OLDaily

The CBC Infolit Bot May Make People Worse at the Web
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, 2019/09/17

You might enjoy this article for its link to the ACRL framework for information literacy or you might like it because it criticizes the CBC Chatbot that teaches you about misinformation. Now I'm not going to be able to review the chatbot because it requires I use my Facebook login to interact on Messenger - and I don't use Facebook products because they allow and encourage fake news. But Mike Caulfield makes the reasonable point here that awarding a blue check mark for a 'genuine' news source (like say MintPress News or Russia Today) may encourage readers to mistakenly trust these sources. "And we haven’t even got into the other side of the problem — the number of pages that are from trustworthy and important sources but don’t have a checkmark." Like, say, me!

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What’s wrongwith Gricean pragmatics
Bart Geurts, 2019/09/17

This article characterizes Paul Grice's theory of communication as a form of intentionalism whereby it is one person's attempt to convey their mental state to the second, and the second person's interpretation of the communication as just such an effort. But is that what we really do when we communicate? Are we trying to transfer our mental states to other people? The author finds numerous problems with this view, and I'm incline to agree. To me, rather than conveying representational states, I think a communication is more like a move in a (language) game. Anyhow, if you are inclined to the view of communication as transfer, you may want to consider these objections.

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2020 – The Year of the Hub
Craig Weiss, 2019/09/17

People are beginning to see distributed applications as the way of the future (even if they call it 'the hub'). "There isn’t any specific order in the Hub, because, wait for it.. they are all interconnected, so A can be D, D can lead to J and so forth.  But, as you can see they all connect to the Center Connection – the main entity." The key question is - what will this main 'learning system' be?

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Learning Science: Mapping Learning
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2019/09/17

Julian Stodd writes that in a programme he is developing, "we build an individual Map of Learning, with a view to understanding how our platform and personal discipline as a learning scientist can inform this. Below, I share my own map for 2019, and the expanded text around the ‘Knowledge’ section." The 'map' (pictured) is just a hierarchy of subjects and skills. But it does suggest that our achievements belong in a graph, rather than a transcript. What would that graph look like? Anyhow, this post focuses on knowledge, as subdivided into meaning and bias. Both of these are directly related to frames, but here that's a completely separate category. That's the problem with a hierarchy - you can never capture all the relations.

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Steering science through Output Indicators & Data Capitalism
Herb Ulrich, Congress of the European Society of Veterinary and Comparative Nutrition, 2019/09/17

This article (5 page PDF) describes and criticizes information analytics services such as Elsevier's SciVal. It is concerning because it may play a role in staffing and funding, and "more problematic might be the fact that publication, curation and evaluation of science are increasingly in the hands of private sector stakeholders." It should be understood, I would say, that this is the first indication of analytics-based assessment that will be applied to professionals more generally (think LinkedIn metrics) and to the population as a whole (think YouTube metrics). There's nothing inherently wrong with assessing people based on their actual output, but we need to have clarity and openness about the nature, purpose and criteria on which that assessment is based.

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