OLDaily

Disruptive Pedagogy and the Practice of Freedom
Julie Fellmayer, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018/10/11

Baldwin writes that "The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions…" but, "I have yet to hear any EdTech expert or 21st century education guru refer to disruption in the transgressive sense that Baldwin was evoking 54 years ago," writes Julie Fellmayer. She has not been reading the same things I'm reading, evidently. But it doesn't matter, as the article takes a hard turn into the demand that we "teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students," which works out to be something like "self-actualization", which means to "sacrifice privilege" and " to immerse yourself in the work of as many POC, feminist, activist, and academic writers, bloggers, podcasters and tweeters as possible."

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The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all
Russell Brandom, The Verge, 2018/10/11

As Russell Brandon reports, "The bigger problem for Google isn’t the crime, but the cover-up. The vulnerability was fixed in March, but Google didn’t come clean until seven months later." As a result, " It’s hard to avoid the uncomfortable, unanswerable question: what else isn’t it telling us?" So the suggestion is that Google doesn't want to expose itself to this kind of risk again, so Google+ must die.

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Decentralising the Internet
Jason Prado, New Socialist, 2018/10/11

This is a pretty good article overall but would have benefited a lot from some clear definitions at the start. So here we go: by centralized, we mean essentially that everybody uses the same server (ie., everybody uses the same URL, for example, facebook.com). By federated, we mean essentially that there is more than one server (for example, mastodon.social and scholars.coop, etc), people can choose which server to use, and they communicate with each other through the servers. A federation is still sort of centralized, because there can be many people per server, and a few large instances can dominate. By decentralized what we mean is one server per person, where the servers can talk to each other directly. And all of that said, any network will tend to centralize if it is scale free. Decentralization requires hard limits on size. And that's the part we keep getting wrong.

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How People Learn
Stephen Downes, SlideShare, 2018/10/11

This is a slide show for a talk I'll never give, because it's not my work. It is made up almost entirely of quites from the recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report I referenced here the other day. The idea was to pull out the findings and present them in an easy-to-read (and occasionally funny) presentation, because I felt that the work merited a wider reach.

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“It is for publishers to provide Plan S-compliant routes to publication in their journals.”
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?, 2018/10/11

This is an interview with Robert-Jan Smits, the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission, and who announced Plan S, ensuring research papers funded by European funders are made open access immediately on publication. The ‘S’ in Plan S can stand for ‘science, speed, solution, shock’, Smits told Nature. The key point now, according to Richard Poynder, is that "the ball is now in the publishers’ court." Smits says “We expect publishers to come forward with offerings which comply with the principles outlined in Plan S”. He also says, “It is for publishers to provide Plan S-compliant routes to publication in their journals." As Poynder comments, "I have myself on a number of occasions argued that publishers should not be treated as stakeholders, but as service providers." Of cousre, this means "seek to extract as much money as possible from the research community, caps or no caps, even as many non-profit learned societies face an existential financial threat." But they're doing that anyway.

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