OLDaily

Presentation
Personal Learning: Taking Ownership of Learning Online – Part 6
Stephen Downes, Dec 07, 2020,

[Slides]

Presentation
Personal Learning: Taking Ownership of Learning Online – Part 5
Stephen Downes, Dec 07, 2020,

Presentation
Personal Learning: Taking Ownership of Learning Online – Part 7
Stephen Downes, Dec 07, 2020,

[Slides]

The Future of Internationalization
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/12/07

Alex Usher makes three fairly specific predictions, which I applaud. It's a bit of a risk but to my mind a lot more honest than the more standard practice of laying out four completely different future scenarios. His predictions are: first, that the normalization of remote teaching will create new markets; second, "professors teaching similar courses with colleagues at other institutions, bringing their two classes together"; and third, the organization of research around the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). I offer three corresponding cautions: first, increased competition from major players; second, the rise of Uber-style freelance professors; and third, the inevitable foot-dragging by nations and companies more interested in short-term, parochial and/or military research.

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DNA 3D Engine
Yaroslav Sergienko, GitHub, 2020/12/07

I want to break away from online learning briefly to show you something wild - a raytracer implemented in DNA - "most advanced and compact 3d engine ever implemented in DNA code." A raytracer is a drawing application that creates images by simulating how light ways interact with objects. With this DNA raytracer, you're actually using a real light source to create the rays. Here is the deployment as summarized by O'Reilly: "(1) Synthesize the oligonucleotides from the cube3d.dna file. (2) Arrange the test tubes as shown in the diagram below. (3) Don’t forget to provide the initial concentrations according to the table below. (4) Use a pipette to encode the position (row and column) of each tube to start the computation." The author warns, "perhaps it would not be a good idea to try this experiment in a real lab, because it will cost you a lot of money and most likely won’t work as intended the first time."

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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2020/12/07

This article is more an overview of the entire issue rather than a summary that resulted in Google summarily firing their the co-lead of their ethics team, but it raises substantial questions about why Google objected to the paper so strenuously. The paper, in some important respects, makes points that have been made previously, and especially that the cost and scale of big-data AI benefits large companies disproportionately, while at the same time being nearly impossible to audit for built-in biases. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, said the paper didn't meet Google standards, and specifically, "it didn’t mention more recent work on how to make large language models more energy-efficient and mitigate problems of bias." But Google's internal review typically focuses only on "disclosure of sensitive material, never for the quality of the literature review." So this seems more and more like a special case, for some reason.

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Getting Started with Student Portfolio Projects in Virtual and Hybrid Courses
John Spencer, 2020/12/07

This is a good overview article that contains some specific recommendations for classroom teachers and touches on the appeal of portfolios, including digital portfolios, for everybody. "Portfolios should not feel like a chore or a hoop that students have to jump through. Instead, they are a celebration of student learning and a chance to reflect on their learning. The more they can own this process, the more likely they will be to engage in deeper reflection and put in the mental effort."

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Fetch: Cross-Origin Requests
Javascript.Info, 2020/12/07

In web pages Javascript-based requests to servers for data are limited by origin requirements; basically, the data must come from the same place the page did. So how do application programming interfaces (API) work? These gather data from multiple sources and display it on a single page. In the past, unsafe script hacks were used (this was how we built our referrer system in 2002). Modern Javascript functions use fetch() (released in 2017) and Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). This article explains how it all works. Your browser sends a preflight request which includes an 'origin' statement, and if the server allows it, it sends a preflight response giving permission. Then the actual request is made. All this is invisible to the user, but just one of a million things web designers have to keep in mind. (Source for this article on GitHub).

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LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
Fadeke Adegbuyi, Divinations, 2020/12/07

This is a devastating and dead-on accurate deconstruction of LinkedIn. "Reduced to its simplest form, LinkedIn is a digital resume," writes Fadeke Adegbuyi. "But we’ve long decided that there are better ways to showcase your ability... Developers have GitHub, designers use Dribbble, and Academics maintain their ResearchGate or Google Scholar profiles." The result is that LinkedIn has become a contradiction. Yet we use it because somehow we feel like we have to. "LinkedIn is bizarre because it tries to make this hostage situation fun. Even though it’s not." Via Doug Belshaw.

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