OLDaily

"The Audrey Test": Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education?
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/08/08

The Audrey Test starts out well, beginning with a quick quiz testing your range of relevant knowledge and then some essay questions about the basics of educational theory - " Who is Seymour Papert?" "What is Bloom's Taxonomy?" Ah, but she should have stopped it right there. But instead, her test gets very US-centric with questions about Common Core and charter schools and "the ratio of computer to student in U.S. public schools." Related: Kin Lane suggests that Watters may be burning out. "The lack of funding for her work really reflects the ed-tech space in my opinion, where only a handful of people truly care about the space, while the majority are either just looking to sell things to the space," he writes.

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Why we need to think differently about AI
Mike Loukides, O'Reilly, 2018/08/08

"In many respects AI seems to be stalled," writes Mike Loukides. "What seems no closer than it was a decade ago, would be steps in the direction of general intelligence or creativity." But why? Loukides suggests that the answer may be found in computer science's focus on abstraction. " Data abstracts people; data is an abstraction that becomes a proxy for you and your concerns—forgetting that data is people is dangerous in many ways, not in the least because these abstractions are often the basis for decisions." That problem doesn't exist only in AI - I've seen a fair amount of education reserach that suffers from the same problem.

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How we can make the government's edtech vision a reality
Martin Hamilton, JISC, 2018/08/08

"The government has signalled its ambition of realising the untapped potential of technology across the education ecosystem," writes Martin Hamilton. "We fully support those aims." He's referring to a column by UK secretary of state for education Damian Hinds (which, stupidly, is behind a paywall). " Students “are able to explore the rainforest, steer virtual ships or programme robots” from their classroom, Hinds notes. Meanwhile, teachers are able to access training, share best practice with colleagues and update parents on a pupil’s progress whilst keeping their main focus on teaching." This article outlines how JISC supports that vision.

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Open Access and the Benevolence of Multinational Corporations
Dylan Burns, ACRLog, 2018/08/08

On TWiT the other day I listened to them first discuss Apple's valuation at a trillion dollars US, and then right after, about minimum wage working conditions and the need for social supports. Of course at one point someone said "we can't afford all these entitlements, governments are not made out of money." I was listening on earphones but I exclaimed out loud, "You just finished talking about a trillion dollar valuation!" Clearly there's enough money for all kinds of programs but for some reason the choice is made to leave that money in the hands of corporations rather than in governments. This is why we find ourselves in the position discussed in this article where libraries have to depend on unreliable corporate largess in order to survive. At a certain point, though, an Elon Musk submarine is not enough.

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Prepare for fun! Scratch 3.0 is coming
Angela Brown, AACE Review, 2018/08/08

Here's the story: "The beta version of Scratch 3.0 will be released at beta.scratch.mit.edu. From August 2018 to January 2019 you can use Scratch 3.0 in this beta version.  This period is a great opportunity to get kids involved in public beta feedback. The offline version of Scratch 3.0 is not available during the beta-phase."

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