OLDaily

How reporters can walk a mile in their sources’ shoes
David Cohn, What's New in Publishing, 2022/07/18

The phtrase that caught my attention in this article was this: "journalists need to foster direct relationships with sources so that the 'people formerly known as the audience' can feel as though they are part of a community that speaks through us." I think there's somthing to the ideas that the media facilitates a community's conversation with itself, rather than merely reporting and editorializing. Does this carry over to education generally and online learning specifically? It's not so much giving students a way to converse with themselves, though that's a part of it. Educators don't just report on and editorialize about a discipline. It seems to me that they support the wider disciplinary community having a way to converse with new practitioners. To me, this means having personal connections with practitioners, not organizational partnerships.

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Not my job: AI researchers building surveillance tech and deepfakes resist ethical concerns
Kate Kaye, Protocol, 2022/07/18

Here's the argument: "because researchers cherish their academic freedom, asking them to predict the future applications for research that could be in very early stages and years away from viability in products restricts that independence." I think they have a point. Not so much because of academic freedom issues, but because they're not anything like fully informed on ethics. That's why we have entire departments of philosophy at most universities. We don't want AI researchers (or, for that matter, learning designers or educational technologists) determining what is and isn't ethical. It is up to companies and institutions that fund this work to ensure that ethics are taken into consideration, just as is the case for any other research, using the appropriate research ethics boards.

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The Digital Disruption of Higher Education– “uni for nothin’, MOOCs for free”? (2022)
Ravi Sharma, Kevin Jones, Warwick Anderson, Anushia Inthiran, University of Canterbury Research Repository, 2022/07/18

The tone of the title sets expectations for this article (40 page MS Word Doc). It "presents an agenda for large Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to empirically validate digital platforms that could fulfil the aspirations of the key stakeholder groups." But the argument used to get to that point is not convincing and often wrong. For example, the authors write, "As Li & Yang (2018) put it: 'The business model of MOOCs is freemium, which relies on variable cost minimisation.' This is the "banking model of education" that Freire (2007) had warned about in his classic essay titled 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed'". It's nothing of the sort, of course. Or for example, "Surely socratic.org which exclaims 'take a photo of your homework question and get answers … a digital tutor in your pocket' cannot possibly be a substitute for face-to-face cooperation, collaboration and co-innovation?" Probably not, but nobody is suggesting it would.

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Brain size vs. body size and the roots of intelligence
John Timmer, Ars Technica, 2022/07/18

The photo attracted me to this article, as it's similar to one of mine. The gist of the article is that animal intelligence is based on the size of their brains, the size as proportional to their bodies, and how they grow and develop. For example, "Parrots tend to continue generating neurons for longer, and the neurons don't mature as quickly as others." The article links to a paywalled article, but here's the full text.

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Course Hero Quietly Took Over Hosting Lumen’s OER Content. They Say It’s No Big Deal
Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge, 2022/07/18

EdSurge covers the recent transfer of OER materials from Lumen Learning to Course Hero. The explanation we are given is that "in 2021, Lumen says, its online course materials drew in 350 million page views" and the cost of hosting them "can look unappetizing when the company paying them doesn't feel it's supporting their main mission." It's a "pricey distraction." Really? That's their total - how many views did the courses that were transferred get? What's the bandwidth? And a million page views per day sounds like a lot, but for a company it's very afordable - I'd budget maybe $200 per month, though here's an article showing how to get it down to $10 per month. 

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