A Concise Encyclopedia on Online Learning E-Book

Kevin Jon Johnson

• Herausgeber: Helgason Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This encyclopedia is alphabetically ordered and has concise definitions of many computer and Internet-based applications, companies and media relevant to teaching in the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Helgason Publishing

Text copyright ©2015 Kevin Jon Johnson

Preface

This book will help teachers help students succeed in online learning, a guide-book to navigate this new, significant terrain. I hope these entries, offered as cheaply as possible, inspire you to engage in the fast-paced online world, a world rich in educational opportunities, a place full of potential, peril and power, a place where students need to go, best to go guided by the sure hand of a caring and knowledgeable parent or educator.

Time and opportunity have not permitted a comprehensive treatment of this topic, but with the premise that a partial map of uncertain waters is better than no map at all, I offer this sketch, useful in outline, in the hope it will help you explore bountiful and beneficial undiscovered countries.

In addition to traditional, research-based instruction the rich new online media provide engaging and relevant places for learning today; this book aims to sketch the online educational landscape, a help to busy educators who may lack the leisure for more sustained independent study at the present time. The Internet provides a certain road that students today need to travel in order to find success in the society and workplace that await them, a workplace that we cannot presently envision as the rapid advances in technology and the knowledge economy preclude clear predictions.

These words define learning in the twenty-first century, but while mapping out the new territory of teaching, a battleground also comes to light: a battle between evil and good. The seven deadly sins (one had hoped they might have died by now) have pitted themselves against Humanity, a respectful and ethical democrat.

Table of Contents

Preface

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Works Cited

A Concise Encyclopedia of Online Learning:

Defining the Future of Education

A

@: the "at" symbol, introduced by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971, helps send emails over a network of computers. Store keepers used this symbol to show prices, for example: 3 pencils @ 300 Yen. But the sign first appeared before printed books; hundreds of years ago monks who copied books (manuscripts) by hand used @ as a short form for "at". (Cox 2002, 93-94)

Accumulo: (see also “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)”) a program begun in 2008 that allows the American National Security Agency (NSA) to store and analyze vast amounts of data across thousands of computer servers. (Walsh 2013, 24 - 25)

achievement gap: children living in poverty have a harder time in school, but this gap can be bridged by engagement; data shows that an engaged student from a disadvantaged background will have a better chance succeeding in later life than a disengaged student from a better-off economic setting – engagement trumps economics. (Price 2013, 100)

action figures for girls: playthings, research shows, can heavily influence the career ambitions of girls. Finding no athletic and empowering action figures for girls, two moms Dawn Nadeau and Julie Kerwin used Kickstarter to raise almost $163,000, more than quadruple their goal; with the money they designed and built their IAmElemental series of action figures ($65 for a set of 7). Each figure embodies a different “element” of heroism like honesty and persistence, portraying women as heroes with strong personalities. (Alter 2014, 82)

action learning: working with others to solve problems, followed by action and reflection. It helps one to gain tacit knowledge. (Price 2013, 41-42)

adaptive learning: (see also “Knewton” and “personalized learning”) referring to a computer-learning interface that constantly assesses the thinking habits of a student and automatically customizes material for her or him. Computer software that does nothing more than choose the next question based on performance on the current question, steering the test by the logic of binary branching, is not adaptive by the industry standards of 2013. We may call adaptive that software that creates a psychometric profile of each user, plus the continuous adjustment of material based on the progress of the student. The algorithms in such adaptive programs check the responses of any given student with thousands or even millions of others. Patterns should emerge. With billions of data points from millions of students supported by ample processing power and experience, such algorithms can do all kinds of prognostication. The data-analysis software created by Area9 that underpins McGraw-Hill’s adaptive LearnSmart products, uses the unique memory decay profile of each user to remind the learner at the very time that the word or concept is about to slip out of their brain forever.

The Education Growth Advisors add that this personalized learning approach that takes a sophisticated, data-driven, and sometimes non-linear approach to remediation and teaching, adjusting to a learner’s interactions and performance and subsequently anticipating what types of resources and content learners need at a specific point in time in order to make optimal progress. Rigorous adaptive learning solutions leverage strands of academic research in areas such as memory, knowledge-space theory, cognitive load theory, machine learning, and intelligent tutoring to develop technology-enabled delivery models. Adaptive learning may be assessment-driven or facilitator-driven, and most suppliers have elements of both embedded in their solution model, although with different levels of sophistication and emphases. (Fletcher 2013, 66; Education Growth Advisors, 4; 6)

adaptive learning (assessment-driven): this offers ongoing evaluation of learner performance and/or mastery that results in dynamic (i.e., near to real time) adjustments in the instructional content, course pathways and learning resources. An example of this could be an online asynchronous math course where individual students proceed through a common set of learning objectives but in different ways and at different rates. (Education Growth Advisors, 5)

adaptive learning (facilitator driven): this occurs when teachers or professors receive robust and actionable student and cohort performance profiles (i.e., dashboards) enabling them to differentiate instruction. Such solutions rely heavily on content metadata and require visually appealing dashboards. It generally links a specific course’s content within a learning sequence or system of standards. These tools allow educators to adapt instruction at a degree of scale and granularity of learning objective not possible in any other way. (Education Growth Advisors, 5)

adaptive learning companies: (see also “Knewton”) for-profit companies, dozens of which currently rush into the new multibillion-dollar burgeoning US market for instructional technology (see also “Common Core” and “data-driven, personalized learning”). A sample of the 70-odd companies rushing into the lucrative American market are the following: Adapt Courseware; Area9 (Denmark); Cerego Global; CogBooks (Scotland); DreamBox Learning (Bellevue, Washington); Jones & Bartlett Learning; Knewton (New York); LoudCloud; McGraw-Hill Education (LearnSmart), Open Learning Initiative; Smart Sparrow; and PrepU (Macmillan New Ventures, USA). (Fletcher 2013, 64; Education Growth Advisors, 13)

Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program: launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it will provide ten $100,000 grants to US colleges and universities to develop online adaptive courses that enroll 500 students or more over three semesters. Peter Stokes, an expert on digital education at Northeastern University, anticipates that in 20 years almost every university course will have an adaptive component. In higher education very few professors have a formal education in how to teach, so this will help. (Fletcher 2013, 65)

ad-hocracies: whereas traditional schools teach students how to function within bureaucracies, the modern workplace brings together ad-hoc configurations of employees whose diverse skills are required to solve a complex problem. (Jenkins 2006, 41)

Adobe Flash Player: a popular plug-in that allows one to view a webpage containing a video or interactive game. (Chan 2010, 24)

adSense: a way that Google makes money by placing advertisers beside products associated with their business. (Sutherland 2012, Google 20)

adword: a way that Google makes money by charging clients who bid on keywords paying a set fee each time their keyword enters the Google search box and the “sponsored link” (advertisement) of the paying client appears. (Sutherland 2012, Google 20)

affinity spaces: informal, experimental, innovative and ideal learning environments in the online participatory culture sustained by common interests, supported by peer-to-peer and mentor instruction, and open to any and all. (Jenkins 2006, 9)

Airbnb: (see also “UberX”) this online service lets you rent someone’s home, instead of a hotel; the cost is lower than a hotel and the site has facilitated 11 million nights of lodging so far. Ratings and reviews are essential safeguards to these systems. Airbnb now offers $1 million in damage protection for a rented home. The post-2008 financial meltdown fostered this sharing economy. (Pogue July 2014, 33)

AJAX:(acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web programmers often refer to the potent combination of JavaScript, XHR, CSS and several other web technologies as AJAX. (Chan 2010, 14)

Alibaba:an e-commerce juggernaut, launched by Jack Ma a former English teacher turned entrepreneur in 1999, bigger in mainland China than Amazon and eBay combined; its 2012 sales topped $150 billion. Ma became a billionaire and made the cover ofForbes, as well as making theTime 100list in 2009. Ma has now turned his talents to cleaning up the environmental mess in China. (Walsh 2013, 52)

alpha geek: one who knows everything about the Internet and computers. (Cox 2002, 57)

Altair 8800: the first build-it-yourself hobby computer available for purchase in 1975. (Cox 2002, 30; Sutherland 2012, Apple 7)

altruism: the dominant value of people who learn socially online outside of the workplace and formal education. (Price 2013, 121)

ambiguous play: unlike predigital games, a common approach in computer and video games today where players learn the goal and rules by exploring the game world. The computer code effectively constrains and guides play. A good game does not require an instructional manual, a game industry truism. (McGonigal 2011, 26)

American decline: (see also “(the) second machine age”) traditionally Americans had an edge in leadership in design due to an educated workforce and an entrepreneurial culture, but this edge is disappearing. The United States once led the world in the share of graduates in the work force with at least an associate’s degree, but now ranks 12th. Despite the buzz in places like Silicon Valley, data shows that the number of U.S. start-ups that employ more than one person has declined by over 20 percent since 1996. In recent decade U.S. K-12 schooling has been very uneven with school quality commensurate with neighborhood income levels and has emphasized rote learning. Online learning may help redress this situation. Society and governments must brace for the fast-paced and far-reaching evolution in economics due to the second machine age, where the creation of sustainable, equitable and inclusive growth will require more than business as usual. (Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Spence July / August 2014, 51-53)

Android: the world’s most popular mobile platform that powers hundreds of millions of devices in over 190 countries. (Lev-Ram 2014, 22)

Angry Birds: before Angry Birds, which took a twelve-person team eight months to build for the specific requirements of an iPhone ecosystem, the Finnish company Rovio had published fifty-two other games and had created sixteen original games. (Kapp 2012, 194)

anonymity: the availability of big data that powerful new computing tools can mine from many different sources, gives corporations and organizations the ability to piece the disparate data together, effectively removing the anonymity from almost any piece of data. Regular people simply do not know who possesses data on them, how much of their data is collected, and whether the data is being used in acceptable ways. (Mundie 2014, 31)

Anonymous: a hacktivist association that has targeted companies like MasterCard and Sony and trade groups like the Motion Picture Association of America for opposing openness, or banned online game play activities; Anonymous targeted the rapid transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area because they shut down cellular phone use; and Scientology because the religious movement too aggressively protected secrets. Some view organizations like Anonymous or LulzSec as fighting for our freedom of information, while others view them as irresponsible hackers putting internal securities at risk. (Scherer 2013, 26; Price 2013, 121)

app: short for application, computer programs or software the helps the user perform a task (as on an iPad). Social physics has determined that people with similar characteristics such as age, religion, gender and employment download similar apps, but social exposure proved a stronger determining factor. (Sutherland 2012, Google 45; Chan 2010, 10; Pentland 2014, Chapter Three)

apperception: a concept from the arts, the act of perceiving oneself perceiving. (Lankes 2011, 32)

Apple: a company founded in April 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and led again into renewed success by Steve Jobs. They chose the name ‘Apple’ because it would come before ‘Atari’, a competitor, and also because that was the record label for the Beatles. From 2009 to 2013 Apple avoided paying $44 billion in US taxes through overseas-accounting legerdemain. On the back of an iPhone appears an eight-word business plan that has served Apple, and other companies, very well: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” Apple has become the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion.

Apple and other large-global enterprises, medium-sized firms and even ‘micro-multinationals’ have been riding the two great forces of our era – globalization and technology – to profits. Technology has sped globalization forward by dramatically lowering communication and transaction costs and moving the world much closer to a single, global market for capital, labor and other inputs for production.

Lev-Ram reports that the 98,000 employees of Apple are mostly white and male, but African American liricospinto soprano (meaning she can be heard above the full orchestra) Denise Young Smith is looking to change that and to break down the siloes of Apple with her ‘In Your Voice’ internal website. Promoted to head of human resources in February of 2014, Young Smith has the support of CEO Tim Cook to help mix-up the Apple recipe. (Sutherland 2012, Apple 6-7; Stein 2013, 55; Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Spence July / August 2014, 45; Lev-Ram 6 October 2014, 126)

Apple II: the first personal computer designed for the mass market appearing in 1977. (Sutherland 2012, Apple 10)

Apple Watch: where others have tried and failed, Apple steps in to try and create a new, vigorous market as with the Apple (not the iWatch) Watch, wearable technology that begins the intrusion on our physical space. The cheapest Apple Watch will sell for $349, and much of its functionality relies on its necessary link to a nearby iPhone for Internet connectivity and GPS. Credit Suisse predicts that in three to five years people will spend between $30 to $50 billion dollars annually on wearables, but in 2013 the entire fitness wearables market only amounted to $330 million. Apple takes in $171 billion in annual revenue. iPhones account for more than half of Apple’s total sales. (Grossman and Vella 2014, 3--35)

applied cognition: you need to know the science on the brain in order to teach and train the brain. The science on how our brains work represents a rapidly expanding field of knowledge; education often lags far behind the brain research. Knowledge of applied cognition gives the science that helps make clear the power of various persuasive media, online and off. According to Wired this skill is one of seven essential skills along with statistical literacy, post-state diplomacy, remix culture, writing for new forms, waste studies, and domestic tech. (Wired 2010)

App Store: launched by Apple in July 2008 with software provided by outside developers for use on iPod Touch; iPhone; and iPad; some apps are free and Apple takes a 30 per cent cut on any revenue, passing 70 percent of the revenue to the app’s developer. An instant success, it took less than one and a half years to reach two billion app downloads; in October of 2010 the store had over 300,000 apps and generated more than one million dollars a day in revenue. (Sutherland 2012, Apple 28-29)

ARCS Model: (see also “Malone’s Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction”; “Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivation”; “Self-Determination Theory” and “Lepper’s instructional design principles for intrinsic motivation”) a four-factor model developed by John Keller well known in the field of instructional game design and often used as a framework for e-learning and courseware. The acronym ARCS stands for: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction; these elements may be applied to various aspects of game-based learning. Attention uses inquiry to stimulate curiosity by presenting a problem or question and immersing the learner into a hands-on experience. Relevance is achieved by goal orientation; aligning with the motives of the learner through achievement or risk-taking; the use of familiarity so that new knowledge connects to prior knowledge; and modelling the results of acquiring the new knowledge. If the learners have confidence that they can succeed, this builds motivation; success builds on success. Finally satisfaction ensures that learners feel that the learning has value and merits continued effort; try to tap intrinsic motivation. (Kapp 2012, 53-54)

Arista Networks: funded by Google-made billionaires Stanford professor David Cheriton and Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and run by London-born and Delhi-raised Jayshree Ullal, it provides a high-speed network with thousands of servers at a low cost, something Google began looking for in 2005. It supports cloud applications that began pushing the envelope in computing around 2005. Arista means ‘to be the best’ in Greek; former owner of the name, Arista Records is now defunct. They provide private ‘clouds’ for customers who cannot afford to build their own. They have over 800 employees, more than 7 million lines of code, and over 2,000 customers. Arista did not chase profitability, but has been profitable for two years. (Lashinsky 2014, 23)

(the) Arkansas Virtual Academy School (AVAS): (see also “virtual schools”) grades three to eight students at AVAS produced higher gains over two years than did their traditionally schooled peers, averaging 9.6 percentile points more in math and 3.6 in literacy. Economically disadvantaged students did particularly well. We should not underestimate the importance of adult relationships to support student learning from preschool through grade twelve; adult interaction is a likely ingredient at AVAS. (Patte 2013, 35-36)

ARPA: (acronym) the Advanced Research Project Agency set up by the American government in 1958. (Cox 2002, 28)

Arpanet: a four node computer system with high speed links set up in 1969; it expanded to 15 nodes in 1971. (Cox 2002, 29)

artifacts: there is no such thing as ‘recorded knowledge’ because knowledge does not reside in inanimate objects but represents a dynamic property active in the minds of living, engaged people. Artifacts like web pages, books and DVDs are not knowledge but rather things that result from knowledge activity. Artifacts like books, although merely pale embers of knowledge do have an amazingly effective power to stimulate conversations and agreements, to build knowledge. (Lankes 2011, 41)

artificial intelligence: (see also “Baidu”; and “Google Brain”) teaching computers to teach themselves represents one of the most contested and potentially most lucrative aspects of the technological frontier, and Andrew Ng, 38, may be on top of this game. Such artificial intelligence can help cope with the flood of data, and Ng sees it as the key to unlock the next wave of Internet businesses. Both Google and Facebook have recently lured talented grad students and professors to help reach this goal with salary offers of six or seven figures. (Kedmey 2014, 10-11)

aspirations: the career aspirations of a student in eighth grade, more than class grades, best predicts future engagement in science, but this cannot be measured well by simply asking students to complete a survey. (Schwartz and Arena 2013, 30)

assault on originality: (see also “remix culture”) over forty years ago, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould understood that the electronic age would change forever the values we attach to art. The vocabulary of the aesthetic, developing since the Renaissance has little validity in reference to electronic culture. In times past, words like “imitation”, “invention”, and “originality” conveyed varying degrees of approval or censure, but even forty years ago Gould saw that such terms can no longer convey the precise analytical concepts they once represented. Gould saw that electronic transmission has inspired a new concept, multiple-authorship where a blurring of borders occurs between composer, performer and consumer. Gould added, “In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process”. (Lamb 2007)

assessment (history of): in the U.S.A. knowledge has not always been at the center of assessment. Earlier assessment attempted to measure intelligence; Alfred Binet originally intended his IQ test to assist teachers in objectively identifying students who needed special consideration. Subsequent behaviorist approaches measured performance of certain tasks. (Schwartz and Arena 2013, 37-38)

assessment systems: analyses on the top performing countries on the PISA tests – Korea, Finland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia – indicate a focus on extensive school-based assessments driven by curriculum standards and teacher-developed syllabi. Most importantly, teachers score and evaluate curriculum-based performance tasks that they developed. This contrasts to the U.S.A. under the cloud of the No Child Left Behind Act which relied on externally provided multiple-choice tests. American teachers did not know what would be on these tests! (Darling-Hammond 2010)

assessment with games: (see also “preparation for future learning (PFL) assessment”) in a keynote delivered to game researchers at the 2010 International Conference on the Foundation of Digital Games, James Paul Gee mentioned that games could and should be used to prepare students for future learning. We may easily imagine how digital games could fulfill this role. The rich experiences offered by gameplay may likely produce tacit knowledge that a PFL assessment may detect, but that an SPS test would miss. For example, players of the popular video game Portal learn and experiment with conservation of momentum and would likely do well in a physics tests given in the SPS format. (Schwartz and Arena 2013, 57-58)

ASVAB: (see also “computer adaptive assessment (CAA)”) the Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery, a testing program used by the U.S. Military, represents a high stakes, successful implementation of CCA technology. It would not have happened without the immense financial resources of the Pentagon. (Reckase 2011, 8)

ATAP: (see also “AT&T’s Bell Labs”; “IBM Research” and “Pasteur’s Quadrant”) acronym for Advanced Technology and Projects group, a Google team headed by Regina Dugan, an engineer with a Ph.D. from Caltech. ATAP has emerged as a counterpart to Google X, the better known group working on self-driving cars, and glucose-detecting contact lenses. Some ATAP projects include a digital tattoo that you paste on your forearm and use to unlock your smartphone; ARA, a modular smartphone that an individual can tailor make to fit their needs; Tango, a tablet that uses a 3-D map of an environment such as a home and could help a blind person navigate; and Spotlight Stories, the use of 3-D animations for smartphones where the viewer can change the perspective from which they view, more like exploring the inside of a cathedral than the traditional animation with a scripted point-of-view. Scientists and engineers form the core in-house team, but they partner with 326 universities, startups, government and nonprofit organizations, and large system integrators from 22 countries. Dugan negotiated rare multi-university research agreements with over two dozen leading universities like the University of Michigan, Stanford, MIT and Caltech that allows ATAP to tap into top-notch researchers in diverse fields. Today things move so quickly that teams with diverse skills and points of view must be brought together quickly to reach the goals set by Dugan. Each ATAP project has two-years to reach the market, so projects do not become open-ended research projects; unsuccessful projects are shelved to make room for new ones. Even if unclear at first, the philosophy at Google is that huge conceptual advances will pay off in some way. The buzz linking Google to bold innovation and operations like ATAP help attract and retain some of the world’s top talent. (Helft 1 September 2014, 34-38)

AT&T’s Bell Labs: (see also “ATAP”) a famous research group credited with inventing the transistor and the laser, roping in seven Nobel Prizes in the process. (Helft 1 September 2014, 36)

“at promise”: Gardner introduces this concept as a counterbalance to the “at risk” designation, to indicate a potentially talented student who may bloom if properly managed by the teacher or institution. (Gardner 1993, 35)

attention blindness: the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task we tend to miss just about everything else. (Davidson 2011)

attention literacy: (see also “21st century literacies”) the ability to exert some measure of mental control over our use of technology in order to be productive rather than simply being distracted by it, coined by Stanford professor Howard Rheingold. (Richardson 2013, 13)

audience response systems (ARS): electronic devices used in a classroom to create 100 per cent engagement. ARS allows for immediate formative feedback and instantaneous concept comprehension checks. Such devices also permit absolutely clear insights into student achievement so that targeted interventions can occur; research on exam performance indicates that ARS enhance student learning. ARS can also be used to gamify the classroom through the application of the following techniques: assigning point values to questions; using points for participation or attendance; using a count-down timer to create a sense of urgency; tracking team performance on questions; creating a leaderboard; visually displaying idea or opinions; and by providing the class with immediate formative feedback by visually displaying the distribution or responses. (Kapp 2012, 115-116)

authentic assessment: assessing tasks that mirror what students might do later in life; mirroring real life, such tasks involve synthesis and engage students thereby providing a window into the true understanding of the student. (Edutopia 2012)

autonomy: (see also “choices”) a survey of American superintendents indicated a unanimous hope for their students: autonomy, to learn for themselves and to make good decisions. Educational researchers Erna Yackel and Paul Cobb summarized (1996) the main educational reforms as directed towards developing intellectual and social autonomy; Piaget also saw autonomy as a major goal of education. The ability to make and execute good choices comprises the central component of autonomy. (Schwartz and Arena 2013, 28)

autotelic: (see “intrinsic rewards”) taken from the Greek words for ‘self’ auto, and ‘goal’ telos, scientists use this term to refer to self-motivated, self-rewarding activity that generates intrinsic rewards. We do autotelic work because it engages us completely, and such intense engagement provides the most satisfying, pleasurable, and meaningful emotional state we can experience. Hundreds of studies and experiments have confirmed the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness. Games, the quintessential autotelic activity, engage us in satisfying, hard work with the chance for success and social contact, and they do it cheaply, safely and reliably. Good games produce a higher quality of life. (McGonigal 2011, 45-46; 50-51)

avatar:an image of a user, whether a photograph, cartoon or arbitrary icon or image. For Kapp an avatar is a character manipulated within a game, either 2D or 3D, where the player has the ability to customize the character to make it resemble him or her in some way. Several studies have shown the power of avatars to influence the behavior of players, including pro-social behavior. (Utecht 2010;Kapp 2012, 98-101)

B

Baidu: (see also “artificial intelligence”; and “Google Brain”) sometimes referred to as China’s Google, they recently hired Andrew Ng, formerly a Stanford University professor, to direct their research and development efforts. Baidu is like Google on steroids. Baidu has a lock on China’s 618 million Internet users, more than double the U.S. number. Baidu’s version of Wikipedia has twice the number of entries as the English version. If the growth of Baidu continues, it could soon sit on one of the most valuable information reservoirs in history. Ng is currently setting up a brand new, $300 million research center in Sunnyvale, California that he hopes to fill with 200 employees poached from Google, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Baidu has promised breakthroughs that will transform the world. On the fringes of Beijing Baidu has the Institute of Deep Learning to house one of the world’s most complex neural networks featuring 100 billion connections, or 100 times as many synapses as Google Brain. Samsung, the massive Korean competitor of Apple, has also begun building a 102,000 square meter research facility in downtown San Jose, but while both Samsung and Baidu want to draw on Silicon Valley talent, Baidu does not plan to launch any products or services in the U.S.A. Recruitment could be hard though, because the pool of required talent is surprisingly shallow. (Kedmey 2014, 10-11)

bandwidth: the amount of data that can travel over an Internet connection per second. Internet connection (bandwidth) can increase with better physical infrastructure (like fiber optic cables that can send data at near the speed of light) and with better methods to encode the data on the physical medium itself. (Chan 2010, 6).

Bartle, Richard: a well-known figure in the gaming industry, he classified player types. Bartle identified the following player types: achiever; explorer; socializer; and killer. These four types exist in every player, but each person tends to exhibit one of these types most strongly. Knowing these types helps inform game design. In 2010 at the Game Developer’s conference, Bartle received the first ever Online Game Legend Award, partly for his pioneering of online games forty years ago. With fellow programmer Roy Trubshaw, he created the first online multi-user dungeon game (MUD) in the late 1970s. (Kapp 2012, 132-133)

behavioral economics: this discipline shows that people are conditioned to see causes even where none exist, so with regard to big data, we have to be particularly on guard to prevent our cognitive biases from deluding us; just let the data speak. (Cukier 2013, 32)

Berners-Lee, Tim: the father of the World Wide Web and digital democracy, he created the computer program that allowed people to easily share documents in a single, global information space (cyberspace). He created HTML as the common Internet language to facilitate global communication. To allow underlined, hyper-linked words in documents to link instantly to other documents he wrote a computer program containing a "protocol" or set of rules called HTTP. Berners-Lee then created the URI (now URL) as a simple address system to permit easy access to information. He then made the first browser to make the World Wide Web navigable. Finally, he dismissed the temptation to gain personal wealth and sell his idea to big business, because he wanted everyone to have free access, thereby laying the cornerstone of digital democracy. (Cox 2002, 41-50)

best teachers: the best teachers are the best learners, like Chaucer’s Clerk “gladly will he learn, and gladly teach”. (Price 2013, 114)

beta-reading: (editorial feedback) the ideal peer-to-peer learning community where people develop as writers by writing, receiving feedback on their writing, and by giving feedback to others in online fan communities. (Jenkins 2006, 9)

big data: large data sets on consumer or citizen demographics, such as that compiled by Tesco with their successful customer loyalty scheme; the Internet allows for much more demographic data collection in a far shorter period of time than earlier, traditional offline approaches. The director of the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, uses digital technology to study billions of individual exchanges where people trade ideas, money, goods and gossip, and uses computers to look at the mathematical patterns among such exchanges.

Such big data so analyzed at MIT can begin to explain complex (once mysterious) phenomenon like political upheavals, financial crashes, and flu pandemics. Big data can diagnose problems and predict successes, but more importantly it can help design organizations, cities and governments that work better than those in existence today. "Big data promises to lead to a transition on par with the invention of writing or the Internet” (Pentland 2013, 83). Big data is distinct from the Web, but the Internet does make big data much easier to collect and share. Big data allows us to learn more than small amounts of data permit. This shift from some to all data and from clean to messy entails a move from causation to correlation. In order for such data to help improve our lives, common sense must take precedence over spreadsheets. (Price 2013, 56; Pentland 2013, 80-83; Cukier 2013, 28; 31-39)

big data, big energy: (see also “Critical Materials Institute”) data centers consume a great deal of energy, accounting for roughly two percent of all energy used in the United States, by one estimate. Besides streaming Netflix videos and hosting social networks, the data centers of the future might produce their own power. Microsoft researchers have found a way for tech companies to reduce their energy without sacrificing the integrity of their infrastructure by using fuel cells that convert chemical energy from fuel into electricity by stripping electrons from a fuel molecule (often hydrogen). Researchers predict that data centers could double their efficiency by integrating fuel cells directly into server racks. (Wogan 2014, 22)

big data handling: using big data requires three profound changes: collect and use a lot of data rather than just a sample; accept messiness, even some inexact data because the insights gained by using large volumes of data outweighs small data errors; and do not look for causes but correlations as big data helps answer what, not why, and that is most often good enough. (Cukier 2013, 29)

big data management: (see also “open PDS” and “SWIFT”) the disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden that outraged the public with news about the scope of the NSA’s secret data collection activities point to government overreach. Pentland argues that keeping so much data in one place is a big mistake with big data that allows leaks like those of Snowden, and raises the possibility that unwanted criminal elements may access such data. Granting that the NSA, for good reasons, may require such data to combat cybercrime and terrorism, Pentland offers three steps to address such a concern: scatter the haystack - get the data in different silos, as pulling it all into one location such as an NSA data farm adds undo risk; harden the transmission lines - powerful encryption and systems such as SWIFT can protect big data from cybercrime and threats of cyberwar; and never stop experimenting because the technology changes so quickly new ideas to secure big data need to always be tried. (Pentland August 2014, 65-67)

big data or big brother: Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger point to the potential dark side of big data (as does Pentland: see the “New Deal on Data” entry), where such information acts like big brother, an unwanted state intrusion into the lives of citizens; in all countries, but especially in nondemocratic ones, big data exacerbates the already present asymmetry of power between the state and the people. (Cukier 2013, 37)

(the) big 6 information literacy skills: a system developed by Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz to outline the six steps (not necessarily taken in order) that a learner needs to take in order to solve an information problem. The six steps are: define the task; determine the relevant sources of information and get the best ones; find the key ideas within the chosen sources; use the information to extract the relevant ideas; organize the information from multiple sources and synthesize your findings; and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the completed solution. (Lankes 2011, 73)

binary code: a system of numbers used in computer instructions that uses only 0s and 1s. (Sutherland 2012, Apple 45)

Black: a super-secure smartphone being developed by Boeing for government contractor’s defense and security customers. It has built in encryption to protect stored data, and self-destructs if you try to take it apart. It runs a customized (and apparently more secure) version of the Android operating system; because Android is the world’s most popular mobile platform, the market for such an ultrasecure operating system is potentially massive. What is the only foolproof security option? Turn your device off. (Lev-Ram 2014, 22)

Blackphone: a super-secure smartphone developed by SGP Technologies for regular customers and sold in June 2014 for $629 each. It encrypts calls, text messages, and file transfers. It keeps mobile web searches anonymous and blocks everyday applications like Facebook from tapping into location, contacts and other data. It runs a customized (and apparently more secure) version of the Android operating system; because Android is the world’s most popular mobile platform, the market for such an ultrasecure operating system is potentially massive. The company is also working on a tablet with similar privacy controls. What is the only foolproof security option? Turn your device off. (Lev-Ram 2014, 22)

block: a piece of Scratch computer code that can snap together with other blocks. (Yan 2013)

blog: derived from ‘text log’, a form of online diary or personal reflection on professional practice. (Cox 2002, 58)

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy: combining the key verbs from the cognitive domain of the revised Bloom's taxonomy with digital approaches and tools. (Churches 2013)

blue laws: (see also “copyright in schools”) American laws that once restricted commercial and other activities on Sundays. These laws, so routinely ignored, came to mean laws that were on the books but never enforced. Concerns over copyright violation within schools should be thought of as blue laws. (Johnson 2008)

board-whoring