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This study has received a lot of attention, being reported in many different outlets. The main reporting suggests that discussions in online learning are strongly biased, with more attention being paid to white male students by instructors, and white female students more likely to correspond with or respond to other white females. I don’t dispute these findings, as far as they apply to the 124 MOOCs that the researchers studied.
Where the madness comes in is then generalising this to all online courses. This is like finding that members of drug gangs in Mexico are likely to kill each other so the probability of death by gunfire is the same for all Mexicans.
MOOCs are one specific type of online learning, offered mainly by elitist institutions with predominantly white male faculty delivering the MOOCs. Furthermore, the instructor:student ratio in MOOCs is far higher than in credit-based online learning, which still remains the main form of online learning, despite the nonsense spouted by Stanford, MIT and Harvard about MOOCs. In an edX or Coursera MOOC, with very many students, it is impossible for an instructor to respond to every student. Some form of selection has to take place.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence, which is unique and irreplaceable. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to passively disintegrate, expresses a value inherent in its way of life, which is the ultimate source of more refined forms of normativity. This response to the problem of meaning will not satisfy those searching for a functionalist or logical solution, but on this view such a solution will not be forthcoming. As an intuition pump for this alternative perspective I introduce two ancient foreign worldviews that assign a constitutive role to death. Then I trace the emergence of a similar conception of mortality from the cybernetics era to the ongoing development of enactive cognitive science. Finally, I analyze why orthodox computationalism has failed to grasp the role of mortality in this constitutive way. Life is Precious Because it is Precarious: Individuality, Mortality and the Problem of Meaning Tom Froese Representation and Reality in Humans, Other Living Organisms and Intelligent Machines pp 33-50
Part of the Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics book series (SAPERE, volume 28)
Via Complexity Digest, Miloš Bajčetić
Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the relationship between quality and popularity. However, these results do not explain the viral spread of low-quality information, such as the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy. We investigate quality discrimination in a stylized model of an online social network, where individual agents prefer quality information, but have behavioural limitations in managing a heavy flow of information. We measure the relationship between the quality of an idea and its likelihood of becoming prevalent at the system level. We find that both information overload and limited attention contribute to a degradation of the market’s discriminative power. A good tradeoff between discriminative power and diversity of information is possible according to the model. However, calibration with empirical data characterizing information load and finite attention in real social media reveals a weak correlation between quality and popularity of information. In these realistic conditions, the model predicts that low-quality information is just as likely to go viral, providing an interpretation for the high volume of misinformation we observe online.
Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0132 (2017)
doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0132
Via Complexity Digest, Miloš Bajčetić
Google has introduced its new algorithm, Panda 4.0, in an effort to reward high quality, original content in the search engine's rankings. But, this doesn't mean marketers should stop curating
Via Robin Good, Miloš Bajčetić
"Most people curate for the benefit of themselves or their organisations. What if we..."
Via Robin Good
A framework for using Curation in a learning organisation
Via Robin Good
Thinking of adding value should be the first stage in curation, PKM, or any professional online sharing.
Via Robin Good
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Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the inevitable cost associated with detecting environmental cues and responding to them in adaptive ways, we conjecture that the potential for predicting the environment can overcome the expenses associated with maintaining costly, complex structures. We present a minimal formal model grounded in information theory and selection, in which successive generations of agents are mapped into transmitters and receivers of a coded message. Our agents are guessing machines and their capacity to deal with environments of different complexity defines the conditions to sustain more complex agents. Information theory, predictability and the emergence of complex life
Luís F. Seoane, Ricard V. Solé
Published 21 February 2018.DOI: 10.1098/rsos.172221
Via Complexity Digest, Miloš Bajčetić
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is whether information spreads according to simple or complex dynamics: does each exposure to a piece of information have an independent probability of a user adopting it (simple contagion), or does this probability depend instead on the number of sources of exposure, increasing above some threshold (complex contagion)? Most studies to date are observational and, therefore, unable to disentangle the effects of confounding factors such as social reinforcement, homophily, limited attention, or network community structure. Here we describe a novel controlled experiment that we performed on Twitter using ‘social bots’ deployed to carry out coordinated attempts at spreading information. We propose two Bayesian statistical models describing simple and complex contagion dynamics, and test the competing hypotheses. We provide experimental evidence that the complex contagion model describes the observed information diffusion behavior more accurately than simple contagion. Future applications of our results include more effective defenses against malicious propaganda campaigns on social media, improved marketing and advertisement strategies, and design of effective network intervention techniques. Mønsted B, Sapieżyński P, Ferrara E, Lehmann S (2017) Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0184148. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184148
Via Complexity Digest, Miloš Bajčetić
In a world, where Artificial Intelligence systems will decide about increasingly many issues, including life and death, how should autonomous systems faced with ethical dilemmas decide, and what is required from humans? An Extension of Asimov's Robotics Laws Jan Nagler, Jeroen van den hoven, Dirk Helbing
Via Complexity Digest, Miloš Bajčetić
Google has introduced its new algorithm, Panda 4.0, in an effort to reward high quality, original content in the search engine's rankings. But, this doesn't mean marketers should stop curating
Via Robin Good
A framework for using Curation in a learning organisation
Via Robin Good
Content curation tools are in their infancy. Nonetheless you see so many of them around, there are more new curation tools coming your way soon, with lots of new features and options.
Via Robin Good
Thinking of adding value should be the first stage in curation, PKM, or any professional online sharing.
Via Robin Good
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