OLDaily

21st century democracy requires an open web
Ben Werdmuller, 2020/05/12

Back in 2012 Sebastian Thrun made the ridiculous statement that in fifty years, there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education. But what if it wasn't so ridiculous? No, not in the way we think, where there are only 10 universities. But more like what has happened to the news industry: "the entire news industry has consolidated down to two points of distribution... Facebook and Google have outsized supplier power over the entire news industry." In other media - movies, say - other technology companies are building distribution monopolies. Why couldn't this happen to online education? What can be done to stop it?

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A Radio of One’s Own: an Interview with Taylor Jadin on #ds106radio
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2020/05/12

Stuff like this is guaranteed to catch my interest: "I wanted to chat with Taylor about some experimenting he’s been doing to spin up his own radio station using Azuracast on Digital Ocean... Taylor was using a script to seamlessly spin up and down a Digital Ocean Droplet using their API in order to only pay for the service when he want to stream." This is all a bit difficult still, but how long are we away from being able to, say, "launch radio station" by simply pushing a button? It may seem like magic, but today we have "launch videoconference" with a push of a button on Zoom (and now, Google Meet), so we can't be that far away.

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What Post-Covid Schools Could Look Like—Starting This Fall
Karen Hawley Miles, FutureEd, Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, 2020/05/12

This post starts off looking like a sensible response to Covid but shifts quickly into an ed reform agenda that by the end of the list of seven suggestions is the usual call to 'look for efficiencies' in the system (even while recognizing "we rarely find flagrant waste or huge inefficiencies"). The first suggestion, "rethink rigid class sizes", seems reasonable. So does taking "a more flexible approach to differentiating time". But how does the recommendation "to move away from across-the-board salary increases and ever-increasing benefits" address the pandemic? The recommendation to "revisait school staffing" seems equally suspicious.

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Remote education during COVID-19 pandemic
Centrum Cyfrowe, Open Education Policy Network, 2020/05/12

This is a detailed report (58 page PDF) reporting on the teacher experience while supporting remote education in Poland. With around a thousand responses, it is sufficient large to be taken with some degree of confidence. In addition to the statistical results the report contains a lot of individual comments that make it worth reading in full (for example, one teacher comments on the danger of using their own private computers to support students). Notably, "Exemptions from the obligation to follow the core curriculum would give teachers the opportunity to be flexible and adapt to the needs of various students in this aggravating situation... some voices were raised that perhaps the entire curriculum – just covered by the common effort of the teachers – will have to be revised."

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Mozilla research shows some machine voices score higher than humans
Jofish Kaye, The Mozilla Blog, 2020/05/12

I still can't stand listening to machine voices (and the samples here haven't changed my response) but they're getting better and, as noted in this study reported by Mozilla, some machine-generated voices are scoring more highly than some human voices. I would imagine machine voices will some become ubiquitous, which means the selection of voice matters. "What happens when computers are more pleasant to listen to than our own voices? What happens when our children might prefer to listen to our computer reading a story than ourselves?... What happens when we can increase the number of people who believe something simply by changing the voice that it is read in?" Related: Google Duo uses AI to insert missing packets in online audio.

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Summer2020 Blogging Fest
Laura Gibbs, OU Digital Teaching, 2020/05/12

This is a great initiative. "I will be taking some time to this summer to share some more detailed information about blogging," writes Laura Gibbs, "both as a strategy for fully online courses but also as a strategy for any course, including classroom-based courses."

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A Survey of Deep Learning for Scientific Discovery
Maithra Raghu, Eric Schmidt, arXiv, 2020/05/12

The authors write, "this survey will be especially helpful for those with a basicunderstanding of machine learning, interested in (i) getting a comprehensive but accessible overview of many fundamental deep learning concepts and (ii) references and guidance in helping ramp up implementation." I can't speak to (ii) but I can say that the explanations are clear and concise, and that the paper as a whole will help a lot of people organize their thinking about deep learning. Topics covered include standard neural network models, supervised learning methods, working with less data, interpretability, and some advanced deep learning models. It's woth comparing the account here with the applications of learning analytics found in the literature (as I've documented here).

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