OLDaily

Reflections and Directions After PKP’s First Two Decades
Public Knowledge Project, 2018/03/19

In my email this afternoon: "The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is pleased to share our reflections on a community consultation process that saw us receive feedback from a wide range of stakeholders, including scholarly communications experts and past, present, and potential users of PKP software and services." This is the organization that creates and offers Open Journal Systems, Open Conference System, Open Havesting, and more. "PKP welcomes feedback in the form of online annotations (using Hypothesis on the report itself), public comments (on this page), or via private feedback (on this form). Your comments will ensure PKP has the best possible plan to carry it into its third decade."

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16 Years of Web Hosting Changes with WordPress and Other Web Platforms: The Lessons Continue
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, 2018/03/19

Because I host my own website (as well as a half a dozen MOOCs and some other stuff) I'm always attentive to discussion of issues around web hosting. I've had good service providers and bad. This article recounts the lessons Wes Fryer has learned over almost two decades of hosting web sites. Mostly his advice makes sense to me (and one day I wish to start following it).

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Countering the Neos: Dewey and a Democratic Ethos in Teacher Education
Jamie C Atkinson, Democracy and Education, 2018/03/19

From the abstract to this article: "This paper defines neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies and makes a case for including more critique within teacher preparation programs, what Dewey and other educationists referred to as developing a significant social intelligence in teachers."

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Students Use Self-Directed Learning to Serve Their Community, One Foot at a Time
Savanna Barksdale, Home Room, 2018/03/19

The foot in question is a duck's foot and what the students are doing is creating prosthetic duck feet using 3D printing to serve as feet for real ducks. This is the sort of thing that appeals to me at so many levels: it involves developing real solutions to real problems, it generates inestment in the community and the environment, it's students teaching themselves how to teach themselves, and it helps ducks. And I like ducks.

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Why the Social Sciences are Irreducible
Tobias Hansson Wahlberg, 2018/03/19

This is a very common position in the social sciences (including education): "“We can hold that any particular social entity at a given time and its causal powers are token identical with the sum of individuals composing it.” Or "it might well be true that each instance of a social kind - for example, a state structure - is identical with an ensemble of individual actors having certain properties." This paper examines, in detail, some of the arguments for and against this position. It is a tough analytical slog and may well take several hours to work though. The effort is worthwhile, however, as it raises (among many others) questions like 'at what point does an ensemble turn into a team?' And even, 'what makes a team a team?' This in turn raises questions like 'is teaching a class the same as teaching an individual?' and 'how do you assign responsibility for the actions of a group?' 36 page PDF.

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Family fun with deepfakes. Or how I got my wife onto the Tonight Show
Sven Charleer, 2018/03/19

Content sites are beginning to block and take down deepfakes animations and videos. These are created by AIs and essentially put the face of one person onto the body of another (where the other may be depicted in some very compromising positions (or to insert Nicolas Cage into all your favourite motion pictures)). This post is safe for viewing, however, and the fakes are clearly labeled as fakes. And it demonstrates quite nicely how the transition from ordinary person to guest on the Tonight Show can appear seamless. The technology poses new challenges to our understanding of truth and veracity. More about deepfakes. More.

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