OLDaily

Feature Article
Whence the Virtue of Open
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2019/06/19

I think that the case can be pretty unequivocally made that open access is not always a virtue. So why would I say it's a virtue, and what could I possibly mean by that?

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Knowledge structures for integrating working and learning: A reflection on a decade of learning technology research for workplace learning
Tobias Ley, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2019/06/19

This article surveys three "examples of the use of knowledge structures in intelligent systems for workplace learning," (APOSDLE, MATURE and Learning Layers) and describes the development of such tools as domain, task and competency models, among others. The paper describes forward progress but acknowledges "we are still far from understanding how knowledge services that operate on emergent knowledge structures contribute to individual learning." I think that the author projects a lot more unity than there actually exists in the field. "It now appears much more realistic than 10 years ago to conceive of intelligent AI solutions that consider human activity as a social and situated practice around shared artefacts that can be traced and supported in technology‐enhanced workplace environments." I think that a lot of stuff has been done, but am unable to say that we can measure any specific progress toward the eventual outcome.

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Quantifying Controversy on Social Media
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, Michael Mathioudakis, arXiv, 2019/06/19

This article (26 page PDF) analyzes patterns of social media connectivity as a means of detecting and quantifying controversy in Twitter discussions. The main work is undertaken by algorithms that partition the conversation graph to identify potential sides of the controversy, specifically, "a state-of-the-art off-the-shelf algorithm, METIS." The quantification is probably the most problematic aspect of this. We could perhaps look at the graph and simply select the more controversial debates just by the shape, but to quantify requires an actual measurement. Here's what they do: "The measure captures the intuition of how likely a random user on either side is to be exposed to authoritative content from the opposing side." Summaries from MIT Technical Review and Olga Ioannou.

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