OLDaily

#GlobalEthicsDay2020 : Ethics as a Practice (EaaP)
Ton Zylstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2020/10/21

Ton Zylstra defines, Ethics as a Practice (EaaP) as part of "a call to see yourself as an ethics practitioner, and a member of a community of practice of such practitioners, not as someone ethics ‘is done to’. So you can always do the next right thing." But what is "the right thing"? I don't pose that question facetiously. We can't even agree on when it's ethical to kill a person. We certainly don't agree on the great ethical issues of our time - surveillance, disinformation, democracy - for otherwise these wouldn't be issues at all. And I'm quite sure that my sense of ethics (which opposes showing McDonalds ads and Disney cartoons to children, for example) isn't widely shared. Is the next right thing stealing food to feed your children? Is it helping immigrants escape into your country? Too often, what people mean when they say 'ethics' is 'compliance'. But we should not confuse these very different concepts.

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Data Visceralization: Enabling Deeper Understanding of Data Using Virtual Reality
Benjamin Lee, et.al., arXiv, 2020/10/21

I've seen this item (11 page PDF) through a few sources now. The idea of 'data visceralization' is to take existing data and to represent it metaphorically in virtually reality. Thus, for example, different companies' income growth could be depicted as a 100-yard dash. Or the size of different economies could be represented as differently-sized planets. This paper tries out some different approaches and reports back on initial user experiences. Personally, I think data visceralization should be combined with haptics, so you can bop someone in the head with data when you really need to.

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CRADLE conference 2020
Selena Chan, learning elearning, 2020/10/21

Selena Chan has been posting summaries of presentations at the Centre for assessment and digital learning (CRADLE) conference at Australia's Deakin University. The posts start here. Highlights include a session on evaluative judgement (EJ) and the RIPPLE platform, some presentations on assessment in a post digital world, and a talk from Monika Nerland on epistemic practices and an ongoing project (CORPUS) studying changing requirements in the public service. Chan also covered the recent ULearn conference from New Zealand with posts starting here.

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Promoting Learning Through Collaboration
Jaime Caldwell, BCcampus, 2020/10/21

This article looks at the adaptation required to support online learning for a first-year physical geography course in British Columbia. The fourteen developers from across the province "identified the need for an open source lab manual, developed a process to create the content, formed a team to refine the materials, assigned an editor to compile the information, and published the first iteration via Pressbooks. And they did it in less than three months." The course was a particular challenge not only because of its  "high-touch, hands-on instruction requirements" but also because of the diversity of  instructional approaches around the province. So the developers created an adaptable resource that can be used in different ways by different instructors. They also took the opportunity to update the teaching approach; "now students can download real-time data, collect their own data, and look at virtual globes, then demonstrate their learning by explaining a concept or identifying a feature in a landscape." The article doesn't link to the e-book, but this appears to be it.

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Falsehoods programmers believe about time
Tim Visée, GitHub, 2020/10/21

I have to admit I laughed to myself when an experienced programmer I respect said in a meeting, "Calendars are solved." Back then (and to this day) I must use (and synchronize manually) two separate calendars, one for work and one for home. And when we're talking about programming involving date-time and calendars, well, you're almost certainly going to have to rely on a calendar library, which may or may not have considered all the problems listed in this article. It's a good quick fun read and will give you a new appreciation of the complexity of time.

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What's the ROI on a SLAPP Lawsuit Against Your Users?
D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Net, 2020/10/21

D'Arcy Norman on the Proctorio SLAPP: "what’s the ROI on this? They’ve blown a moon-sized hole in any goodwill their community (and potential new community) may have had for them. Any new contracts are going to be hardfought after this."

Cory Doctorow on the SLAPP: "Linkletter can't really talk about the case, thanks to Proctorio's sneakily obtained injunction. That means that it's incumbent on us, the people who care about justice for students and whistleblowers, to spread the word."

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Amplify Your Virtual Classroom With AWS Educate
Instructure, AWS Educate, 2020/10/21

This is marketing content from Instructure advertising a partnership with Amazon Web Services to provide access to cloud services and content to students. "Educators have access to several no-cost features, including: virtual classroom environments; cloud learning content; AWS access; and Professional development." That's great, and part of an accelerating trend, but what I don't understand is why companies like Amazon focus these programs on traditional institutions and their students. What Amazon is doing here increases the divide between those with the means to pay tuition and access educational programs and those without the means. It would be better, to my mind, to just make these programs open access and allow anyone with the interest to take advantage of them.

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Interface University and Other Scenarios for the AI Economy
David Staley, EDUCAUSE Review, 2020/10/21

In the scenarios here we have here an example of someone taking one element - in this case, AI - and projecting a future based on that element. In this case, one thing we get is 'Interface University', the idea for a new kind of higher education institution where students and AIs work together. "Learning would become a noisy affair," writes David Staley, "with humans and artificial intelligence engaged in continual conversations." But everything else, it seems, would be the same: majoring in individual disciplines, graded project-based assignments, and of course, AI-focused curricula. Posh! With AI-supported learning on demand, people wouldn't need to attend university at all. Learning would happen very quietly, with conversations happening in an internal monologue. And they wouldn't be conversations; the AI will stimulate all senses to provide a form of internal virtual (or augmented, depending) reality to provide background, play out scenarios, draw implications, and more. Via Helge Scherlund.

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Building Relationships: How to Connect from a Distance
Crystal O. Wong, Faculty Focus, 2020/10/21

This is yet another article on the need to make connections and re-establish relations as an essential first step in responding to the pandemic (I won't list all of these I see, but I'm certainly seeing a trend). Crystal Wong writes, "the word 'connect' means different things to different people; for me, connecting with students embodies a model of care, such as treating students with respect, making them feel welcome, and responding with compassion. When students know we care, they are more likely to reciprocate, and when they do, relationships are formed." Learning online is not just informational, it's not just transactional. It's interesting how I'm seeing the idea of presence overlap with the idea of connection in these articles, even if the word isn't explicitly used.

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