OLDaily

Humanities Commons
2019/06/06

I watched Bryan Alexander's Future Trends Forum today where the guest was Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the topic was the Humanities Commons, which according to its website is "the network for people working in the humanities. Discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials, make interdisciplinary connections, build a WordPress Web site, and increase the impact of your work by sharing it in the repository." There's a lot to like about the site; maybe start by looking at the most downloaded resources for a sense of the range and quality. See also: Scholars, It's Time to Take Control of Your Online Communities.

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Generous Thinking
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Humanities Commons, 2019/06/06

This site is the draft manuscript of a book that was published in dead-tree format earlier this year. The book expresses author Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "desire to see universities and those who work in and around them... develop more responsive, more open, more positive relationships that reach across the borders of our campuses." It's about listening before speaking, collaborating before competing, etc. It also involves working in publish, and reaffirms the idea of the university (and education in general) as a public space.

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Education in 2030
Holon IQ, 2019/06/06

This report has some flaws but it is overall a far better snapshot of the future of learning than many of its contemporaries. It draws from both the 'top down' - looking at data and research from sources like the World Bank and OECD - and the 'bottom up' - analyzing hundreds of news articles, blog posts and commentaries from a wide array of sources. This leads to a picture where five scenarios dominate - education as usual, global giants, regional rising, peer-to-peed, and robo revolution. These aren't depicted as alternatives per se - they're all at play in our complex environment, influenced by (and influencing) governments, markets, research, etc., each to a different degree. I like this report a lot, and my brain feels a lot like the graph diagrammed here.

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Data Feminism
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, PubPub, 2019/06/06

This book was mentioned by Kathleen Fitzpatrick during her discussion today. I haven't read it but a quick look through the chapter descriptions suggests that I should. The book captures a trend in thinking that looks at data as not abstract and based in reason alone but embodied and based in questions of context, power, community and relationships. " The products of data science are the work of many hands. Unfortunately, though, we tend not to credit the many hands who perform this work." P.S. I like the open book format with comments (even if the comment period is closed).

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Perception As Controlled Hallucination: Predictive Processing and the Nature of Conscious Experience
Andy Clark, Edge, 2019/06/06

Rather than summarize I'll just pull a key quote from this terrific article featuring Andy Clark, a well-known expert in the field: "You experience a structured world because you expect a structured world, and the sensory information here acts as feedback on your expectations. It allows you to often correct them and to refine them. But the heavy lifting seems to be being done by the expectations. Does that mean that perception is a controlled hallucination? I sometimes think it would be good to flip that and just think that hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception."

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