OLDaily

Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification approved as W3C Recommendation
Decentralized Identity Foundation, 2022/07/29

Decentralized Identifiers (DID) are a core part of web3 and with the 1.0 specification being approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) companies can now move forward with widespread adoption of supporting services. It's worth noting, though, that the W3C specification allows for centralized decentralized identifiers, a point both Google and Mozilla raised in their objections. It would also have been desirable to see "at least one, interoperable method that works out of the box." Microsoft, as well, raised concerns about compatibility with JSON and JSON-LD. Here's the W3C announcement.

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Futurelearn may not be a going concern
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2022/07/29

So here's Donald Clark's assessment of MOOC provider FutureLearn: "It is a financial disaster. After ten years, virtually alone in the UK market, it has a whopping £16.1 million loss on £11.3 million revenues. With £15.7 million on salaries, it's drowning, with its nose and lips are barely above water." Notwithstanding the corporate requirements of Open University, my question is this: is education supposed to make buckets of cash? What's wrong with spending money to provide affordable (or even free!) public higher education? Ah - but I don't expect my own idealism to prevail in the brutal numbers game that is higher education in the English-speaking world.

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Ten Lessons of Implementing Recommendation Systems in Business
Reddit, 2022/07/29

It's classic Reddit that the first response to this useful post is to assert (a) that the post belongs in another forum, and (b) that 'we know' the stuff presented in the post. I think, though, that this general level guidance is exactly what nose-to-the-algorithm data scientists need to see from time to time. In any case, the post is more generally useful, and offers a good guide to the issues that should be considered when implementing recommendation systems anywhere, including learning analytics. If your project hasn't taken these ten items into consideration, then that's a point of failure.

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The Aging Student Debtors of America
Eleni Schirmer, The New Yorker, 2022/07/29

This tells you all you need to know about how the university system is broken. " Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old." An outlier? Certainly. But it's the sort of thing that should never happen.

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Does Inclusive Access Affect Academic Outcomes? Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Spica
InclusiveAccess.org, 2022/07/29

'Including access' is a misleadingly named system whereby expensive textbooks are included in the cost of tuition fees, rather than sold separately. It's 'inclusive', I guess, because students can no longer share copies or buy used textbooks. Does it do anything good for students? Apparently not. "The key finding of the study is that Inclusive Access programs did not show any measurable improvement in student outcomes—either for students overall or those more likely to be underserved." Via Alex Enkerli.

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