OLDaily

A Gullible Population Is a National Security Issue
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2018/06/28

Vicki Davis makes the point stated in the title in a forceful way using examples of Russian-produced social media advertisements aimed at an American audience. If I had to change anything, I would change the word "national" to "global", because it doesn't matter where the advertisements come from, nor where they're directed, they still have the intent (and effect) of making the world burn. As Vicki Davis says here, " Information literacy is no longer just a nice-to-have literacy. It’s required for stability and civil discourse within any modern country. We don’t have to agree about everything with our fellow citizens, but we should learn how to disagree, and we should realize that our common enemy can easily make us enemies of one another and let us do their dirty work."

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JavaScript API for Face Recognition in the Browser
Vincent Mühler, ITNext, Medium, 2018/06/28

This is documentation of a script you can use on your website to classify and recognize faces. Though it's based on recognition of faces on photos, the obvious application of this is to use it as a way to identify who is looking at your website. Of course, you would have to turn on the reader's camera (sometimes without telling them). But what could go wrong? More generally (and usefully) it's a way to use AI-supported interactivity in your website, doing much more interesting things like face recognition.

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Orchestration Graphs: Modeling Scalable Education
Pierre Dillenbourg, Amazon, 2018/06/28

Enough of this book is visible online to be tantalizing (not that I can buy it, though; I have nothing like the budget it would take to actually buy books). The premise is as follows: "a sequence of learning activities can be modeled as a graph with specific properties." What follows appears to be a good application of graph theory to learning processes, up to and including the stochastic properties of graphs - that is, the idea that we can view a student's path through the graph as a set of probabilities. Readers should also note the concurrence between this idea and that of the directional acyclic graph (DAG) mentioned here a few days ago - I'm not sure whether it ever appears in the book, but it's a natural tie-in. And of course all of this describes (in my view) the graph-based underlying model of the original MOOCs (long forgotten in the rush to convert MOOCs from free to commercial). Via Gerald Ardito.

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Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report
Brian M. Stecher, RAND, 2018/06/28

This is an evaluation of a $775m Gates Foundation project to improve teacher performance. The key finding is that the program did not work. "Sites implemented new measures of teaching effectiveness and modified personnel policies accordingly but did not achieve their goals for students." But I like how Boing Boing responded to the report: "Kudos to the Gates Foundation, seriously... they hired outside auditors to evaluate the program's effectiveness, and published that report, even though it shows that the approach did no good on balance and arguably caused real harms to teachers and students." 587 page PDF.

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