OLDaily

Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms”
Clifford Lynch, First Monday, 2017/12/04

Suppose we wanted to preserve the content in Facebook as it exists right now. What would it take? We might think that if we save the database, that would be sufficient. Not so, argues Clifford Lynch. Without the training data Facebook relies upon, and the algorithms that process that data to show you what you see, we haven't preserved Facebook. But this may be beyond our reach, not simply because Facebook won't release it, but because it may be impossible to capture. The best we can hope to do, maybe, is to document output, via "robotic witnesses", or "new Nielson families." These, though, would be small, labour-intensive, and partial attempts.

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Get Ready for the AWS Serverless Application Repository
Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services, 2017/12/04

I wanted to address the topic of serverless aplications in my talk on Friday but left the discussion out because of a lack of time. But it's an important dimension to next generation virtual learning. Here is an announcement from AWS that frames the concept nicely: "we followed up with the Serverless Application Model (SAM) to further simplify the process of deploying and managing serverless applications on AWS. We have also published serverless reference architectures for web apps, mobile backends, image recognition & processing, real-time file processing, IoT, MapReduce, real-time stream processing, and image moderation for chatbots." The challenge for developers of open learning is to ensure that these applications (and more) remain accessible. See also AWS Cloud 9, a web-based IDE for application code developers.

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Containing the Future of OER
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/12/04

Jim Groom summarizes my talk from last Friday. In doing so he adds that "getting a sense of how this all works and what it might mean is important for educational technologists" and scans the horizon looking for other people doing similar work.

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Note On My Emerging Workflow for Working With Binderhub
OUseful Info, 2017/12/04

Tony Hirst writes about "the public reboot of Binder / MyBinder (which I first wrote about a couple of years ago here), as reported in The Jupyter project blog post Binder 2.0, a Tech Guide and this practical guide: Introducing Binder 2.0 — share your interactive research environment." The idea is that Binder notebooks can be shared ion GitHub. Hirst writes, "I’d love to see the OU get behind this, either directly or under the banner of OpenLearn, as part of an effort to help make Jupyter powered interactive open educational materials available without the need to install any software."

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