenced by notorious cases such as the finding by MIT Researcher Joy Buolamwini that certain facial recognition software fails to work for those with dark skin tones. Moreover, lack of transparency and data misuse at ever-larger scales has prompted calls for greater scrutiny on behalf of more than 50 million Facebook users.
    • individual and collective responsibility to handle data ethically. These conversations, and the principles and outcomes that emerge as a result, will benefit from being intentionally inclusive.
    • More than 100 volunteers from universities, nonprofits, local and federal government agencies, and tech companies participated, drafting a set of guiding principles that could be adopted as a code of ethics. Notably, this is an ongoing and iterative process that must be community-driven, respecting and recognizing the value of diverse thoughts and experiences.
    • The goal of this research project is to understand how legal and ethical norms can be embedded into technology, and to create tools that enable responsible collection, sharing, and analysis of data. These issues have also been a topic of discussion at multiple recent workshops.
    • Earlier this month, a workshop at the National Academy of Sciences focused on ethics and data in the context of international research collaborations. Similarly, another recent workshop on fairness in machine learning aimed to identify key challenges and open questions that limit fairness, both in theory and in practice.
    • there are powerful incentives for the commercial sector to disregard these initiatives in favor of business as usual. It is not clear how compliance and accountability could be incentivized, monitored, or enforced in both the public and private sectors, although new European Union regulations pertaining to data privacy will affect organizations globally beginning in May 2018. Both “top-down” regulations, as well as “grassroots” efforts, are increasingly raising questions about how we might define fairness, combat bias, and create ethics guidelines in data science and AI.
    • widespread adoption of ethical data collection and data analysis practices requires more than business penalties and awareness of these issues on the part of data science practitioners and the general public.
    • Boenig-Liptsin notes, “We need to understand how our values shape our data tools and, reciprocally, how our data tools inform our values.”
    • We are seeing an increasing number of data practitioners and leaders stand up and speak about the questionable and often outright illegal collection, sharing, and use of sensitive data. For their voices to drive change, and for our society to truly harness the positive impacts of data innovation, while mitigating unintended consequences, we will need a collective effort. This effort needs to reach beyond academia and policymakers, to anyone who can contribute — from the public and private sectors.
    • voice expectations for responsible data use, bringing data practitioners together to examine existing research and evidence.
    • translate findings into actionable principles — and to hold each other accountable
    • In addition to working with regulatory bodies, the shaping of social norms can transform these principles into enforceable standards for the responsible use of data.
    • Fully harnessing the data revolution requires that we not only explore what can be done with data, but also that we understand the broader impacts of how any individual or organization’s contribution affects others.
  • tags: data ethics ethics in IT

  • tags: ethics data bigdata ethics in IT

  • tags: ethics data ethics in IT

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.