OLDaily

The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities
Nick deWilde, 2020/08/21

There's some stuff I really disagree with in this article, though it's hard for me to tell whether it's because it's wrong or whether it's because I simply find it distasteful. It could well be the latter. Overall, the picture of community offered here is one where "individuals typically 'hire' communities to accomplish transitions that require human connection." This article describes communities which satisfy that function. One key principle is that "member quality determines community success." That's the bit that bothers me. If I apply this model to educational communities, I see pretty much exactly the same principle applied in elite universities today. Nick deWilde describes a system where member selection drives revenue (tuition) and success (community capability) that creates demand for membership. So his model works - if you're one of thre lucky ones who become a member.

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Fairness and machine learning
Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, Arvind Narayanan, 2020/08/21

The sections on classification and causality remind me of the work I did as a graduate student learning the foundations of probability theory. It also reminds me of Clark Glymour's 'Tetrad Automated Causal Discovery Platform' for discovering “valid, novel, and significant causal relationships” in data.' These are the sorts of things bringing together ethicists and epistemologists today. Anyhow, this draft textbook (several chapters are still incomplete) reads well and is relatively accessible, though readers will find themselves in some heady territory in the later stretches of both sections mentioned above. But there's some really good discursive content here, for example, the section on 'no fairness through unawareness', which describes the sort of issues that can arise when using (say) DNA to identify potential academic achievement.

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A Grand Strategy for Grand Challenges: A New Approach through Digital Transformation
Susan Grajek, D. Christopher Brooks, EDUCAUSE Review, 2020/08/21

There's nothing particularly wrong with this article but I have to admit rolling my eyes a bit about the idea of (Our Brave) leaders advancing a set of 'Grand Challenges' that we (the peons) will meet though a 'digital transformation'. The challenges are almost always business objectives - that's why learning is described as 'student success' and why research and discovery is described as 'reputation and relevance'. And of course the institution's financial health and responses to competition (including the heathen 'alternative credentials') round out the rest. I think the framing represents a misunderstanding of the idea of grad challenges or leadership in general - it's not the health and advancement of the institution that motivates people, it's the advancement of whatever it is the institution was created to address in the first place. That's why my grand challenge ("each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumbrance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation") makes so much sense for me, and cannot even be imagined by institutional administrators (who these days are debating killing students).

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Towards a Decentralized and Distributed Framework for Open Educational Resources based on IPFS and Blockchain
Ujjal Marjit, Prabhakar Kumar, International Conference on Computer Science, Engineering and Applications, 2020/08/21

Nice. Does exactly what the title says. "This paper proposes a Ethereum blockchain based decentralized and distributed framework to alleviate the problems existing in present OER. In addition Interplanetary File System (IPFS) has been included in this proposed system for storing the hypermedia as distributed way." It's the sort of paper you can drownes yourself in.

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