OLDaily

How will higher education respond to climate change?
Bryan Alexander, 2019/10/18

Bryanm Alexander has been engaged in a series of posts on the future of higher education and climate change. Posts so far cover campus populations, campus facilities, the academic mission, and campus and the off campus world, wherein he quotes a  a Second Nature report (33 page PDF) as saying campuses "can serve as ‘hubs’ in their local communities for creating, testing, and disseminating knowledge about regional climate projections and adaptation strategies." This is a role they should be serving (but have often ignored) in general. Anyhow, the topic of climate change is obviously timely, and it serves as a helpful reminder that projections of the future of anything need to take into account the wider world and what we're doing to it.

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The tribal web
Steve Wheeler, Learning with 'e's, 2019/10/18

Steve Wheeler recognizes that the word 'tribe' "can be a contentious term" but in this series of posts he goes ahead and uses it anyway. He could just as easily have used the terms 'culture' and 'family' and his arguments and evidence could be the same. There is certainly cultural sharing and cultural grouping on the web - a quick breeze through TikTok provides ample evidence of that. But the meaning inherent in the word 'tribe' suggests a much more organized social structure (or, at least, should) including leadership, decision-making processes, common values and religion, physical or geographical integrity, and more.

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In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course—is it the right move?
Scott Gilbertson, Ars Technica, 2019/10/18

Back in pre-history - thirty years ago, say - software designers wanted to make their work available for free, but commercial companies would take it, make a small change (maybe), and call it their own, charging money for it. Open source licensing changed all that, because vendors couldn't simply cash in on someone's work to create an entirely closed and proprietary version of it. But all that was before the cloud and software as a service. And so open source designers are facing the same problem they did in pre-history: a company like Amazon comes along, takes an open source database, and builds a closed and proprietary service out of it, and contributes nothing back to the original project. That's why, according to this article, a number of open source companies changed their licensing this year. They feel they're being taken advantage of. And they're right.

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