OLDaily

The Principles Of Visual Communication
Elizabeth Lin, Smashing Magazine, 2020/11/06

Among the many other things I'm interested in, my work in what I call 'critical literacies' usually takes a back seat. But one day I need to write about it at length, because items like this article in Smashing reinforce the points I make about design, patterns, values and change or flow. Now there are many items that talk about the principles of visual communication, but this is as good as any to illustrate the underlying ideas. It's a useful article in its own right, and not just because it relates well to critical literacies. Via Mike Taylor.

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How to Support Social-Emotional Learning Through Choice
Janet Taylor, The Art of Education, 2020/11/06

There's a lot to be said for the argument being made here, but I think that the word 'choice' is exactly the wrong word, especially given the 'Choice Spectrum' illustrated in this article. What word would be better? Freedom. Choice isn't freedom; it's still a type of constraint (and in many ways, it's worse than full constraint because it gives you an illusion of freedom). Things like 'learner-led' and 'learner-directed' aren't types of choice, they're types of freedom (that, as an aside, is why education can't be push-button: it's dehumanizing not because it's technological but because it replaces freedom with a small set of options. So anyhow, to get to the main point of this article, I would say that it's freedom that supports social-emotional learning (SEL), not choice. After all, freedom means living with consequences, and that's a far better teacher every time.

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This could lead to the next big breakthrough in common sense AI
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2020/11/06

This article is about combining language models in AI, like GPT-3, with computer vision, a process called 'vokenization'. The idea is that it will enable a system like GPT-3 to distinguish between the linguistic expression 'black sheep' and the visual recognition of black sheep and white sheep. This has been triued before; the process involves combining images with captions and presenting both to the AI. But captions are hard to get right, and so the training sets are (comparatively) tiny. Vokenization is the approach used to get around this problem. Instead of starting with images and manually adding captions, they start with language and automatically associate images using image recognition. Why would we do this? "If we want to build robotic assistants, for example, they need computer vision to navigate the world and language to communicate about it to humans.

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Ed-Tech and Trauma
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2020/11/06

Audrey Watters's main point in this transcript is to "recognize the incredible and awful trauma that everyone has experienced, that many are still experiencing in many parts of the world." There's no doubt about that, and I know her own world has been wrecked by tragedy this year, and I am truly sympathetic. The other thing she wants to say is that "we know ed-tech is unlikely to ameliorate any of this, and is just as likely to make things worse." Indeed, "ed-tech is not even the right question." Even if we could get the technology working properly, the problem is that too much of it is based on "carceral pedagogy — that is, a pedagogy that draws on beliefs and practices that echo those of prisons — surveillance, punishment, and too often literal incarceration." This, she writes, is "the antithesis of education as a practice of freedom. And carceral pedagogy is deeply traumatizing."

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Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets
Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch, 2020/11/06

The story here is that "a series of tweets by one Miami University student that were critical of a proctoring software company have been hidden by Twitter after the company filed a copyright takedown notice." Observers, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that this is a "textbook example" of fair use, and that therefore the takedowns are inappropriate. Twitter later released his tweets after finding Proctorio’s takedown notice to be “incomplete.” Here is the restored tweet thread. The code snippets have not been restored yet to Pastebin, however. While you're reading, consider whether a company employed to enforce ethics has itself a duty to be ethical.

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10 Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World from Covid-19 for Canadian universities and colleges
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/11/06

These were posted on the Contact North newsletter November 4, and then on Tony Bates's own website a day later. In many respects they're what we've heard from Tony Bates before, but the presentation of the ten items puts these ideas together in a nice package. One thing that's key is, as Bates says, "we are beginning to see the advantages of media and open educational resources for teaching and learning." But as he has said many times in the past, teacher training and support are key (so are, I would argue, proper support for everyone else in the system, from technologist to administrator). And some specific lessons learned include the need for flexible assessment, flexible learning spaces, and better online access and equity.

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Creative Commons Strategy 2020 - Second Draft
Catherine Stihler, Brigitte Vézina, Sarah Pearson, Creative Commons, 2020/11/06

Creative Commons is calling for comments on a draft of the CC organizational strategy. The draft asserts that licenses have not been sufficient and issues a call "for a new approach to protect what we have achieved so far and to create the world we want to see—a world where knowledge and culture are equitably shared in ways that serve the public interest." It's not exactly clear what that means, but there are strong hints throughout that it wants to see creators paid more and that it wants to focus on specific ares of "knowledge and culture", and specifically, "education; contemporary creativity; cultural heritage; government and public sector information; open data; academic and scientific research and scholarship." In response, I made a copy of their draft and added a number of comments; you can find my discussion here. You can also provide feedback through their minimal Google form.

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Learning and Development – The GAP is coming
Craig Weiss, 2020/11/06

I don't think this is new, but it's a comment well-adapted to today's times. Craig Weiss describes 'the GAP' as two specific parts, both so intertwined, that one cannot achieve success without the other, and vice versa: digital transformation (and) e-Learning." People and institutions who embrace both digital transformation and e-learning than those who embrace only one, only the other, or neither. "Are you going to embrace and support and explore technologies that exist today and down the road or are you going to stay the course, add e-learning, still tap into ILT, maybe some paper, or some other old school way."

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