👓 AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat | WIRED

Read AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat (WIRED)
Teachers are being forced to adapt to new tools that execute homework perfectly.
The headline is a bit click-baity, but the article is pretty solid nonetheless.

There is some interesting discussion in here on how digital technology meets pedagogy. We definitely need to think about how we reframe what is happening here. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t look back at the history of the acceptance (or not) of the calculator in math classes from the 60’s onward.

Where it comes to math, some of these tools can be quite useful, but students need to have the correct and incorrect uses of these technologies explained and modeled for them. Rote cheating certainly isn’t going to help them, but if used as a general tutorial of how and why methods work, then it can be invaluable and allow them to jump much further ahead of where they might otherwise be.

I’m reminded of having told many in the past that the general concepts behind the subject of calculus are actually quite simple and relatively easy to master. The typical issue is that students in these classes may be able to do the first step of the problem which is the actual calculus, but get hung up on not having practiced the algebra enough and the 10 steps of algebra after the first step of calculus is where their stumbling block lies in getting the correct answer.

👓 2018 in numbers | Adactio: Journal | Jeremy Keith

Read 2018 in numbers by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
I posted to adactio.com 1,387 times in 2018
An awesome and quite beautiful annual update here. I can’t imagine that I posted as much as Jeremy (or wrote as many longer posts in particular), but I do know that my posting velocity has increased since I began using my own website in preference to all other social media several years ago.

Reply to Chris Beckstrom about sparklines

Replied to reply to https://adactio.com/journal/14656 by Chris Beckstrom (Chris Beckstrom's Homepage)
Congrats! Fantastic stats. How’d you do those cool little graphs?
They’re known as sparklines: https://indieweb.org/sparkline and you’ll find some interesting details and implementations in the see also section in addition to (I’m sure) searching Jeremy’s site for the word “sparkline”.

👓 2018: A year in review | Andy Bell

Read 2018: A year in review by Andy Bell (Andy Bell)
<what-a-year>
It’s safe to say that 2018 has been a jam-packed year for me, both personally and professionally. I’m going to reflect on this year in this post and also look forward to 2019. Let’s dive in!

🔖 Learning Gutenberg: Series Introduction | CSS-Tricks

Bookmarked Learning Gutenberg: Series Introduction (CSS-Tricks)
Hey CSS-Tricksters! 👋 We have a special long-form series we’re kicking off here totally dedicated to Gutenberg, a major change to the WordPress

👓 The end of 2018 | Oh Hello Ana

Read The end of 2018 by Ana Ana (Oh Hello Ana)
This may be the first time that I am writing a year review before the year actually ends so it is a good sign. Also, It’s really hard to create blog post titles so I decided to go dramatic. I had a couple of goals for this year. I wanted to work on my wellbeing, do a talk at a meet up, go to the g...

📑 What I learned at work this year | Bill Gates

Annotated What I learned at work this year by Bill Gates (gatesnotes)
So has Warren Buffett, who says his measure of success is, “Do the people you care about love you back?”  

🔖 Google+ Exporter

Bookmarked Get Google+ Exporter desktop app (gplus-exporter.friendsplus.me)
Export your Google+ feeds to Wordpress, Blogger and JSON. Simply choose your OS.
I haven’t tried it yet, but this is one of the first Google+ exporters I’ve seen.

hat tip:

📑 What I learned at work this year | Bill Gates

Annotated What I learned at work this year by Bill Gates (gatesnotes.com)
Unfortunately, there were more cases [of polio] in 2018 than in 2017 (29 versus 22).  
The numbers and rosy picture here aren’t quite as nice as other—more detailed—reporting in the Economist recently would lead us to believe.

In some sense I do appreciate the sophistication of Bill Gates’ science communication here though as I suspect that far more Westerners are his audience and a much larger proportion of them are uninformed anti-vaxxers who might latch onto the idea of vaccine-derived polio cases as further evidence for their worldview of not vaccinating their own children and thereby increasing heath risk in the United States.

Graph of Polio cases by year since 2000 as reported by The Economist