OLDaily

Twitter shaming won’t change university power structures
Charles R Menzies, Academic Matters, 2020/08/06

This is a really good article (also available here and here) that makes what is at heart a simple point: :Online shaming leads to personal attacks and resignations, not structural change." Charles Menzies writes, "Public outcries and subsequent resignations or terminations of people like Korenberg suggest our social institutions are responsive to societal change.... But what Gluckman and other social anthropologists have found is that these rituals merely reinforce power structures." Hence, "it shouldn’t just be about individuals.... only a fundamental restructuring will make a difference.... we have to change real structures of control and power."

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PushPin: Towards Production-Quality Peer-to-PeerCollaboration
Peter van Hardenberg, Martin Kleppmann, PaPoC '20, 2020/08/06

This paper (10 page PDF) describes the decisions behind the design of PushPin (see also), a "local-first collaborative corkboard app designed to collect all the information you need and synchronize it across all your computers." Warning: this is "experimental software and currently implements an extremely open and permissive sharing system!" That said, the discussion is quite interesting and even if you're not intending to build such a system, a good reading will provide an overview of some of the major considerations and options available for writing such applications. It focuses on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) "data structures that can be concurrently updated by multiple users on different devices", and P2P replication protocols that "allow updates from one device to be propagated to other devices that have a copy of the data, without relying on cloud services."

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A Foreword to Critical Digital Pedagogy
Ruha Benjamin, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2020/08/06

This is a relatively light introduction to a collection of essays released last week as an open access book (available on PressBooks; couldn't find a PDF). It is a gathering of "articles from the last 10 years that have helped shape the field of critical digital pedagogy." The article makes the point that pandemics are typically times of change, a portal we walk though from past to future, and "without a deep engagement with critical digital pedagogy, as individuals and institutions, we will almost certainly drag outmoded ways of thinking and doing things with us."

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How to sustain authentic learning in challenging times
Ed Stevens, David Owen, Wonkhe, 2020/08/06

Normally I'd just ignore a false-promise article like this, but I'd like editors to feel the pain a reader feels when they get to the end of the article and realize they've been conned. Without explaining how, the authors assert that "the summer of 2020 will be much like any other" and that "authentic learning partners will be adapting their innovative work for a post-Covid-19 world." That would be nice - but the title of this article promised rather more. Ed Stevens and David Owen do not have solutions, at least, not in this article. They just tell us how hard it will be and that projects and programs may be furloughed, and make a vague promise about some future handbook.

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