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I know this is old news and no-one is really bothered anymore. But for those of you looking for an update on the Eduspaces closure and takeover by Taking IT Global, the following notice has been up on the site for at least the last ten days.
[…] I didn’t see it ending up like this. The eagle eyed A.J.Wyatt leaves a comment on my previous entry pointing to the new announcement on the Eduspaces […]
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.
Well, I did read somewhere that the target date for the switch was March 26 or something. That is still something over a week away. The content for individuals is still there and accessible by direct link, and you can still publish to your blog. But there has been no communication to members that I am aware of!
No, I’ve not seen any information either. I’d not seen the March 26th date … all I’d heard was that it would be a couple of weeks after we’d had to say “Yay” or “nay” to migration. It’s now more than a couple of weeks, though not yet the 26th, so maybe that’s the date. As A.T says, you can still publish on it/ to it from external sites.
I’m pretty confused – lack of communication is dire. Main point of my heading was to say that as a community Eduspaces is pretty much finished I guess – or at least will have to be rebuilt from scratch. Couple of points – wonder what has happened about idea of a community advisory body (if this had been acted on fast it could have provided the communication channel which is sorely lacking) and if the individual accounts are still open I wonder why they are not providing an aggregated feed – or is this more difficult than I think?
Interesting new development at eduspaces (http://eduspaces.net/index.php)
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It was announced at the beginning of this year that TakingITGlobal would take over and continue to host the eduspaces.net community. Because of their location in Canada, some legal issues had to be sorted out first. This was why EduSpaces members had to explicitly state to have their account transferred to what would have been a new provider. Unfortunately, the legal issues didn’t end there, so, to avoid any more inconvenience for EduSpaces users, TakingITGlobal and the EduSpaces team have decided not to continue with the planned migration.
What will this mean for you? Well, Eduspaces will remain EduSpaces, and your account will stay where it is for the foreseeable future. This means no migration nor termination of the service and you can continue to use and enjoy the service as you have always done. Misja will help look after the community.
We have learnt many valuable lessons during this process and would like to apologise for the way the transition period was handled.
The EduSpaces team – March 18th, 2008
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And additional info here–
http://eduspaces.net/misja/weblog/298383.html