OLDaily

Open Logic Project
University of Calgary, 2018/08/14

As noted in today's "Four Short Links" from O'Reilly, "The Open Logic Project is a collection of teaching materials on mathematical logic aimed at a non-mathematical audience, intended for use in advanced logic courses as taught in many philosophy departments." Nice. Though as Tony Hirst comments, " the TeX source does mean you need a (La)TeX environment to run it (and the project does bundle some of the custom .sty style files you need in the repo, which is handy)." More on the project.

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Building an IndieWeb Reader
Aaron Parecki, 2018/08/14

There's a lot to like in this description (I haven't tried out the actual product) of a reader that in many ways resembles what I'm trying to do with gRSShopper. This is a hard project: "there are a whole bunch of different parts to building a reader, many of which have no overlap in skillset: managing the subscription list, polling and fetching feeds, parsing feeds, data storage, rendering posts in a UI, providing inline action buttons to be able to reply and favorite posts, etc." There are some nice bits, especially the interoperability with Twitter and Github.

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Can You Automate OER Evaluation With The RISE Framework?
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2018/08/14

"The basic idea of the RISE Framework," writes Matt Crosslin, "is that analytics will create a graph that plots page clicks in OER resources on the x-axis, and grades on assessments on the y-axis." This allows for an association between resources and grades, and hence, a way of spotting resources that need to be fixed. Or so we're told. "But comparing overall scores on assessments to certain click-stream activity in OER (sometimes an entire book) comes across like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun approach," writes Croosslin. David Wiley responds with a blog post, commenting "I fear there’s a sense of (false) dichotomy between content and assessments that are well-designed and well-aligned on the one hand and spaces of self-determination, autonomy, and society on the other."

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Open and Distance eLearning in Asia: Country Initiatives and Institutional Cooperation for the Transformation of Higher Education in the Region
Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria, Journal of Learning for Development, 2018/08/14

This article covers the region in very broad strokes, as is to be expected, but offers a good overview. It lists eight major mega open universities (with links and stats), some cooperation initiatives, and a number of open education initiatives (which are almost invariably based on MOOCs). The article concludes with two separate lists of challenges: first, a set of things that should be done to improve open education in the region, and second, a set of factors hindering the transformation process, including a need for recognition, quality, cooperation, sustainability and digital inclusion.

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Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Mike Masnick, TechDirt, 2018/08/14

This post takes a while to get to its central point, and in the process says a bunch of things I don't agree with. But the core statement is correct, in my view. It is this: "we need to move to a world of protocols instead of platforms, in which transparency rules and (importantly) control is passed down away from the centralized service to the end users." Facebook has the problems it has because it wants to be the internet, run centrally. This is what's wrong with it, and this is what should be fixed. "Facebook should open itself up so that end users can decide what content they can see for themselves, rather than making all the decisions in Menlo Park "

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