OLDaily

The mutating metric machinery of higher education
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2018/09/26

"The narrative," writes Ben Williamson, "is that HE has been made to resemble a market in which institutions, staff and students are all positioned competitively, with measurement techniques required to assess, compare and rank their various performances." It's an unsettling narrative, he writes. "The sector as a whole is expanding rapidly with the emergence and evolution of ‘the data-intensive university’." This article assesses these developments in terms of ‘metric power’, a concept from David Beer that provides a useful framing, says Williamson. While the organizationms involved "are not necessarily uncritically pursuing a market-focused neoliberal agenda," nonetheless, " these sector agencies are all now part of an expanding data infrastructure that appears almost to have its own volition and authority, and that is inseparable from political logics of competition, measurement, performance comparison, and evaluation."

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The MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab Launch the Knowledge Futures Group
MIT Press, 2018/09/26

While I'm sure the people at the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) are supportive of any initiative to get research into the public sphere, I'm sure they would be surprisaed to learn that MIT's new Knowledge Futures Group (KFG)  initiative is "a first-of-its kind collaboration between a leading publisher and a world-class academic lab to transform how research information is created and shared." Maybe MIT means "first in the US" or perhaps "first at MIT". After all, PKP has been opening access with projects like Open Journal Systems since 1998. Anyhow, this article describes some KFG like PubPub, an open authoring and publishing platform, and Underlay, an open, distributed knowledge store. These are worthy projects. But don't say these are world firsts. It gets old.

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BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains
Linxing Jiang, arXiv, 2018/09/26

This article (15 page PDF) presents "the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving." It's based on passive "electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain signals and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver information noninvasively to the brain." The potential here is that "future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a "social network" of connected brains." Of course there's no way this technology could go wrong, or be used to influence elections or decision-making in the future.

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