OLDaily

Overview of the Proposed Pan-Canadian Trust Framework for SSI
Tim Bouma, SSI Meetup, 2019/01/24

SSI stands for 'Self-Soverign Identity' and it's the idea behind a number of related approaches to digital identity, including the framework being developed by the Canadian government and described in this webcast. The core task of such a framework is to describe how we answer three key questions: does the identity correspond to a real person, is that person in fact the one being represented here, and has that person actually consented to the action being performed? These, in turn, are supported by a set of 24 'trusted processes. For more, see the #GCDigitalID Video,  FWD50 Conference slide deck, the Consultation deck, the Trusted Process mapping analysis, and the Github repo (still a work in progress). Related: press conference in Davos on digital identity from McKinsey.

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Education Blockchain 50
2019/01/24

This report is pretty high-level, but it's well-presented and offers a good overview of the state of blockchain in education. The hook is the set of 50 companies identified in an education blockchain market map (pictured). Sectors represented include skills and credential verification, IP, payments, and marketplace. Some examples presented in the article (I've paraphrased from source): Learning Machine, securing credentials on the blockchain; EchoLink, providing information regarding a job candidate’s education, skill and work experience; Larecoin, a cryptocurrency which tokenizes tuition payments, scholarships and student debt; and Orvium, a framework for managing scientific publications.

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How Do You Govern Machines That Can Learn? Policymakers Are Trying to Figure That Out
Steve Lohr, New York Times, 2019/01/24

This article is just the very tip of what is a wider movement to design regulations for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It reports on a workshop held at MIT as part of an OECD fact-finding project. But as this Metafilter article shows, OECD is hardly alone. Here are some related initiatives:

• Microsoft's approach to AI
• Google: Engaging policy stakeholders on issues in AI governance
• European Union: Draft Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI
• Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence (Obama administration)
• The Public Voice: AI Universal Guidelines

Mentioned in the comments as well is a paper called Fairness Through Awareness with a deliciously-titled appendix called "A catalog of evils". Another paper addresses the role of AI in helping humans become less biased (an idea whose time has surely come).

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Learning vs. Embedment: The Core Problem for 21st Century Learning
Todd M. Warner, Chief Learning Officer, 2019/01/24

The unusual use of the term 'embedment' caught my attention and the ice cream analogy kept me reading. "While they talk about 'customization,' what they really mean is rearranging the LEGO blocks of their content, inserting your company logo into the PowerPoint presentation and adding a handful of questions that relate to your company. Customization, in their view, is about sprinkling your organizational context on top of their content. This is wrong and broken. If learning is going to work in the ways that organizations need it to work, it must be built from your organizational context and sprinkled with critical bits of content, not the other way around."

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VR and AR: The Art of Immersive Storytelling and Journalism
Emory Craig, Maya Georgieva, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/01/24

The item was the top listing in the EDUCAUSE most-read and most-watched EDUCAUSE Review blogs and videos in 2018. The bulk of this article is a listing of several immersive storytelling initiatives, including: a Masters project, The Wait, at UC Berkeley; a new Immersive Storytelling & Emerging Technologies (ISET) concentration at Johns Hopkins; the Motion Capture Studio and the XReality Center at The New School in New York City; The Mobile Virtual Reality Lab at Florida International University; and a project called To Be with Hamlet at New York University. We are told that in the future immersive storytelling "will impact a wide range of disciplines." Not exactly a penetrating insight.

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