OLDaily

Ethical debt and the great online pivot
Samantha Ahern, Wonkhe, 2020/04/02

I'm going to juxtapose two posts here: one from the Christensen Institute titled Keep calm and carry on: Reasonable approaches to home-based learning, and the other from WonkHE called Ethical debt and the great online pivot. The former argues that "Vetoing all learning over equity concerns makes the perfect the enemy of the good." The latter says "The first consideration is that of social justice." The former says "It seems ironic, however, to say now that 'no one learns if not everyone can learn.'" The latters says, "we are also subjecting them to a programmed sociality predetermined by the platforms that they are using." I read Audrey Watters say "you might consider it 'just works' because it ignores all sorts of permissions and security features" and I think to myself, "oh sure, it was so much better when we used all those systems that didn't work."

People argue as though the ethics of all this is settled, but it isn't. I was in the middle of writing a very long paper about that when all of this hit, and I hope to finish it. We need to do better than sweeping declarations about what's good and what's bad in all of this. Social justice matters, but so does education. Privacy matters, but so does openness.

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Approaches to Marking
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/04/02

Earlier this week I had a drive-by Twitter disagreement with Bonnie Stewart about whether online marking exaggerated inequalities. I argued that it does not; she responded "all the prejudices remain with new inequities added." À propos (probably coincidentally) Alex Usher looks at "the issue of different methods of marking and assessment." Writing about higher education, Usher contrasts the “professorial classroom sovereignty” in North America with models where the responsibility for marking is split between several agents in order to produce (variably) cost-effectiveness or fairness. Usher comments, "it is worth thinking sometimes about the price-tag our doctrine of 'professorial classroom sovereignty' carries: specifically, in reduced ability to seek gains from specialization, concerns about fairness in grading, and quality control." And I think this casts nicely into my own perspective that individual in-person classroom teachers are a lot less fair than we would like to pretend, and that online learning can redress this in ways the traditional system cannot.

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New pandemic edtech power networks
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2020/04/02

Ben Williamson argues that "during the ongoing coronavirus crisis, new pandemic power networks have begun to coalesce around claims that edtech is not just disruptive, but in fact palliative." These agencies are driving an agenda, he says, that favours "digital technologies as a solution to a perceived ‘crisis’ of education that pre-dates coronavirus..., private sector technology companies as key providers of educational infrastructure, platforms, apps, content and other services... (and) decentralize education systems (as) connected networks where learning can be conducted across homes, schools and other settings." As I read this my reaction is partially "well what did you expect?" and "most of this is what we want." Sure, I have grave reservations about any desire to privatize the educational system. But I don't see that happening in countries that have strong public education sectors. What I see happening is government moving to support education as a vital public service that needs to be provided to everyone no matter what.

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How Things Have Changed—New Expanded Netiquette Rules for Video Conferencing
Karen Nichols, CAT FooD, 2020/04/02

It has been a long time since I've written about netiquette. But the flood of new videoconferencing users is reminiscient of the time in the 90s when incoming AOL users doubled the size of the internet. So establishing some norms makes sense. Now I'm not sure I would agree with all of these - for example, instead of saying "wear work-appropriate clothing" I think the rule should just say "wear clothing". Also the stuff about framing and lighting and looking at the camera could be replaced with "point the camera at you, not the ceiling". But despite my disagreements, I think it's time for vidiquette. See also: Melanie Yunk. More: BBC.

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Domains, decentralisation, and DNS
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2020/04/02

Doug Belshaw reflects on an OER20 presentation with Lauren Heywood, Jim Groom, and Noah Mitchell. " As Jim mentioned in answer to my question at the end of the session, it’s like the ‘dirty secret’ of the internet is that we’re all sharecroppers in a rentier economy. Why? Because we can never truly ‘own’ our address on the internet; we can only ever (as Maha Bali and Audrey Watters have both discussed) pay money to a central registry." As Belshaw notes, a lot of the work on decentralized systems such as IPFS are intended to counteract this. But we're not there yet, and there's a risk that we may never get there.

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Covid-19: How is Italy coping with school closure?
Anna Cristina D’Addio, Francesca Endrizzi, World Education Blog, 2020/04/02

Italy was one of the earlier and hardest hit regions in Europe and had a lot less time to prepare for a sudden conversion to online learning. How well did they fare? "They have reacted quickly. Some schools have activated or accelerated training opportunities for teachers... t he Ministry of Education has set up a web page with a knowledge bank of initiatives for schools... INDIRE with other two networks developed Flipped classroom, a project adopted by 592 schools." And so on. It hasn't been perfect: "2% of Italian families have internet connection between 2 and 30 Mbs, much lower than is required to download and stream educational content." (In case you're wondering, Bell provides me with a miserly 5Mbs here in Casselman, Canada, so it's not impossible to work with less, just frustrating).

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The Internet Archive Chooses Readers
Karin Wulf, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2020/04/02

Publishers have unsurprisingly gone apoplectic over the Internet Archive's declaration of a “National Emergency Library.” and consequent decision to allow unfettered access to copyright works in its collection. "It is showing exactly why we need to defend copyright even when violators assure us all will be well. This isn’t a slippery slope — it’s a landslide.” On the other hand - what, exactly, are publishers losing? Bookstores are closed. Libraries are closed. Publishers have done almost nothing in response to the crisis (except to gleefully count their windfall profits from increased digital book sales). The Internet Archive is simply replacing what was already available. See also: Bill Rosenblatt.

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Webmentions with WordPress for Open Pedagogy
Chris Aldrich, 2020/04/02

This is the text and images from a presentation at the PressEd conference held online last week. As the title suggests, the focus is the use of Webmentions. The main idea of a webmention is that, when you want to comment on someone's post, you do the commenting on your site, and then send a 'webmention' notification to that person's site, which will then decide what to do with your comment. It's a distributed version of the automated comment systems provided by companies like Disqus or Facebook. Anyhow, the point of this talk is to mention the WordPress plugins supporting the Webmention standard.

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Welcome to Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant!
Geoffrey Rockwell, Theoreti.ca, 2020/04/02

Dialogi.ca and Voyant are literature analysis tools and methodologies created by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair. Here's an intro video. There's a lot to explore - and explore you should, because the site and software offer a refreshing perspective on literary analysis. They use an application called Voyant that takes a text and provides word clouds, word counts, graphs of related words, and more. The idea is that these resources are used as a starting point for dialogue about the texts, as described in these walk-though background papers or web sites. This dialogue can be caputured in a  Spyral document (Spyral is similar to Jupyter Notebook). There's more being added every day on their Twitter site. It occurs to me that this would be a great tool for self reflection on one's own writing, as I can do here with this analysis.

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What Is Discord, and Is It Only for Gamers?
John Cornell, How-To Geek, 2020/04/02

The answer to the question is of course "no" though Discord's roots in online gaming make the question relevant. As the article says, " Discord is a free communications app, most similar to popular apps like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and TeamSpeak, (that) features user-friendly text, voice, and video chat." Discord supports "public or private servers that anyone can quickly set up for free." So there are many Discord servers you can connect to - here's a list and here's how to connect - and you can set up your own.

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