domingo, 30 de diciembre de 2018

La Educación

No soy filósofo, ni sociólogo, pero creo que el conflicto armado, la disputa con las manos, la intolerancia, la violencia … no son posibles cuando entre las dos partes en confrontación se es capaz, a través de la educación, de diferenciar la diversidad de opiniones de la necesidad de liarse a tortas.

Un poco por estas consideraciones y también un poco por prepararme para unos cursos que era posible que tuviera que impartir, decidí realizar el CAP (Curso de Aptitud Pedagógica) y en la memoria utilicé unas ideas de un documento de Apple que cayó en mis manos y del que, sorprendentemente, he conseguido borrar todo rastro... 

El documento habla de la enseñanza personalizada, como contraoferta a la enseñanza de "café para todos" existente en la actualidad y esta era mi manera de expresar algunas de sus ideas:

"Con los medios tecnológicos actuales y la mayor parte de las infraestructuras ya implementadas, por qué no se financia la inversión tecnológica (y no solo los ordenadores, sino las telecomunicaciones, porque es en la red donde reside la fuerza de los mismos) para orientarnos a una enseñanza personalizada. Cuando nos hemos convertido en un país de servicios, dejando la era industrial detrás, tanto por la deslocalización empresarial como por la propia evolución de nuestra economía, nuestra educación sigue respodiendo a un modelos de enseñanza industrial, de café para todos, en la que no se cuenta con el bagaje cultural, las preferencias educativas, las ambiciones ni las capacidades (o incapacidades) de los alumnos.

Con un planteamiento de enseñanza personalizada el profesor se liberaría de la dieta única para sus alumnos, frustrante puesto que no todos la pueden seguir igual ni les va a afectar igual. El profesor podría ser creativo y, por lo tanto, al desarrollarse interiormente, alcanzar una mayor plenitud en su realización profesional, una de las de mayor vocación.

Con la enseñanza personalizada, la edad y la procedencia geográfica de los alumnos no tiene mayor importancia. Simplemente se agrupan en las materias de su interés, de las que los profesores, en lugar de limitarse a los libros de texto o a los PDFs en la intranet, orientarán a los alumnos para que éstos encuentren por sí mismos el conocimiento en otras fuentes.

A través de la enseñanza personalizada y las clases virtuales, los alumnos descubrirán que no se trata de aprender sobre tecnología, sino de aprender sobre el lenguaje, como escuchar, como escribir y cómo expresarse claramente.

Lógicamente el absentismo bajaría a través de la enseñanza personalizada, no hay que llegar a clase ni trabajar en el horario establecido, sino cuando a uno le convenga, de este modo los alumnos trabajan más y la calidad de la enseñanza mejora. El ritmo de estudios, además mejora de manera sustancial, puesto que un alumnos puede pasar de ser “el último de la clase” (y desmotivarse) a descubrir que a su ritmo puede ir superando obstáculos, marcándose sus propios objetivos. De esta manera la disciplina se la impone el mismo alumno.

El aislamiento es uno de los miedos en la enseñanza personalizada, pero se ha de considerar que la personalización difiere de la individualización en su enfoque colaborativo. Los alumnos no se sentirán aislados en un foro que los agrupe, no por edades, sino por intereses. De esta manera, a través de la ayuda que se presta a otros en los foros, se cataliza el propio aprendizaje. Suena ligeramente a “wikipedia”, pero el reto de los profesores es controlarla sin censurarla y su motivación para estar al día. Si a ello añadimos un ambiente de enseñanza virtual, con una buena intranet con recursos, control de trabajos, resultados, recogida de opinión de los alumnos… encontraremos que el aislamiento no es un factor a temer.

La enseñanza personalizada es la construcción frente a la instrucción. El paso de los libros de texto a los PDFs no es suficiente. La verdadera enseñanza no es distribuir contenidos educativos a los alumnos, sino la interacción con las personas y los contenidos para crear tu propia enseñanza. Este misma afirmación, desde el punto de vista del alumno es válida igualmente: el aprendizaje no es que te den “algo que estudiar”, sino que a través del intercambio de opiniones con otras personas y de la criba entre diferentes contenidos el alumno se genere su aprendizaje.

Del mismo modo, la enseñanza personalizada es la creación frente al consumo. Aprender a través de proyectos imaginativos que requieran crear algo, mucho más que a través de consumir información, sea ésta o no digital. Hay que ayudar a los alumnos a que se ayuden a sí mismos. Es el modelo de negocio de Google: no tienen la información pero te ayudan aencontrarla por ti mismo. O el de eBay: no venden nada pero te ayudan a comprarlo a quién sí lo quiere vender. 

Del mismo modo, la web antes era un montón de “sites” mandando información a quién los visitaba. ¿Qué es hoy? La web 2.0, un lugar donde los usuarios crean el contenido. La enseñanza personalizada significa que el estudiante puede hacer sus propias contribuciones. En cuanto a los profesores… efectivamente podría darse el caso de que los alumnos dominen más la herramienta que el propio profesor, pero ahí está el reto y va decreciendo en la medida en que los formadores se renuevan. Evidentemente el perfil tecnológico de quien se jubila dentro de 10 años no coincide en nada con el del que se incorpora ahora, tras un proceso de estudios “normal”.

Es el momento de iniciar la transición de las “fábricas de enseñanza” del siglo pasado a la enseñanza personalizada, que trata de hacer un traje a medida de las habilidades, la cultura y las ambiciones del estudiante.

A través de la enseñanza personalizada se elevarán los estándares educativos porque:
  • Crece la atracción del estudiante por sus estudios (los elige él, en base a su persona) 
  • Crece la motivación de los profesores porque les permite pasar del café para todos a una enseñanza a medida, más creativa 
  • Ayuda a los estudiantes a superar los límites geográficos y de edad respecto a lo que quieren aprender y a despojarse de la tímidez o el pánico de ser “el último de la clase” 
  • Sin desatender que, a diferencia de la enseñanza individual, la enseñanza personalizada parte de un planteamiento colaborativo y que reside en el profesor animar a los alumnos a hacer dar un enfoque creativo a su aprendizaje y supervisar el resultado.

Lo que significa que la enseñanza personalizada requiere un cambio de paradigma en la práctica educativa desde la instrucción hacia la construcción."

lunes, 17 de diciembre de 2018

Second annual AI index report (@verge via @exponentialview)

 an interesting article The AI boom is happening all over the world, and it’s accelerating quickly - The Verge

…findings from a group of experts were published in an ongoing effort to help answer those questions. The experts include members of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the nonprofit OpenAI, and the Partnership on AI industry consortium, among others, and they were put together as part of the second annual AI Index.

“There is no AI story without global perspective. The 2017 report was heavily skewed towards North American activities. This reflected a limited number of global partnerships, not an intrinsic bias,” reads the 2018 report’s introduction. “This year, we begin to close the global gap. We recognize that there is a long journey ahead — one that involves collaboration and outside participation — to make this report truly comprehensive.”

In that spirit of global analysis, the second AI Index report finds that commercial and research work in AI, as well as funding, is exploding pretty much everywhere on the planet. There’s an especially high concentration in Europe and Asia, with China, Japan, and South Korea leading Eastern countries in AI research paper publication, university enrollment, and patent applications. In fact, Europe is the largest publisher of AI papers, with 28 percent of all AI-related publications last year. China is close behind with 25 percent, while North America is responsible for 17 percent.

When it comes to the type of AI activity, the report finds that machine learning and so-called probabilistic reasoning is far and away the leading research category by a number of published papers. 
Not far behind, however, is work on computer vision, which is the foundational sub-discipline of AI that’s helping to develop self-driving cars and power augmented reality and object recognition, and neural networks, which, like machine learning, are instrumental in training those algorithms to improve over time. Less important, at least in the current moment, are areas like natural language processing, which is what lets your smart speaker understand what you’re saying and respond in kind, and general planning and decision making, which is what will be required of robots when automated machines are inevitably more integral facets of daily life.
China is heavily focused on agricultural science, engineering, and technology, while Europe and North America are focused more on the humanities and medical and health sciences, though Europe is generally more well-rounded in its approach to research.
As far as performance goes, AI continues to skyrocket, especially in fields like computer vision. By measuring benchmark performance for the widely used image training database ImageNet, the report finds that the time it takes to spin up a model that can classify pictures at state-of-the-art accuracy fell “from around on hour to around 4 minutes” in just 18 months. That equates to a roughly 16x jump in training speed. Other areas like object segmentation, which is what lets software differentiate between an image’s background and its subject, has increased in precision by 72 percent in just three years.
AI will only continue to get more sophisticated, but there are a number of hurdles, both technological and with regard to bias and safety, before such software could be reliably used without error in hospitals, education systems, airports, and police departments.



sábado, 15 de diciembre de 2018

Testing the resilience of Europe’s inclusive growth model,

The New McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) research,  focuses on prospects for inclusive growth in the period to 2030—possibly the largest driver of citizens’ life satisfaction.

Europe’s inclusive growth model and the European Union’s (EU) welfare-based social contract appear to be under threat amid limited growth in median income in recent years, falling trust in institutions (both EU and national), discomfort about mass migration, worries about security as well as the resilience of global agreements, and a rise in populist politics that challenges the status quo.

Europe now needs to respond to six global—and interacting—megatrends that could push inequality higher within EU member states and among them and increase social and economic divergence, placing the inclusive growth part of the EU social contract in even more peril.

Given these trends, Europe needs to be proactive about testing new ways in which the social contract might work in the case of the future of work, low-carbon lifestyles, and technology ethics, for instance. Overall, however, we find that Europe may be able to preserve the essence of its welfare-style social contract, if it delivers superbly on all its current initiatives that are linked to, and aim to respond to, the megatrends.

Among initiatives with the best outcomes for inclusive growth, the EU and European countries might have to scale up green and technological innovation and develop new skills. While inequality will likely grow as new social policies unfold, these new approaches might be financed by the returns on those policies, and, in the process, mitigate rising inequality, and helping to head off anti-EU sentiment. Social divergence within member countries is likely to persist and must be tackled with the EU complementing the actions of member states.





It simulates the challenges and opportunities ahead in several scenarios and focuses on the impact of the six megatrends.

-Much of Europe has returned to growth, but its inclusiveness remains under pressure


-Six megatrends could test the resilience of Europe’s inclusive growth model
  1. Ageing demographics
  2. Digital technology, automation and AI
  3. Increased global competititon
  4. Migration
  5. Climate change and pollution
  6. Shifting geopolitics


-The megatrends may mean that Europe faces higher inequality and more social divergence




-Action in three areas is required to strengthen Europe’s inclusive growth model:
  1. Fully execute a deliver scenario
  2. Complement growth with improved measures to promote income equality within and across countries
  3. Amend the parameters of the social contracts



Executive summary






jueves, 6 de diciembre de 2018

The Spatial Web

The Spatial Web Will Map Our 3D World—And Change Everything In the Process

Over the next two to five years, the world around us is about to light up with layer upon layer of rich, fun, meaningful, engaging, and dynamic data. Data you can see and interact with.

This magical future ahead is called the Spatial Web and will transform every aspect of our lives, from retail and advertising, to work and education, to entertainment and social interaction.

Massive change is underway as a result of a series of converging technologies, from 5G global networks and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, to 30+ billion connected devices (known as the IoT), each of which will generate scores of real-world data every second, everywhere.

…the Spatial Web refers to a computing environment that exists in three-dimensional space—a twinning of real and virtual realities—enabled via billions of connected devices and accessed through the interfaces of virtual and augmented reality.

In this way, the Spatial Web will enable us to both build a twin of our physical reality in the virtual realm and bring the digital into our real environments.

It’s the next era of web-like technologies:
  • Spatial computing technologies, like augmented and virtual reality;
  • Physical computing technologies, like IoT and robotic sensors;
  • And decentralized computing: both blockchain—which enables greater security and data authentication—and edge computing, which pushes computing power to where it’s most needed, speeding everything up.
Geared with natural language search, data mining, machine learning, and AI recommendation agents, the Spatial Web is a growing expanse of services and information, navigable with the use of ever-more-sophisticated AI assistants and revolutionary new interfaces.

– – – – – –
How the Spatial Web Will Fix What's Broken About the Internet

To recap, while Web 1.0 consisted of static documents and read-only data, Web 2.0 introduced multimedia content, interactive web applications, and participatory social media, all of these mediated by two-dimensional screens—a flat web of sensorily confined information.

During the next two to five years, the convergence of 5G, AI, a trillion sensors, and VR/AR will enable us to both map our physical world into virtual space and superimpose a digital layer onto our physical environments.

Web 3.0 is about to transform everything—from the way we learn and educate, to the way we trade (smart) assets, to our interactions with real and virtual versions of each other.

And while users grow rightly concerned about data privacy and misuse, the Spatial Web’s use of blockchain in its data and governance layer will secure and validate our online identities, protecting everything from your virtual assets to personal files.

In this second installment of the Web 3.0 series, I’ll be discussing the Spatial Web’s vast implications for a handful of industries:
  • News & Media Coverage
  • Smart Advertising
  • Personalized Retail

The Spatial Web

The Spatial Web Will Map Our 3D World—And Change Everything In the Process

Over the next two to five years, the world around us is about to light up with layer upon layer of rich, fun, meaningful, engaging, and dynamic data. Data you can see and interact with.

This magical future ahead is called the Spatial Web and will transform every aspect of our lives, from retail and advertising, to work and education, to entertainment and social interaction.

Massive change is underway as a result of a series of converging technologies, from 5G global networks and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, to 30+ billion connected devices (known as the IoT), each of which will generate scores of real-world data every second, everywhere.

…the Spatial Web refers to a computing environment that exists in three-dimensional space—a twinning of real and virtual realities—enabled via billions of connected devices and accessed through the interfaces of virtual and augmented reality.

In this way, the Spatial Web will enable us to both build a twin of our physical reality in the virtual realm and bring the digital into our real environments.

It’s the next era of web-like technologies:
  • Spatial computing technologies, like augmented and virtual reality;
  • Physical computing technologies, like IoT and robotic sensors;
  • And decentralized computing: both blockchain—which enables greater security and data authentication—and edge computing, which pushes computing power to where it’s most needed, speeding everything up.
Geared with natural language search, data mining, machine learning, and AI recommendation agents, the Spatial Web is a growing expanse of services and information, navigable with the use of ever-more-sophisticated AI assistants and revolutionary new interfaces.

– – – – – –
How the Spatial Web Will Fix What's Broken About the Internet

To recap, while Web 1.0 consisted of static documents and read-only data, Web 2.0 introduced multimedia content, interactive web applications, and participatory social media, all of these mediated by two-dimensional screens—a flat web of sensorily confined information.

During the next two to five years, the convergence of 5G, AI, a trillion sensors, and VR/AR will enable us to both map our physical world into virtual space and superimpose a digital layer onto our physical environments.

Web 3.0 is about to transform everything—from the way we learn and educate, to the way we trade (smart) assets, to our interactions with real and virtual versions of each other.

And while users grow rightly concerned about data privacy and misuse, the Spatial Web’s use of blockchain in its data and governance layer will secure and validate our online identities, protecting everything from your virtual assets to personal files.

In this second installment of the Web 3.0 series, I’ll be discussing the Spatial Web’s vast implications for a handful of industries:
  • News & Media Coverage
  • Smart Advertising
  • Personalized Retail

domingo, 2 de diciembre de 2018

Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?

via @azeem's @exponentialview
Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen? - The New York Times

It was big and still quite profitable, but the company had lost its luster, failing or trailing in the markets of the future like mobile, search, online advertising and cloud computing. Its stock price languished, inching up 3 percent in the decade through the end of 2012.

It’s a very different story today. Microsoft is running neck and neck with Apple for the title of the world’s most valuable company, both worth about $850 billion, thanks to a stock price that has climbed 30 percent over the last 12 months. At the end of trading Friday, Microsoft was just ahead of its longtime rival.

When Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile phone business in 2013, Mr. Ballmer hailed the move as a “bold step into the future.” Two years later, Mr. Nadella walked away from that future, taking a $7.6 billion charge, nearly the entire value of the purchase, and shedding 7,800 workers.

Microsoft would not try to compete with the smartphone technology leaders, Apple, Google and Samsung. Instead, Microsoft focused on its developing apps and other software for business customers.

Microsoft does have a successful consumer franchise in its Xbox video game business. But it is a separate unit, and though it generates revenue of $10 billion, that is still less than 10 percent of the company’s overall sales.

Microsoft products, in the main, are about utility — productivity tools, whether people use them at work or at home. And its Azure cloud technology is a service for businesses and a platform for software developers to build applications, a kind of cloud operating system.

Mr. Nadella’s big acquisitions have been intended to add to its offerings for business users and developers. In 2016, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, for $26.2 billion.

“It’s really the coming together of the professional cloud and the professional network,” Mr. Nadella explained at the time.

Under Mr. Nadella, Microsoft has loosened up. Windows would no longer be its center of gravity — or its anchor. Microsoft apps would run not only on Apple’s Macintosh software but on other operating systems as well. Open source and free software, once anathema to Microsoft, was embraced as a vital tool of modern software development.

Mr. Nadella preached an outward-looking mind-set. “We need to be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that learning into Microsoft,” he wrote in his book “Hit Refresh,” published last year.

The company’s financial performance — and its stock price — suggest that the Nadella formula is working.

“The old, Windows-centric view of the world stifled innovation,” said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. “The company has changed culturally. Microsoft is an exciting place to work again.”

sábado, 1 de diciembre de 2018

Loneliness – Quartz Obsession — Quartz

“Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice.”
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

“According to the surgeon general, the biggest risk facing the country is not smoking or second hand smoke—it’s isolation and loneliness. When people get off social media and connect #IRL, their oxytocin goes up and their cortisol (stress) goes down. We should all try this experiment and see how we feel!”
Erica Keswin, Founder at Spaghetti Project

                   Loneliness – Quartz Obsession — Quartz