OLDaily

How to Dig a Billion-Dollar EdTech Hole
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2020/08/25

The best bit of this article is a 'spoiler alert' at the very bottom: "In future e-Literate posts, we will examine how many crucial practices of colleges and universities that consider themselves to be 'student-centered' are, in fact, faculty-centered." Meanwhile, this column looks at how publishers didn't design their offering for market fit, and how their clients - university professors - would have misled them even were they trying to do so. It's a good read, especially the clear-headed analysis: "Students were just a malfunctioning part of the system. So the problem that the publishers were solving for was how to fix the malfunction by making students buy their products again... The business model they aspired to was hostage-taking. Students could not get their grades unless they bought the product." I would add that when we look at 'inclusive access' we see that hostage-taking business model in full effect.

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A generation left behind? Online learning cheats poor students, Times survey finds
Paloma Esquivel, Howard Blume, Ben Poston, Julia Barajas, L.A. Times, 2020/08/25

This article has some nice descriptions of how some students had better in-person experiences at school, and argues that therefore "online learning cheats poor students". I feel it is incumbent on me to state the obvious: it is not online learning that cheats poor students, it is being poor that cheats poor students. Even if there is some difference in their learning experience with and without online learning, the overall defining fact informing both their education and their life in general is the fact that they are poor. Stories like this may offer a salve to those who don't really want to offer the poor any support, but they don't legitimize doing nothing. The students without computers as described in this story should be given computers (and much more besides). There are really no excuses (and this story doesn't provide one). Via Anchorage Daily News.

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What is Google AMP, and How Do I Use It for My Website?
Anthony Heddings, CloudSavvy, 2020/08/25

This is probably the most accessible description of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that I've read. AMP are a Google framework designed to optimize pages for rapid loading on mobile devices. It's most useful for static web pages. Basically, for each page, you create two versions - a regular one, and the AMP page that has special tags and a Javascript library. Where appropriate, the AMP page will be used; otherwise, the regular page is used. This description was good enough for me to consider creating an AMP version of all my website pages (gRSShopper's template system should make it pretty easy).

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How (Not) to Test for Algorithmic Bias (Guest Post)
Brian Hedden, Stranger Apologies, 2020/08/25

It's a common argument that AI-based evaluations and predictions hsould be fair. But what is fairness? This article looks at different ways of defining it. For example, fairness may or may not take into account the influence of being a member of specific groups - a race, perhaps, an occupation, maybe, or a school division. Arguably it's imporrible to satisfy both ways of being fair at the same time. "Pessimistically," writes Brian Hedden, "we might conclude that fairness dilemmas are all but inevitable; outside of marginal cases, we cannot help but be unfair or biased in some respect." But perhaps there's a way to "to take a second look and sort the genuine fairness conditions from the specious ones." Hedden writes, "I think expectational calibration within groups is plausibly necessary for fairness." Perhaps - but it's going to depend a lot on how these groups are formed, as Hedden shows. See also: impossibility theorem.

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