OLDaily

Social Epistemology as a New Paradigm for Journalism and Media Studies
Yigal Godler, Zvi Reich, Boaz Miller, New Media and Society, 2018/12/27

This is a nice heavy read befitting the holidays. Take a few minutes and enjoy a good intellectual meal. "Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking."

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Some Notes On Installing Federated Wiki On Windows
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2018/12/27

I'm going to try this. "I recently started looking at whether I could do federated wiki just on my laptop and not deal with a remote server. It doesn’t get me into the federation, per se, but it allows all the other benefits of federated wiki — drag-and-drop refactoring, quick idea linking, iterative note-taking, true hypertext thinking."

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We Are Underinvesting in Human Capital
Michael Echols, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/12/27

One of the reasons why I could never be EdSurge's new business reporter is that I could never take the business-focused stance toward the 'education industry'. This article is a case in point. I do not use - and could not use the phrase "human capital". And sentences like this seem to me not just wrong but morally wrong: " Not only do we not have enough bodies to fill the open positions, we do not have enough experience and education to meet the implied knowledge and skills required by companies." The people here have been completely objectified to become "bodies" and :knowledge and skills". I can't live my life thinking of people that way, and articles that push that perspective are, to my mind, deeply suspect. (p.s. I think Audrey Watters would be perfect for the EdSurge beat, but doubt that EdSurge's political officers would ever allow her perspective to appear in their pages).

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Article: Connectionism: A Summary of the Proceedings
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, 2018/12/27

This paper summarizes the proceedings of the Connectionism conference held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on February 16 and 17, 1990. Participants included Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart, Paul Churchland, George Lakoff. One of the commentators was Tim van Gelder, who I didn't know at the time would ten years later invite me to Australia on a three month fellowship to study the automation of critical thinking. Thanks are due to Jeff Pelletier, who put up some of the cash needed for us to attend the conference, and to Istvan Berkeley, who aided with some notes and diagrams (and who sent me this PDF to post here some 29 years later). Click here to view the paper. It's hard to believe it has only been 29 years since then.

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Recalibrating Our Approach to Misinformation
Michael Caulfield, EdSurge, 2018/12/27

I generally appreciate what Michael Caulfield has to say, but I haven't been in agreement with his approach to fake news. And I really dislike his characterization of critical thinking as "the thoughts and prayers of the educational industry." Now to be fair, he is talking about it being "wrongly applied". He writes, "Because the goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention.... whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue." Well, true, but how are you supposed to know a priori who the bad actor is? Caulfield's approach to critical thinking is to identify (somehow) trustworthy sources. But real critical thinking involves looking at an issue from multiple perspectives, not a deep focus on a single source. So neither Caulfield's problem nor his solution applies here.

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How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
Max Read, New York, 2018/12/27

The story here is that  "year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot." The question is, what (if anything) can we do about it? The author writes, "What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t 'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be." This suggests that a means of finding truth without trust will not solve the problem of the fake internet. I'm not sure about that. I think truth is more foundational than trust.

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