OLDaily

Erasing history
Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2019/05/13

Photographs, murals and statues inescapably point to the past, but the past is infinite - we could display anything, from primordial soup to yesterday's breakfast. So we have to choose. That's why the art we display in our public places reflects what we think today about the past. It tells us what we want to celebrate, cherish and remember. That is why our choices about murals and statues are important. That's why we put up monuments to heroes, not criminals. So when people say we should take down art depicting oppression, slavery or genocide, we are not saying we want to erase history, we are saying that perhaps today we should stop celebrating oppression, slavery or genocide as though they were good things. And it's hard not to think of people who defend these displays as people who still think they were good things.

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8 Characteristics of the InnovatorsMindset (Interview Questions for Administrators)
George Couros, The Principal of Change, 2019/05/13

I was going to just skip past this article, but then the question occurred to me, what if we were to prohibit all classification schemes and taxonomies from writing on education? These abound, but they don't actually provide any information. These 8 characteristics are a case in point. What have we learned when we are told there's a thing called "innovator's mindset" that includes 'reflective', 'resilient', 'creators', etc? What is is about these things that leads us to group them together, why these things and not some other things (like, say, 'energetic' or 'curious')? What is their causal efficacy - what creates them, and what do they create in turn? What is their role in explanation (beyond, say, 'problem solvers solve problems')? And - to get back to my original question - what would the same author say if they weren't allowed to use taxonomies and classifications to make their point?

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EMC launches Microcredential Framework
Kerrie Kennedy, The PIE News, 2019/05/13

According to this article, the European MOOC Consortium (EMC) has launched a Common Microcredential Framework (CMF). " The CMF launched at the recent EADTU-EU Summit 2019 in Brussels with the EMC’s founding platform partners, including FutureLearn, France Université Numérique, OpenupEd, Miríadax, and  EduOpen." According to FutureLearn's Mark lester, “Leaving work for long periods of time to earn a traditional qualification will be less applicable in this new world and a new solution is needed from the education sector to meet this growing need.”

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Leading your organization to responsible AI
Roger Burkhardt, Nicolas Hohn, Chris Wigley, McKinsey, 2019/05/13

This is a pretty good article on ethical issues related to the use of AI. One strength of this article is that it shows how the risk varies for different flavours of AI. "Models with more predictive power are often more opaque...  leaders must probe their data-science teams on the types of models they use by, for example, challenging teams to show that they have chosen the simplest performant model (not the latest deep neural network) ."

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Facebook Building Cryptocurrency-Based Payments System
Julie Verhage, Bloomberg, 2019/05/13

I saw a few articles this week on something from Facebook called 'Project Libra'. The gist from Bloomberg: "According to Facebook insiders, the blockchain group is developing a stablecoin, a type of digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar or a basket of currencies, making it less prone to swings in price." I don't see anything good coming out of this. "It looks like the long-term vision is creating a sort of marketplace model within Facebook,” said Harshita Rawat, a payments analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. This way we can get the same social responsibility and public good Facebook has provided to social networking in our financial markets - all closed withing Facebook's ecosystem. More: CoinDesk, Michael Spencer, The Block, Gizmodo, CoinTelegraph, etc.

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Blockchain in learning exploring for validation of lifelong learning certification
Inge de Waard, Ignatia, 2019/05/13

From the post: "This is the first part of a series on Blockchain for Learning posts. In this post I am giving my (current) overview of Blockchain options from industry, a second post will focus more on the academic side (including impact on universities), and I will add a philosophical post on it as well)." It introduces the concept of blockchain in learning then provides a loose list of initiatives. (The headline was more a list of hashtags than a headline, a trend I do not encourage).

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