OLDaily

How Social Media May Redistribute Trust Away From Institutions
Jesse McCrosky, DataEthics, 2020/12/16

This post draws on a talk by Jeff Hancock describing three types of trust: "individual trust, which exists between people based on their personal experiences of each other; distributed trust, which is the social network of trust, including those you trust and those trusted by those you trust; and institutional trust, which is based on an institution’s role in society, for example, trust in established media, government, academia, etc." The suggestion in the article is that "social media is fundamentally built on the concept of distributed trust," and that this form of trust may be replacing institutional trust. And Jesse McCrosky writes, "it seems plausible that the decreased value in shared truth could lead to a decay in the importance of truth itself." Maybe, but let's call institutional trust centralized trust to get a proper perspective. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are centralized; we should lump them in with other centralized institutions, and maybe rethink where the blame lies for the putative decay of truth.

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Using Interactive 3D Graphs to Increase Learning in Calculus Classes
Jonathan Holt, Duke Learning Innovation, 2020/12/16

I picked this item because I like the images. And also, because it reminds me of how difficult it was for me to visualize what was happening when I was doing calculus problems. So this could well be a useful addition to a math class. Unfortunately the examples are blocked and accessible to Duke University people only. Still, the pictures are nice, and I would imagine we could find similar models created by more socially friendly institutions out there.

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New Improvements in the CC Search Browser Extension
Mayank Nader, Creative Commons, 2020/12/16

I've been a bit distracted today setting up my new computer (Dell Alienware running Windows 10). One reason I got it was to be able to run browser extensions without worrying about NRC policies (I have no idea why corporate computers block browser extensions, but they do). This is an example of a useful extension. "The CC Search Browser Extension allows users to search, filter, and use images in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses." I make new content quite a bit, so it's useful to me to have access to reusable diagrams and images.

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