OLDaily

'The' Ohio State University loses its three-letter trademark bid
David K. Li, NBC News, 2019/09/12

I used to track these stories. But that was before people generally recognized that the patent and trademark system was being abused. But some institutions still persist in the grand traition of Wal-Mart (smiley face) and British Petroleum (green) and try to trademark absurd things. In this case, the word 'The'. Fortunately, more reasonable heads have prevailed, as they have been more consistently these days, and The Ohio State University cannot own its own definite article.

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The Content Revolution
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/09/12

I must confess I am hard-pressed to find the difference between 'backward design' as described here and attributed to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. and the model presented by Shirley Chapman in the Introduction to Instruction course we designed at Assiniboine in 1996. Chapman's course wan't particularly remarkable; the principles she outlined were standard for distance learning as they had been developed over the preceding decades. The idea of designing 'backwards' - beginning with the learning objective, creating authentic experiences, and testing for outcomes - has been standard procedure ever since the domain of online learning has existed. Maybe I'm missing something. It wouldn't be the first time. Maybe it's the difference between coming from a distance education background and a traditional university. I don't know.  But here we have the two accounts, and you can compare them directly for yourself.

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How to Use TikTok for Social Listening
Liz Gross, Campus Sonar, Brain Waves Blog, 2019/09/12

Yes I have TikTok on my phone and yes I watch it from time to time, though I am not nearly cool enough to submit my own uploads. So no short quirky videos from me! If you don't want to install TikTok on your phone you can still get a sense of it from the website's trending page. This article is about using TikTok for "social listening". Of course, for the advertising and media set, that means automatically ingesting content without actually appreciating it (much less learning from it). They complain, "When it comes to social listening and social intelligence, TikTok is still uncharted territory. There’s no publicly available API, and enterprise social listening tools aren’t scraping TikTok’s data." Me, I just open my eyes and watch. There's a lot to learn that way. Sure, I could theorize it or problemitize it, but why wreck a good thing?

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Learning Path: An introduction to the Model Asset Exchange
IBM Developer, 2019/09/12

Probably most readers won't actually use this directly, but their tools will. In a nutshell, this is a directory of AI models that can be used for information processing by other applications. For example, one of the models listed is the Toxic Comment Classifier. This is a pre-trained neural network that detects six types of toxicity in a text fragment. To use it, you would set up an instance (by executing a one-line Docker command), and then send the text fragment to the instance API from your own application. This gives your application a way to detect toxic comments, and then you can decide whether to delete them or whatever. The point here is that this is accessible as a service, and that applications of the future will access a large number of these services to perform cognitive tasks on demand.

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MoodleNet and ‘free speech’
Doug Belshaw, MoodleNet, 2019/09/12

This post addresses the problem of hate speech in the fediverse. Because the software is open source, and because each instance is independently managed, there's always the possibility that racists and fascists will create their own instance and try to spread their content to every other node in the network. This has already happened in the Mastodon network, with the creation of an instance called 'Gab', and the response by most administrators has been to block it and for Mastodon central to refuse to list it. Which I feel is appropriate. MoodleNet is adopting a similar stance, and this post outlines a User Agreement and a Covenant for Instance Administrators that would apply to such instances. Fair enough, but the problem with such rule-based approaches is that the people who would follow them don't need them, and the people they should apply to use them as a minimum standard and a way to find loopholes. At a certain point, we must rely on our judgement, not a rulebook, and we can recognize hate for what it is, and take the appropriate action.

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