OLDaily

Your Computer Isn't Yours
Jeffrey Paul, 2020/11/13

One big difference between computers and mobile phones has historically been the amount of control vendors exercised over your platform. As a computer manufacturer, Apple has always trended toward the lock-down approach favoured in the telcom sector, and now with their new operating system, they've achieved that degree of lockdown in laptops and desktops. "In the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it." Run unauthorized software, and it knows, and can lock you down. " Today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet." What a nightmare. More. Note that as Apple rolls out its own processing chips this lockdown will get even tighter.

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Scaling digital in the public sector: Building blocks for the future
Munmun Baishya, Ankur Ghia, Naufal Khan, Gayatri Shenai, McKinsey, 2020/11/13

This is a listicle outlining "ten building blocks for successfully scaling digital" in the public sector, times especially for "the government transition this fall. It follows a fairly standard path, beginning with articulating the objectives, then beginning to "innovate on acquisitions", acquiring talent, simplifying processes, and then operational requirements such as data sharing, security, agility and governance.

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Higher education platforms and cloud infrastructures in the ‘dataist state’
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2020/11/13

Ben Williamson asks, "What does this increase in the participation of private platform actors signify for teaching and learning in universities, for the public role of higher education, and for the lives of students?" One thing: intelligent networks, "universities being connected to interoperable cloud and data systems provided by giant infrastructure partners in new public-private partnership configurations." Another: the use of cloud services to offer online courses and MOOCs, which Williamson calls 'cloudsourced education'. These lead, he says, to the 'dataist state', wherein "the state learns from tracing ‘discrete slices of people and things’ as data, and then seeks to intervene to change, ‘nudge’ or optimise their behaviours," an operation that because of its scale requires outsourcing to the private sector. This represents a "ceding of authority" from government and universities to to global private platform and infrastructure providers, he argues.

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Our approach to systemic racism in Open Education
Angela DeBarger, Hewlett Foundation, 2020/11/13

"Through our initial conversations about this agenda with practitioners and researchers," writes Angela DeBarger, "it has become clear that the new strategy had not gone far enough to demonstrate how open education could be an asset for equity and social justice." There are two aspects to this. One is to ensure that the open educational resources (OER) being developed are broadly inclusive, using for example gender spectrum stock photos (archive) or traditional knowledge (TK) lables where applicable. The other is the development application of OER by and for people in specific contexts. Toward this end, Hewlett will "we will create opportunities for educators to challenge inequities that are barriers to inclusive practices and participation," writes DeBarger.

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A Regulatory Framework for AI: Recommendations for PIPEDA Reform
2020/11/13

This document describes the outcome of a a public consultation on some proposals for ensuring the appropriate regulation of AI in the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The authors argue, "A rights-based law that includes rights to explanation, contestation, and demonstrable accountability, while introducing consent exceptions to allow for more innovative and socially beneficial uses information, promotes a realistic and effective approach to privacy in AI." It would allow personal information to be used by AI, but within a rights based framework "that would entrench privacy as a human right and a necessary element for the exercise of other fundamental rights." It would also create provisions to ensure transparency, accuracy and fairness in automated decision-making, and require businesses to demonstrate accountability. These are all spelled out in more detail, including especially what is meant by things like transparency and accountability.

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What do college students actually spend on course materials
Phil Hill, Phil on EdTech, 2020/11/13

There's a little bit of a tempest in the world of OER over how much students actually pay for course materials (and how much they cost, which isn't the same thing) in the U.S. It revolves around a widely cited figure of $1200 per year attributed to the College Board; here's an example from EdSource. Critics have argued that this cost is an over-estimate, and in this article Phil Hill points to a recently revised estimate from the College Board pegging it at $410. The most interesting item in Hill's article is the figure showing that textbook prices, which have been rising steadily for decades, stopped increasing around 2016. As Hill says, "multiple acquisition options and inclusive access models are already helping students." And that's a good thing.

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