In August last year courseindex.com published an article about how blockchain technology might be used to prevent the falsification of academic records. Development of such a blockchain was being developed by Sony and IBM in collaboration at the time. A shocking statistic quoted in the article was that 21% of U.S. job applicants’ resumes stated fraudulent degrees.
The cryptocurrency boom and its underlying blockchain technology is generating such levels of global interest that even authoritative institutions like the London School of Economics – a world leader – are sitting up and taking notice. The bitcoin scene has been like the Wild West for years, but as understanding matures, educational structures are emerging to better prepare those who want to enter the fray.
When King Henry VI of England founded Eton College in 1440 as “The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor”, he could scarcely have imagined that 578 years later it would be attended by students from all over the world, and least of all that they would not even need to leave their home countries to study there. But modern witchcraft (the internet) has made it so in the form of Eton’s online teaching arm, EtonX.
Computers are dumb. They do what they are told to do, and that’s it. Powerful as they are, computers cannot (yet) make decisions on anything like a human level. If a nasty piece of code gets injected into a computer, it will execute it - unless other software tells it not to. The computer doesn’t ‘know’ that the code is undesirable.
Over 50 leading AI and robotics researchers have said they will boycott a leading Korean research institute over its plans to develop AI-powered weapons.
In February, KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) announced that it was launching a joint research project with defense company Hanwha Systems to develop AI technologies for lethal autonomous weapons that search for and eliminate targets without human control.
In the wake of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw 50 million Facebook users’ data skimmed off by an unscrupulous British firm and used to help politicians target voters in Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, many users of the social network have woken up to the fact that their previously blasé attitudes towards what Facebook does with their data may need revising.
One of the outstanding small business opportunities of our times is selling courses online, and one of the best systems to do it on is Moodle. The world of education is moving away from traditional college degrees, evening classes and correspondence courses towards a ‘just-in-time’ model in which learners pick and choose what they need to learn right now, and can get instant access to it.
Want a Computer Science certificate from Harvard? Here you go. And you don’t have to go to Massachusetts. What’s more, this is the most popular course on the Harvard campus, with Harvard students calling it ‘the best of the best’. Now it’s online at edX, and enrollment is a snap. The course is known as CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science, and it teaches the essentials of basic computer languages while training students both with and without prior programming experience to think algorithmically and solve problems.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
-Mark Twain
How do you plan to age? Will you let the river of time carry you along helpless, or have you armed yourself with a paddle to steer with so you can explore the banks? How much value do you place on longevity? Is it worth growing very old just for its own sake?
If you have ever taken an eLearning course, do you remember the essentials of it now? Did it get the knowledge into your head in an engaging way that helped you to retain it? If the answer is yes, you were lucky enough to have taken a course created by a good instructional designer. Instructional Design is the practice of creating learning experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge efficient, effective and appealing.
What do private detectives actually do? Well, they don’t spend all their time solving murders. The police tend to deal with that. In reality what private detectives do is work that the police won’t or can’t do, don’t have time and resources for, have failed at, or are not required to do. PIs are also often employed by people who for various reasons do not want the police to be involved. And they are not all men.
