OLDaily

Why people end up mad when AI flags toxic speech
Edmund L. Andrews-Stanford, Futurity, 2021/07/22

There's a lesson here anyone interested in the ethics of AI or education or whatever should heed. "There are no simple solutions, because there will never be unanimous agreement on highly contested issues. Making matters more complicated, people are often ambivalent and inconsistent about how they react to a particular piece of content." There's no one thing called 'ethics'. "For example, human annotators rarely reached agreement when they were asked to label tweets that contained words from a lexicon of hate speech. Only 5% of the tweets were acknowledged by a majority as hate speech, while only 1.3% received unanimous verdicts."

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My ‘Man on the Moon’ Project
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2021/07/22

Clark Quinn's moonshot is this: "I’d like to see an entire K12 curriculum online." But he has some conditions. "It can’t be the existing curriculum," he writes. "Common Core isn’t evil, but it’s still focused on a set of elements that are out of touch." Um, OK. Also: "it can’t be the existing pedagogy... Instruction is designed action and guided reflection." OK, that's one view. Finally, "having a teacher support component along with every element is important." So, I'm sympathetic, but I'm sceptical of a moonshot that people can't currently use and won't be able to use in their actual schools even when trained. I think that instead of thinking of education as one big thing, like sending a person to the moon, it's better to think of it like many little things, like words and sentences and languages, that anybody can use.

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Proctorio sponsor OEB, so it’s a no from me
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2021/07/22

I haven't been invited to Online Educa Berlin (OEB) for a few years now (not since my disastrous 'gRSShopper in a Box' workshop) but if I were I would still attend even if they are sponsored by Proctorio. Why? Well, Proctorio is just one of many companies whose practices I oppose. I've attended conferences sponsored by Apple, Blackboard and Microsoft even while very opposed to their business practices of the day. So why would I announce a boycott of a conference I wasn't planning to attend anyway? No, what I do instead is attend the conference and then harangue them at their booth, or in their presentations, or in my presentation, about what they are doing. Yes, it gives me a reputation of being unpleasant, but I think it's far more effective to register my objection by doing something than by doing nothing.

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Show Students Their Data: Using Dashboards to Support Self-Regulated Learning
ennifer Love, Sean DeMonner, Stephanie Teasley, EDUCAUSE Review, 2021/07/22

This is something I can get behind. "Learning analytics (LA) have tended to be focused on the needs of administrators primarily, then on instructors’ needs," writes Tony Bates in a commentary on this paper, "but LA can also be very useful for students." The project described in this paper focused "on supporting self-regulated learning for students" and principles included allowing students to customize what they see, supporting social comparison, and LMS integration. Not surprisingly, most students reported changing how they studies as a result.

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RIOXX metadata application profile v 3.0 beta draft released
George Macgregor, RIOXX, 2021/07/22

Sometimes matter-of-fact updates contain hidden stories. This announcement is one of them. For example, I wonder what's behind this: "ali:free_to_read -- removed owing to inconsistent application across the sector." And this: "RIOXX v 3.0 moves away from using the XML 'id' attribute... This has resulted in the introduction of the 'uri' attribute as an alternative to 'id'." Background: "RIOXX has also proven to be generally useful as a standard for sharing metadata between repositories and network services such as large-scale metadata aggregators (e.g. Core).... (and) was originally developed by Paul Walk (while at UKOLN) and then EDINA) and by Sheridan Brown (Chygrove Ltd). Since then, with the loss of both RCUK and HEFCE, RIOXX has been maintained by Paul Walk at Antleaf." Stories on stories.

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