OLDaily

OA in the Open: Community Needs and Perspectives
Rebecca Kennison, Judy Ruttenberg, Yasmeen Shorish, Liz Thompson, LIS Scholarship Archive Works, 2019/10/07

The 'community' in this case consists of musum and library workers, and so some of the findings are not surprising. For example: "There is a strong desire for clear criteria and a centralized clearinghouse or catalog of trusted projects, products, and platforms that could be used to aid decision-making and to speed the approval process." The report (35 page PDF) also helpfully summarizes some recent developments in collective funding frameworks, for example, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), Mapping the Scholarly Communication Infrastructure, and the OA Switchboard. See also this short summary.

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Making Room for Asset Pedagogies
Benjamin Doxtdator, Long View on Education, 2019/10/07

This is dated from early September, though I've only just seen it Benjamin Doxdator here offers a critical, even brutal, review of Innovate Inside the Box by George Couros and Katie Novak. The criticisms are wide-ranging, from the book's failure to address "the radical necessity to decolonize the curriculum" to its misinterpretation of Dweck's "growth mindset" to its placement within the Dave Burgess Consulting (DBC) network. But really, what this review gets to is "the tension between reconfiguring ourselves and reconfiguring systems ... or  troubles which occur within the character of the individual, and issues which concern the institutions of an historical society as a whole.” I want to have it both ways: not only to embrace and extend personal agency to the greatest degree possible, but also to redress systemic and historical wrongs in our institutions that have suppressed entire classes of people. Anyhow, in this review you'll find a lush selection of arguments and resources which by themselves make this post worth your time.

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The MIT Press receives a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund to develop and pilot a sustainable framework for open access monographs
MIT Press, 2019/10/07

It kind of bothers me that one of the richest universities in the world is receiving foundation funding for research in open access. Surely the money could be better spent elsewhere? I also worry that MIT will simply take the money and try to find a way to commercialize open access texts, under the heading of 'sustainability' or some such thing, much the way they've approached similar projects in the past. MIT has made a lot of money on open access initiatives over the years; I would encourage them to consider ways of giving to the community, rather than taking from it.

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Researchers implanted “memories” in the brain of birds to teach them how to sing
Lamia Yang, FLWL News, 2019/10/07

I'm not sure exactly what to make of this, but I can't resist passing it along. The gist is that researchers managed to train birds (part of) a specific song by simulatin neural cells with light. The length of the light pulses corresponsed to the duration of the notes in the song. This is a long way from brain-writing, of course, but arguably the songs have been "transcribed" - in part - in the birds' brains. This link is to a summary; the full paper s behind a paywall, sorry.

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Digital learning assessments and big data: implications for teacher professionalism
Claire Wyatt-Smith, Bob Lingard, Elizabeth Heck, UNESCO, 2019/10/07

This is mostly a position paper on the impact of big data on learning assessments. The authors trace the progression of assessment from simple aaptive learning to AI-based assesment in authentic learning environments. They argue, however, that technology in this domain remains "mostly aspirational", and argue that there is a continued need for teachers to be involved in the assessment process, and they need to be "reprofesionalized" to support working with AI-based assessment.

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Why we moved our Silicon Valley startup to Canada
Russ McMeekin, VentureBeat, 2019/10/07

I like to think I'm a part of what makes Canada so attractive to tech. "Over the past several years, the Canadian government has collaborated with academia and private enterprise to nurture a vibrant tech ecosystem whose innovation rivals that of other tech centers around the world." The focus here is on AI, but the overall investment is in high tech.

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