MOOCs The Platform: Education, Vocational Training, and More

MOOCs (massive online open courses) reinvented education in the mode of global accessibility, even faster than blogs and ebooks reshaped the publishing industry. Now in place as a concept and an infrastructure, ‘MOOCs as a platform’ can be used for other purposes, most proximately vocation and training. Already much of MOOC content is an educational-vocational hybrid of learning new things like knowledge and skills for the digital economy in the form of bootcamps and code academies for software programming, web services, mobile applications, and big data science.

MOOCs are a resilience tool for being able to quickly retrain large numbers of individuals that may be displaced in economic shifts such as the increasing automation of the economy (i.e.; self-driving vehicles, machine intelligence supplanting knowledge-worker jobs). More generally MOOCS as a concept category are concerned with ‘in-habbing’ - habilitating anyone into any situation - and ultimately the next-generation of the Internet that facilitates massive online collaboration and social connectivity.

A fun science fiction idea could be artificial intelligence waking up grâce à contemporary digital environments like MOOCs, YouTube (image recognition), and high-frequency trading networks. As a MOOC instructor, the new Turing Test would be determining if your online student is a machine or a person; that is to the degree this question still matters.

Human augmentation substrate: the microbiome

The human microbiome, comprising 10x human cells, is interesting not only for its significant role in determining health, disease, drug response, and individuality, but also in possibly being a less-invasive human augmentation substrate, for example, bringing nanoscale connectivity and memory processing modules onboard via the microbiome.

New research has identified that only five microbial lineages exist on humans: firmicutes, bacteriodetes, actinobacteria, proteobacteria, and other phyla which is surprising compared to the diversity of microbial phyla on Earth. However, within the lineages, there are many strains and species, for example 1,600-2,000 distal gut species of microbial bacteria in each person, only 7% of which were known previously (paper). Gut bacteria is critical to human functioning, one activity is producing butyrate in colon epithelial cells to maintain energy homeostasis. (paper, article)

The microbiome is a complex adaptive system: resilience and vulnerability
Research extends beyond characterization - an investigation of perturbations to the human microbiome has shown resilience in recovery following a disturbance. However there is vulnerability with persistent perturbation. The human microbiome may not reassume its initial state unless the disturbance is at a frequency that the system has experienced before and for some time. In this case, the system may get stuck in an alternative state or local maximum. (paper).