Last month, Bradley Boehmke and Brandon Greenwell published a guide to machine learning with R, it was titled Hands-On Machine Learning with R. I have included a link to this publication on the Pattern Recognition page of the Sport Informatics and Analytics course I curate on Wikieducator (link).
I have been curating the course since 2015 and each day I monitor the literature to see if anything should be added to the pages. What is to be included in these pages was brought into focus by a recent Stephen Downes presentation (9 November 2019) (link). In it, Stephen shared this definition of open educational resources.
His presentation included this slide:
All three points are important to me but I am particularly interested in content creation through curation. I see this as a fundamentally ethical commitment to open sharing. I sense that the act of curation also involves co-creation and that the process invites iterative change in the resources. I have explored the practice of curation at length (link).
David Deubelbeiss, amongst others, points out that “Curation is an act of love, by someone who loves “knowing”. It is personal and lit by the green fuse of curiosity. It is about seeing patterns and also having experience in the field to know how to separate the chaff from the wheat” (link).
As I curate the sport informatics and analytics course, I am mindful of how much has changed since 2015. I started out with four themes. Each one of these has expanded in a way that makes each of theme a course in its own right.
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (link) challenged my thoughts about curation in her discussion of Let Them Eat Cake. I think she raises fundamental questions about how we learn.
Fortunately, the Wikieducator format makes it very straightforward to change page types and links. I agree with David that curation is an act of love and part of this emotional attachment requires us to think how it might be otherwise. Mine suggests:
This fits neatly with Stephen’s view of the pedagogy of engagement in which students are enabled to select resources. I do see a very important place for a thematic approach to learning. At present the four themes are:
- Introductions (to open sharing)
- Pattern recognition
- Performance monitoring
- Audiences and messages
I think theme 4 might fit in well with Mine’s cake ideas. The page design of Wikieducator means that I can work on these changes without intruding on the current resource.
Photo Credit
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash
