OLDaily

Misleading on Fair Dealing
Michael Geist, 2018/11/23

Michael Geist is up to part five in a landmark series on how the publication industry has been misleading lawmakers about the state of educational publishing in this country. He covers:

• the legal effect of the 2012 reforms 
• the wildly exaggerated suggestion of 600 million uncompensated copies each year.
• the significant decline in book copying as part of coursepack materials
• the gradual abandonment of print coursepacks in favour of digital course management systems (CMS)
• the massive education investment in and shift to e-book licensing.

I find it interesting that you can create a five-part series based on misrepresentations made by the publishing industry, but I am sadly not surprised.

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Autonomy and Identity
Les Green, Semper Veridis, 2018/11/23

Short post on how autonomy and identity go hand in hand. I've argued for autonomy in the past as a core element of successful networks, and it's not hard to see why: "its value lies in creating lives for ourselves, in making up identities, in choosing and pursuing ‘conceptions of the good’." But what about cases where identity is determined by nature - whether my DNA says I'm Irish or English, for example. Even here, autonomy plays a role: I can choose to discover the truth of the matter, or not really care either way. Autonomy isn't merely about "whether, or how far, some aspect of our identity is a matter of one’s own say-so." It's about defining one's own way of life, whatever one's DNA.

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Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 2018/11/23

According to a new study, it can take seconds for Twitter to spread false news across the internet. But in addition, the study also examined "the critical role played by so-called 'influencers:' celebrities and others with large Twitter followings who can contribute to the spread of bad information via retweets." The bots get the ball rolling, but the influencers finish the job. Bot owners depend on this. "The researchers found that, far from being random, those bots actively targeted influential Twitter users with negative content to create social conflict. Those users often did not realize they were being targeted and hence retweeted and helped spread the misinformation."

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The Future of the Public Mission of Universities
Robin DeRosa, actualham, 2018/11/23

This is a transcript, with slides, from a teriffic talk given by Robin DeRosa  on the privatization of public infrastructure and the outsourcing of core educational functions - like online course design and hosting - to commercial entities. The first half of the talk looks at the impact of privatization in other areas and some of the problems it can cause. The talk then looks at privatization in education specifically. There`s a lot that could be said, but I think a few points are worth underlining. First, privatization represents a lost of control over key infrastructure (with resulting fee increases, reductions in service, and co-option to serve other interests). And second, privatization does not actually save governments the money it purports to save. Comprehensive and persuasive, this article deserves a slow read.

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