OLDaily

What are critical thinking skills?
Steven Forth, TeamFit, 2019/03/14

What caught my attention first was Steven Forth's skills profile. It's a very detailed listing of skills, 324 in all, with expertise in them ranging from newbie to guru. Presenting them as a graph makes more sense than using that many badges, and the categorization of the skills helps a lot. But it stuck me that the identification and naming of the skills is very important. Which takes us to the article. Here we have an account of what constitutes 'critical thinking' as a skill. And, frankly, it's a mess. Properly speaking, critical thinking is really a collection of skills. But not the skills identified here, but a completely different set of skills. That takes me back to Steven Forth's skills, which lists many business skills, and had me wondering how many ways there were to say 'management' or 'analysis'. And I also wondered whether I should trust SkillRank to assess those skills.

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Persistent identifiers: the building blocks of the research information infrastructure
Alice Meadows, Laurel L. Haak, Josh Brown, UKSG Insights, 2019/03/14

Though this article addresses the research infrastructure it could be addressing the wider world of knowledge and learning. The authors argue " Persistent identifiers (PIDs) – for people (researchers), places (their organizations) and things (their research outputs and other contributions) – are foundational elements in the overall research information infrastructure." These, they suggest, should conform to FAIR principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Additionally, the authors write, we need to be able to identify the source of the metadata - who entered it, and what authority they had to do so. Image: Foster, What is Open Science? Via DigitalKoans.

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Learning to solve for pattern
Jim McGee, McGee's Musings, 2019/03/14

When I was first introduced to the concept of learning design, which is built around scripts and roles, my first reaction was, "what about impov?" This article takes on that question directly. "Navigating this environment requires a shift in perspective and a set of operating practices and techniques that can be most easily described as improv adapted to organizational settings. The shift in perspective moves from a world of connecting the dots to a world of “solving for pattern”. I borrowed the phrase from essayist Wendell Berry. It asks us to step back from the immediate details and view problems from a higher, systemic, vantage point."

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IBM didn’t inform people when it used their Flickr photos for facial recognition training
Shannon Liao, The Verge, 2019/03/14

In a story that broke a couple of days ago it was revealed that IBM used about a million open-access photos on Flickr to train their facial recognition software. The first response was in the form of complaints that they didn't inform anybody. Of course, this sort of use occurs all the time, and it's not just faces, and it's not just IBM. Here's a report from IEEE Spectrum about a database of a million video clips of hundreds of common actions called Moments in Time. Facebook is using datasets that include billions of images. And as the Verge notes, the photos IBM usedwere part of "a larger collection of 99.2 million photos, known as the YFCC100M, which former Flickr owner Yahoo originally put together to conduct research." In a statement yesterday, Creative Commons points out that "copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online." Right. Different principles are at play here, and this is as good a time as any to have a discussion about those principles.

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Meet Tengai, the job interview robot who won't judge you
Maddy Savage, BBC News, 2019/03/14

I guess it's not a large leap from using artificial intelligence to grade college essays to having an AI in a robot conduct your job interview. And the motivation is equally benign: "The goal is to offer candidates job interviews that are free from any of the unconscious biases that managers and recruiters can often bring to the hiring process, while still making the experience 'seem human'." But we need to avoid getting carried away; as one Reddit author says, "The current state of media coverage of AI is fixated on constructing a compelling narrative to readers, and often personifies models well beyond their capabilities." I think that's happening here for something that is essentially a glorified speaker-microphone.

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Introducing the Coursera Global Skills Index
Coursera Blog, 2019/03/14

Coursera has introduced something called the Coursera Global Skills Index (GSI), "an in-depth look at skill trends and performance around the world, made possible by the millions of learners who come to Coursera to learn and grow." Not surprisingly, it says people are falling behind in critical skills. Overall, people in developing countries are lagging most, while Europe is the skills leader. The most surprising result is that Argentina ranks first in technology (Europe takes the next fourteen positions). Canada ranks as 'cutting edge' in business and data science, but only 'competitive' in technology. The United States ranks as 'competitive' in all three categories. (Report downloads are not currently working so I can't say anything about the methodology).

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