OLDaily

Ethical Issues in Learning Analytics
Stephen Downes, PressBooks, 2020/02/20

I had the plan of turning a talk I gave last year on Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care into an article. I've been working on it for a while, and it has gradually become a book project (my raw raw notes are here and my draft text is here). As I suggested in Brazil when I gave the talk is that there is no simple agreement on ethics, and issues that are presented as clear-cut (such as: we're all against surveillance!) are far from obvious when we actually look at them. Anyhow, this is a draft chapter from the book, and its sole purpose is to provide a list of the (many many) ethical issues involved in the use of analytics and artificial intelligence to support learning. Comments are of course welcome.

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‘DigCiz Weaponization of Care’…by Autumm Caines and Sundi Richard
OER20, 2020/02/20

One significant emerging strand of the open educational resources movement is the idea of open eductional practices as a care discipline. Now there's a lot packed into that idea. For now, here's what we're seeing on the OER20 conference website: "This year’s conference theme for OER20 is around The Care in Openness and asks 'in the age of data surveillance and significant risk on the open web, how can we map out and give visibility to the critical component of care practices?' We have found this particular aspect of the conference theme to be a difficult one as it is often care itself that is used to justify data surveillance. We are referring to this phenomena as 'The Weaponization of Care' and we would like to start a conversation about it in open education." I think 'care' is being weaponized in any number of ways, one of which is to cast the idea of OER into a certain specific light.

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Y Combinator, Not Lambda School, Is Unbundling Education
Byrne Hobart, The Startup, Medium, 2020/02/20

Reading this Twitter thread led me to this article, which, which says this: "If you were reinventing the Ivy League as a signaling-focused product, your stripped-down version might look like this: you invite a small cohort of talented people to move to a city for about three months, you host some social events so they get to know each other, you have them work on projects and you advise them on those, and afterwards you introduce them to a bunch of savvy rich people. In other words, you’d invent Y Combinator." The Twitter thread is just misguided. But the article taps into what is really the value proposition for Ivy League universities, and we should be asking how to transfer this value to everyone, not just the sons and daughters of the well-connected.

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Digital Technologies Are Part of the Climate Change Problem
Tim Unwin, ICTworks, 2020/02/20

Last week I wrote a post about flying to conferences and made the point that climate change is a larger more systematic problem that needs social, economic and industrial solutions. Individual actions are nice, but ultimately our choices are so limited individual actions don't add up to much. This is clearly the case in the technology industry, where (for example) smartphone manufacturers go out of their way to make sure that their phones (55 kilograms of carbon emissions in manufacture) can't be repaired. eWaste is a problem, dirty electricity generation is a problem, mining rare earth elements, and infrastructure expansion (including waves of satellites). We could be doing all of this responsibly, but of course, we aren't. We could be regulating this properly, but of course we aren't.

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Generative Design is Doomed to Fail
Daniel Davis, 2020/02/20

This article helpfully tells us about generative design while explaining why it will fail. "Generative design is an enticing vision. Rather than employing a designer to laboriously create a design concept, you can instead use an algorithm to quickly generate thousands of options and ask the designer to pick the best one. Effectively, the designer becomes an editor." So, yes, that is an enticing vision. But to see why it will fail, imagine writing an email that way. It turns out, comparing options is harder than it looks. It probably takes more time to read all the emails and pick one. "Ask any professor: would you rather grade 100 student essays or write one article of your own?"

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Report on Post-Publication Open Peer Review Experiment
Claire Dandieu, Zenodo, 2020/02/20

This is a report (68 page PDF) on a post-publication peer review project, but the concept of 'peer review' is rather transformed in the process, focusing more on annotation than review. The authors explain, "The purpose is no longer to make an overall judgment to recommend and justify the publication (or not) of a work, but to make a judgment on very specific elements of the text by sharing scholarly reading." (p., 13) From where I sit, annotation and review are very different things. Annotation is one way of reviewing, a very labour-intensive one (which would explain why so many participants 'did not have time'). A review is more of an overall evaluation than a point by point commentary. So while I think this is an interesting report, I think there's more (wider) work that could be done on the topic.

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School staff should look after ‘every penny like their own’, says academy trust CEO
Freddie Whittaker, Schools Week, 2020/02/20

I've always been amused by the idea of 'running government like a business'. It's nice to fly 'business class'. I've also always thought my personal taxes should be like business taxes, where I'm taxed only on the profit I made each year, not gross revenues. Now we have an argument that school staff should look after school finances as if it were their own money. And I think: no. They do not want us to do that. I spend money carelessly, often on vanity projects, and am usually in debt. I spent most of my money this pay period on cats. And this is probably true of most people, who treat money as nothing more than a tool, and not some Higher Purpose.

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