OLDaily

9th Circuit holds that scraping a public website does not violate the CFAA
Hacker News, 2019/09/10

As reported by O'Reilly, via Hacker News, "not only is scraping legal, LinkedIn can't put barriers in the way of HiQ's crawlers." To 'scrape' a website is to use automation to make page requests and extract information (such as names, URLs, or titles) from them. The court's decision (38 page PDF) was wide-ranging and worth reading in full. "The district court granted hiQ’s motion. It ordered LinkedIn to withdraw its cease-and-desist letter, to remove any existing technical barriers to hiQ’s access to public profiles, and to refrain from putting in place any legal or technical measures with the effect of blocking hiQ’s access to public profiles." So, cool. Sometimes Terms of Service aren't the law.

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Philosophy of Computer Science
William J. Rapaport, he State University of New York, Buffalo, 2019/09/10

This is a long long looooong text (900 page PDF) but so good. It takes its time, explains clearly, and stays well within a traditional perspective, which is what we want from a textbook. Thus we read to the end of page 68 before we have finished defining philosophy as "the personal search for truth, in any field, by rational means." We then have another 95 pages defining 'computer science' (including some side-discussion on whether we should be drawing sharp boundaries in general, and a detailed consideration of whether computer science is a type of magic). Do look at the five key insights (pp148-149). So what is computer science? Essentially, "to capture the messy complexity of the natural world and express it algorithmically." That sets up the next question, "what is science," and so on. I don't think you could ask for more from such a text, really, not even brevity. Image: XKCD, also on p. 318.

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Exploring Self-Regulated Language Learning with MOOCs
Barbara Conde Gafaro, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019/09/10

I've always been suspicious of the concept of 'self-regulation' as it sounds like one of those things authors say that poor people lack in order to explain how they are the authors of their own misfortune. In this paper, Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) means "refers to the processes whereby students1 plan, monitor, and reflect on their performance toward goal attainment," or to cite Zimmerman, it is "the degree to which students are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning processes." Self-regulation, to my mind, can be contrasted with self-efficicacy, which attributes to students a sense of agency, and not merely a need to control oneself. And to my mind, it is the role of the MOOC to promote self-efficacy, rather than merely to require self-regulation.

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Facilitating Student Engagement Through Educational Technology: Towards a Conceptual Framework
Melissa Bond, Svenja Bedenlier, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019/09/10

There's nothing educational researchers love better than a good taxonomy, and so it's not surprising to see these authors draw from the literature to find this: "The energy and effort that students employ within their learning community, observable via any number of behavioural, cognitive or affective indicators across a continuum." There's a table of examples of each (for example, integrating ideas, sense of belonging, attention/focus). But the table leaves me wanting a principled distinction between these three elements, and suspecting there isn't one to be had. The paper then takes a hard right turn and introduces us to a "bioecological student engagement framework," which includes a microsystem, macrosystem, exosystem and exosystem. Then a sharp left, as we read about the influence on engagement created by the student, learning environment, teacher, curriculum, peers, family and outcomes. The overall model (illustrated) produced is essentially a mash-up of all of these factors. Taxonomies galore. But no sense of what the arrows in the model signify, and what underlying principles (if any) would be at work.

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Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis
Michael Paskevicius, Valerie Irvine, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019/09/10

When they use open educational resources (OER), many educators "report simply replacing an existing commercial resource with no significant changes to pedagogical approach or practice," according to this article. But the use of OER creates wider affordances, sometimes described under the heading of 'open pedagogy'. Consequently, this article "investigates how faculty members in BC describe the ways in which openness is impacting their teaching and learning practices." The study itself is terribly limited (n=11) but the discussion provides a starter-kit of topics to explore in this area.

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