OLDaily

Wrangling an Online Conference in the Discourse Platform
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2021/10/18

I am not conversant in Discourse, so I'm not sure how it works nor why it's different. But there does seem to be something to it that I like. "The conference space in Discourse here can be a bit messy (at least in my hands), and you have to find a place to loosen your desire to make it controlled. But to me, it ends up being more human, like a noisy public place, rather than a place where every room likes like the room next door." Alan Levine provides a good rundown of the features (I especially like "never ask them to convert dates and times again).

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Teacher in a Strange Land: I Can’t Believe I’m Looking at Test Scores
Nancy Flanagan, National Education Policy Center, 2021/10/18

Test Scores Show Dramatic Declines!, says the headline, but "The data are apples-to-oranges-to bowling balls muddled. If anything, if you still believe test scores give us valuable information, the data might be mildly encouraging." Even more to the point, "You can’t talk about good schools or good teachers or even “lost learning” any more, without a mountain of numbers. Which can be inscrutable to nearly everyone, including those making policies impacting millions of children. When it comes to standardized test score analysis, we are collectively illiterate. And this year’s data? It’s meaningless." I can't say I disagree.

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Blogging from localhost to IPFS
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2021/10/18

This short post demonstrates the most elegant system for publishing to the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) that I've seen so far. I looked a bit more into it and found js.ipfs.io, which makes IPFS publishing possible with three lines of code (I haven't tried this yet so there may still be a catch). But to me the big news in all of this is that Cloudflare is supporting IPFS URLs, which suddenly makes it fast and useful for everyone. "These things happen slowly," writes Belshaw, "often taking a decade to mass adoption as bugs and annoyances are ironed out. We’re getting there."

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Another criterion of IT project success: nothing
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2021/10/18

A few days ago I wrote, "one value I have embraced is designing ways participation and outcomes in my MOOC can’t be measured." Terry Freedman considers this approach to evaluation and somewhat agrees with it. It's true that "you have to come up with various criteria that can, in theory, be measured and which, also in theory, actually matter," he writes, but "you can end up being so focused on measurable criteria that you miss really important stuff — because you weren’t looking for it." Exactly. He concludes, though, "you still need to satisfy the bean-counters." Maybe the bean-counters might come up with a worthwhile evaluation criterion, but it seems so unlikely, especially if they're aiming for something that can be applied generally or universally.

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