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Coursera & InnoCentive: Good match?

Coursera is one of the biggest (open) online education suppliers - with high quality courses in the arts, humanities, technology, and fundamental science.

InnoCentive is one of the biggest ideagoras and offers a platform for organizations to crowdsource their scientific problems.

Letting hundreds of students think about real-world solutions (and have them peer-review those) is a win-win situation: students are more motivated to work on real problems, and companies get their hands on the top-rated solutions. 

Of course, InnoCentive can be any other ideagora or platform for freelance projects like Guru.com or just by including real-world problems.

Likewise, Coursera can be another online educational supplier like Udacity or a smaller one.

#Gamification13 assignment 3

Just submitted (a mod of) the 3rd #gamification13 assignment (I skipped the second). Using the teacher’s D6 framework for gamification design, I have described a project I am currently involved in and where we want to apply game elements to improve (or stretch the pedagogical horizon of) education in Latin America.

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There we go.. an artificial brain

The most advanced simulated brain up until now. The model consists of 2.5 million neurons (agents?) and can interpret numbers and other inputs, assess the response, and make errors like people make. It is also adaptive, and learn new tasks and learn from mistakes and rewire its own neurons. It takes a couple of hours to process something humans do in less than a second, but as computing power improves, this will grow into something like a real brain.

A short video explanation here: http://youtu.be/pg7YNUnK-Io and the full paper here.

Btw, 2 giant research projects in both the EU and the US were awarded funding over 1 billion €$ to develop an artificial brain.

The Google generation: myth or reality?

Very comprehensive list that critically analyzes many of the claims made about the Net Gen, Homo Zappiens, Digital Natives, Millenials, or whatever the kids born in the 90s are called. What should be noted is that only in some cases, opposite claims are made, but in most cases, it is just explained that there is no clear evidence supporting the original claim. The research is published in 2008 and the sources they have used to do their analysis even older, so more recent insights will probably add additional proof. However, the list gives a good overview of the different claims used and shows that one should be careful in interpreting what is said.

Paper: Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Huntington, P., Fieldhouse, M., Gunter, B., Withey, R., et al. (2008). The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Aslib Proceedings, 60(4), 290–310. doi:10.1108/00012530810887953

Many of the claims made on behalf of the Google generation in the popular media fail to stack up fully against the evidence (Williams and Rowlands, 2007, pp. 11-18). Over the following pages, we try to assess these claims on the basis of the very scant available evidence.

Confidence level: low [a], medium [b] or high [c].

• They are more competent with technology[b] (see confidence level above). Our verdict: generally true, we think, but older users are catching up fast. However, the majority of young people tend to use much simpler applications and fewer facilities than many imagine.

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