Daily Archives: March 12, 2017

Block 3 - Algorithm culture, Blog posts, Lifestream, Twitter

TWEET: Microsoft white paper on the future of education

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Link to Microsoft’s white paper on the way education is changing.

“Learning technology is not a simple application of computer science to education or vice versa”

“Universities tend to be proactive in their approach to preparing undergraduates for the world of work. However, as the employment landscape becomes increasingly fluid, universities must constantly update their teaching practices to suit the demands of the jobs market.”

“This means that students and academics could be working on anything up to three internet-enabled digital devices in a single session: a laptop or desktop, a tablet and a smartphone. Students, like most modern employees, are working on the move, at any time of day, in almost any location as work and leisure hours become blurred by increasingly ‘mobile’ lives”  Yes, definitely reflects my life!

“The primary applications for artificially intelligent systems in HE will occur within marking and assessment. Automated systems designed to mark essays, for example, will reduce the time spent by academics on paperwork and increase their face-to-face time with students or their time spent engaging with research occurring outside of the institution.”  I hope this never happens

“Work in the future will be more interconnected and network-oriented. Employees will be working across specialist knowledge boundaries as technologies and disciplines converge, requiring a blend of technical training and the ‘soft’ skills associated with collaboration.” I think we’re already starting to see this happening

Learner or predictive analytics […] can serve to both measure and shape a student’s progress. Universities will also unlock new insight into how students are engaging in digital and physical spaces.   Very relevant to this algorithmic cultures block.

“Although mobile technology has permanently changed learning environments, all of our interviewees stressed the point that learning technology should be a tool and never the end goal. The ideal university education is still about improving a student’s ability to produce appropriate ideas, solve problems correctly, build on complex theories and make accurate inferences from the available information.” Hurrah!

Block 3 - Algorithm culture, Blog posts, Lifestream, Visual artefacts

Week 8 – visual artefact

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I guess this isn’t strictly a visual artefact as there’a a lot of text in it, but I’ve tried to present it in a very visual way and, in the interests of variety and familiarisation with different digital tools, I’ve tried something different.

I’ve presented this artefact in Prezi:

Please click the image to open the Prezi presentation

As far as possible I attempted to introduce some scientific rigour to my experimentation and avoid the temptation to force the results I expected.  The element of playfulness made this more difficult than I expected!

With the benefits of hindsight, in my case Amazon recommendations was probably not the best choice of algorithm to experiment with, as my account is used by other members of my family.  If anything my recommendations are more skewed to my son’s preferences, as he is a more prolific user of Amazon’s services than I am.