Blockchain Means Digital Ledger Technology

Beyond the digital currency hype is a foundational technology named Digital Ledger Technology. Earlier attempts along these lines were about securing digital documents from back-dating or other tampering. Today Blockchain is a digital revolution that could be positioned as the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking. In print is the volume; Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy - by Melanie Swan. This read appears interesting and informative. Lets go a little deeper. Inside each block in a blockchain is some data, and also a finger print of the block called a hash. A hash is a randomly generated alphanumeric where the probability is unlikely it can be copied. Each block in a Blockchain also contains the finger print or hash of the previous block. Information in the Block is also distributed where multiple copies of Blocks are distributed to many computers. One aspect of the security of Digital Ledger Technology is the fact that if a hacker wants to change the information on any block they will also have to change the information on the many computers that contain copies of the block data and finger prints. While this is possible since computers are so fast there is an additional concept where Proof-of-Work slows down the creation of blocks. This gives time for Blockchain owners to identify that some corrupting influence is occurring on they're Blockchain. If a block in the chain is found to be corrupted - all following blocks will be corrupted also. The Blockchain will have evidence that some intrusion has occurred. Blockchains are more than the foundation of digital currency. Blockchains can be applied to paying taxes, and I am thinking Basic Skills in Education. Interested in Digital Ledger Technology? Watch This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSo_EIwHSd4

EdTech Equals More Productive Learning Opportunities

Proprietary API's ( Application Programming Interface ) translates to a language where one service think "Google Maps" is able to communicate with a second service like "AccuWeather". What do you get? Seamless interaction where you know what weather to expect at your destination! Today in the education process Instructors are designing classroom solutions, a "mash-up" say - where stand alone products can be combined to create new learning opportunities for students. This is huge as in Big Data brings analytics to the classroom and to the institution. It is not just the top universities any longer. Education right now is a collection of adaptive tools and data driven recommendations for individualized student learning paths. Enter IMS Global with Learning Tool Interoperability LTI - now instructors are able to integrate disparate platforms to optimize student learning and provide guided pathways to a certificate , or degree. Getting students to significant job opportunities where important learning can continue is driving our educational systems forward. API's are still really important but LTI avoids having to create a proprietary API and improves the ease of of learning for many many students. The rate of progress in the Education Ecosystem is ever increasing and can be disconcerting where it seems to be going so fast some instructors are fearful of erosion in Education Standards. With the availability of so much information about the learning process many more students are realizing customized education plans that better meets their needs while they are in education programs and not as an after thought. The great equalizer education is a "Greater Equalizer" today.

WGU Night Owls

Why not join 90,543 Students across America. 2018 might be the year you get a Masters online in a program that runs year around. Accreditation for this online institution was reaffirmed in 2016 and is the same accreditation offered to students at University of Washington, Gonzaga University and Brigham Young University to name a few. Looking to advance your career in Business, Education, Information Technology or Health? You are not alone with students all over the United States including Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Every degree program at WGU leads to a highly rewarding career path. With planning, focus and motivation students can complete programs in about a year. This is doable for many instructors that need a masters to take the next step in their careers. Lots of Education Technology is being introduced in K-12 schools and WGU offers M.A. in Science Education. This has the potential for real opportunities for many teachers. If you are self motivated & organized an online graduate program may be perfect for you and you can stop putting off getting your masters. With your smart phone and your laptop you can avail yourself the opportunity to get your masters even with your impossibly busy schedule. Check it out WGU.edu

Blockchain & Chatbots Great Match

Internet users are fundamentally social beings. We respond to friendly computer programs particularly if they ask how we are feeling! Chatbots are engaging but there are trust issues. Enter distributed ledger technology (DLT) and it can be demonstrated if your Chatbot has a history of doing it's job right. The good job is represented by a history of safe and successful transactions. This is the marriage of Chatbots and Blockchain. The "Block" is a collection of servers, and servers coded as Chatbots may begin to shift the trust issue in a more favorable direction. In the near term I will feel lots better if the chatbot that is asking me questions represents a large well established company that has a reputation to protect. Success and failure is logged into the Chatbots public balance sheet. You can decide yourself if the bot you are conversing with is any good! What about the "Chain" part of the blockchain? The chain part establishes history. What does that get us? It might be an application of a warranty coupon that you lost in a drawer somewhere a long time ago. Just ask the chatbot to look on the blockchain where your purchase information and your warranty information are available as data storage. Since the blockchain is implemented as chatbots with a least a tiny bit of cognitive services - this all translates to "Smart Contract". Contracts become active content on the network that are easier to interact with since they seem to know what they're job is...There is definitely an application to "Education" here. Let's use student support service bots to interact with students and provide students with secure and accurate information to phones. The information they provide is stored on the blockchain by the school or the training entity.

Chat Apps In Microsoft Teams The New Email

OK I admit it I have curiosity about what the Chatbot is going to say? As I search around the web some Chatbots don't answer & some Chatbots will chat you up! Mostly readers are able to surmise this is just the beginning. We still have to know what to ask or what to say - but the wider viewpoint is we are beginning to talk to machines. And we are asking them complex ad hoc questions. Business is intent on getting employees to work together in a more fluid fashion. Enterprise Chat programs are adding a new dimension to our communication skills. As professionals we want the simplicity of a communication hub. We want to get things done and we want to do it without having to switch back and forth between new contexts. To some workers - may BE millennials - think enterprise software results in tools that are cumbersome and clunky. I got this quote from the literature: "These new ( Chat ) apps allow you to convey a thought or status quickly, with a few words , or an emoji, so there's speed to value". That might be a tiny bit optimistic for some Chatbots. Check this out - We have a our best ideas in the shower or on the treadmill. How easy to speak the idea to you're digital assistant. That ( I almost said who ) then remembers it and might even be able to go out on the web, and get some references with which you develop your idea. Sure you can do it with email and you can do it with a voice recorder - but those entities do not "work with you to assist you in developing your ideas". The potential of our current technologies inspires us to communicate well. Now thanks to technology we have a second layer of business that does not include a hierarchy. Our communications are becoming more virtual-web-like. We strive for: The more knowledge workers have - the more we expect better decisions.

WIZELINE Research

Instructors Chatbots are here to stay and I have numbers to convince you I am right. Where did I get these numbers - I found them online !!! :-) They look right to me so here we go: 60% of Online mostly American adults use chat services in some way. By 2020 Chatbots will power 85% of customer service interactions. 67% of worldwide consumers used a chatbot in 2017. The number of users communicating with Chatbots will increase by approximately 25% in 2018. ( I made that up) 35.6% consumers will use a voice activated ( maybe Cortana ) bot once a month. It is predicted Chatbots will save business $8 BILLION annually. 31% of business executives are thinking Virtual Private assistants will have the largest impact on their businesses. Instructors with all this thinking about Chatbot adoption we should be using bots in our classrooms so students hit the ground running with Chatbots when they get their jobs. Here is one I totally like: Art Papas of Bullhorn: 65 percent of Millennials would rather talk to chatbots than humans - So why not let them?

Chatbots 2018 Center Stage

Chatbots are computer programs designed to emulate speech. The new UX ( user experience ) is to text questions to a computer program using English Language statements. Bot programs are perfect for chat applications or email applications since interaction with bots can be recorded and stored using these applications. The chat bot applications look for phrases or words that have specific meaning. The bot is able to construct answers to questions after evaluating phrases. Not every response from Bots hits the mark. Many bot applications are very basic and do not work with every input statement. I like Chabots Magazine http://www.chatbotsmagazine.com This by Dindaya Gupta published in Chatbots Magazine : "Soon 2017 will be recorded in the book of history. Of the many reasons to recall the passing year, one would be chatbots for sure. On Google alone, people searched the term — chatbots- between 120K to 1200K over the year. It kept trending on Twitter and other social media platforms and occupied the center stage of the technology companies". If last year 2017 you thought chatbots were for the future then Welcome to 2018. This is the year when bots become a technology tool that will change the way we learn and work. When you are having a conversation in Microsoft Teams - One ( or more ) of the team members participating in the conversation will be bot team members. In 2018 when you pick up the phone you may be connected with a digital assistant. Students who attend the same class have different skills, interests, and abilities and students will benefit from personal (chatbot) tutors - who can provide one-on-one explanations. Chatbots hold the promise of individualized learning pathways for all students.

January Great Time For Refresher Course

A new course starts monthly at Ed2Go.com Seriously this is a great program instructors. Ed2Go courses are great review two lessons a week. I have taken plenty of these courses before taking a similar course at a certificate granting program. There are career packages at Ed2Go which I have not taken but instructors are you thinking of teaching a new class or you want to learn a new computer language. Check it out - I have really valued The content guide lines for these classes. There is a test every week and you study the materials for the test. Then there is a final and you can study for the final from the tests. I need to ramp up if I am going back to working towards a degree even part time. Ed2Go is the perfect tool and with courses starting every 4 weeks I am pretty sure you can stuff a course in just before schools starts again. I am thinking in terms of staff development during January for instructors to have a chance to check out a new idea.

IBM Platform Equals Fresh Food

Food you purchase from the market has roughly 1 week worth of shelf life. Stores have no way of knowing the history of the food they buy. The food in fact might have been exposed to Bacteria causing illness. An E.Coli event happened in the U.S. It took the FDA 90 days to find the source. A similar situation occurred with an Salmonella outbreak. The origin of this event was never found. Super Markets are now using an Open, Distributed network of individualized computers that hold bundles of files known as "Blocks". Since the individual computers known as nodes are connected to a larger network the "Blocks" of files are said to be "Chained" together. This BlockChain concept is very hard to hack and as a result highly secure networks like this are called Blockchains. Think Cryptocurrencies if you want to imagine the security surrounding the BlockChain concept. This approach to a secure network is implemented by IBM and intends to save food product companies 10's of millions of dollars. Walmart, Kroger, Dole, and Tyson Foods apply Blockchain technologies to their food supply chain. Using Blockchain one CEO claimed their percentage of food with a shelf life of one week rose from 30% to 90%

Talent Pipeline Management-

The U.S. chamber of Commerce Foundation which is an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began The Talent Pipeline Initiative in 2014. What is the plan? A More Competitive 21st century workforce!!! Why Join the TPM Movement? We will educate more students by incorporating Service Learning where students build more relevancy into their educations by helping to solve problems in the community. This foundation spawned a multitude of exciting ideas including STEM ToolKit and WorkForce Training. This is a HUGE opportunity for us. Two year colleges, teaming up with organizations like ALCOA, and Boeing means students with highly developed work skills but less developed academic skills can still participate and learn skills relevant today. The idea that pedagogy and curriculum miss the mark for many students becomes less relevant when students are learning in a more immersive context. Why not 2 year colleges cooperate with Industry leaders to build a modern workforce. We are already doing this we just need to realize how successful we have been. https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/talent-pipeline-management-case-studies

Third User Experience !!!

Artificial Intelligence is here now and will be bigger in 2018!!! AI and "Robot's Are Taking Over" have been concerns in everyone's workplace for decades. Are Machines, Robots, and Computers taking over everything and we humans are all going to starve to death...Probably Not! What struck me in this endeavor are the many many bots that chat but don't do anything else. Chat Bots and AI are really new and while the creations are out there - they have in no way passed us by. Artificial Intelligence is in its infancy. What are the more common applications? From the Curiosity Bot to the Zoom.AI personal assistant the bots are absolutely fascinating - but don't get spoiled by the sophistication of these products - there is still plenty of work to do. What is this post about? :-) "Don't freak out instructors - We are going to survive this". You won't be surprised when bots start to creep into your life. A bot goes and gets the right person for you to talk to at the phone company. Are you going to a shrink Chatbot ? NO! Are Chatbots going to help you get news about a subject you are interested in? YES! Zoom.AI have a look! I am advocating having one or more example bots in the classroom.

"Courage...is an incredibly important trait -

Teachers Here is TV content that also has an online offering - The Henry Ford ( http://thehenryford.org ) "You have to have the willingness to do things that other people tell you maybe can't be done" - I Learned from reading a piece about Technology Innovator Meg Whitman Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This reporting is perfect for a book report, and on the site there is also a video! Check it out - I am looking for content for phones I searched: "Polymer Chemistry" - on Thehenryford.org and I came up with a link to an image of a chemistry class from 1937. There is lots of content for great reports on thehenryford.org Do some STEM. Look around it is a remarkable site.

Freelance Instruction is NOW!

Bring your courses to life and start for free with TalentLMS. I visited the site and I really like the tour. See how many products interface with this LMS which is pretty much a requirement today. Are you concerned about making certain the products you connect to your LMS at your institution are "Accessible" according to ( 508 ) the American Disabilities Act? This is important now and will become more important as students engage with highly connected education networks. After you log in to your LMS do you wonder what platform you might be working on? With Learning Tool Interoperability LTI you are integrated with other platforms, and the transition from the LMS to a vendor platform may appear seamless to students. ( and everyone else too !!! ) As a teacher I like the idea of students being immersed in education content. Not all students share my excitement for connecting platforms together! 😁 Some students can feel lost when they are not sure of where class boundaries are. I remember as a student I wanted an education - But I also wanted to know that I could complete the work and be finished with a Badge, Credential or Degree.