OLDaily

‘Lead’ vs. ‘lede’: Roy Peter Clark has the definitive answer, at last
Roy Peter Clark, Poynter, 2019/08/19

Despite the cute title (the answer is 'lead', and that's how I learned it, but I use 'lede' in today's world of search engines) this article about the first paragraph of a new story is useful and insightful. My own understanding of a lede is that it is short - 23 words or so - and contains the entire story in one or two sentences. It's a key part of the 'inverted pyramid' style of writing, where the most important bit is stated up front, and then the article moves into deeper and deeper detail. The idea was that if you ran out of room you could remove the lowerst paragraph(s) and still have a complete (but less detailed) story. That's how I prefer to write, when possible.

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Connectionism
Cameron Buckner, James Garson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019/08/19

This is a much-needed revision to the SEP's entry on connectionism, the science of neural networks for artificial intelligence, including especially a look at the newest wave of connectionist theory called 'deep learning'. Connectionism was of course directly responsible for a lot of my own work and the basic ideas of subsymbolic representation and distributed processing were key to my own thinking. You'll find a lot of contemporary debate in education contained in the section on 'the shape of the controversy between connectionists and classicists'. Anyhow, this is a straightforward presentation of an important topic.

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Let’s sprint again :)
Matthias Andrasch, OER World Map Blog, 2019/08/19

The OER mapping project is running through another round of improvements. What caught my eye was this: " This week we address the issue that our login interface is not very accessible, so we would like to integrate keycloak (Open Source Identity and Access Management) into the OER World Map." Though it has been around since 2014, this is the first I've heard of keycloak. You can read more about it here. It can authenticate users to various services on a web server and it enables users to use social network accounts to login. It looks like a pretty heavy install (Java scares me) but it also seems to be pretty popular. If you're going a large centralized site this might be a solution for you.

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Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in Schools
Erica Southgate, Karen Blackmore, Stephanie Pieschl, Susan Grimes, Jessey McGuire, Kate Smithers, University of Newcastle, 2019/08/19

This is a new report (155 page PDF) on AI in education commisioned by the Australian Government Department of Education. The first half (about 40 pages) focuses on AI while the latter half (another 40 pages) focuses on virtual and augmented reality (the rest consists of Appendices). You can read a summary here. The authors define AI and provide an overview of its applications in schools. Summaries of the major ethical issues follow, and then an application of the "five pillars" of ethics in AI: awareness, explainability, fairness, transparency, and accountability.

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Open Database of Educational Facilities
2019/08/19

From Statistics Canada: "first version of the Open Database of Educational Facilities (ODEF), which contains approximately 20,000 records spanning all of Canada. The purpose of this initiative is to contribute to the creation of a detailed, comprehensive and open database of educational facilities in Canada." It lists everything from elementary schools to universities. There are some flaws; it's all in lower case, and the 'institution type' field has big gaps. Still, this is pretty cool.

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