OLDaily

Open Letter to Editors/Editorial Boards from FemEdTech
Hybrid Pedagogy, FemEdTech collective, 2020/05/04

This letter argues that there has been a disproportionate effect from the pandemic on women and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) researchers, and calls on journals and their editors to "state on their websites the special measures they will take to support women researchers and scholars during this time," to "prioritise papers written by women, particularly where they are single or lead authors," and to "take into consideration the additional schooling, caring and community responsibilities which fall disproportionately on women."

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Online remote teaching in higher education is not the problem
Suellen Shay, Daily Maverick, 2020/05/04

People are arguing that " arguing how the rush to “online” learning is going to leave students behind, "lead to failure" and that the move to online will deepen the inequality fault-lines between, and within our universities," writes Suellen Shay. But "the bigger reality is that we have been leaving students behind for decades. We are characterised as a sector by high drop-out and low throughput... we have been leaving 30-50% of our students behind for decades now." And the argument is unhelpful; it provides us with no solutions. (Note that if the website throws an ad barrier, you can choose the 'journalists should go hungry' option (in light gray at the bottom) for free access - no need to worry, the author is a university professor and won't go hungry.)

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the reality of missing out
Harold Jarche, 2020/05/04

I quit Facebook back in 2017 and thus have been spared its excesses since then. But many people have returned during the pandemic for fear, as Harold Jarche says, of missing out. Facebook is where the community is these days, and if you want to keep up with your family or your town, you join and check in regularly. But I wonder whether people are really getting any value out of it. "We are now dependent on a global corporation — that uses our data to manipulate us — as our main form of communication," says Jarche. "It is as if we live in a company-owned town, and buy all of our goods from the company store, using a party telephone line that the bosses listen in on." I think I'll stay off Facebook.

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ICANN Board Withholds Consent for a Change of Control of the Public Interest Registry (PIR)
ICANN, 2020/05/04

This ambiguously worded headline signifies that ICANN will not allow control of the .org domain to be sold to a private company. At least for now. The reasons stated include "a change from the fundamental public interest nature of PIR to an entity that is bound to serve the interests of its corporate stakeholders, and which has no meaningful plan to protect or serve the .ORG community" and "the US$360 million debt instrument forces PIR to service that debt and provide returns to its shareholders, which raises further question about how the .ORG registrants will be protected."

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