OLDaily

The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
Tim Maughan, OneZero, 2020/12/21

The news told me this morning that the Dow Jones dropped because of fears about the new strain of Covid in the U.K. It's utter nonsense, of course, to think that we could know what caused the market to drop, much less reduce it to a single cause. But that's the fiction that is served to us every day on the news (and in education, and in education research, but I digress). The world has been for some time too complex to understand. It has probably always been too complex. Tim Maughan writes that "no one is driving" and that this is a problem. Maybe. But my approach is to say, given that no one's driving, given that the world is too complex to understand, what do we do? Because, to be sure, the world is outside my control, and I have no illusions about that.

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What Is Objective Reality?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2020/12/21

This post summarizes  Jonathan Rauch's 2018 essay in  National Affairs, The Constitution of Knowledge. It expresses the view that what counts as a fact is determined by a process of free enquiry, dialogue and vetting. In broad strokes, that is true, but in the details, it is wrong. Or, perhaps I should say that it is changing, because what it means "to organize social decision-making about what is and is not reality based on a governance framework and a set of principles" no longer means what it used to mean. Why? Because replication fails in chaotic and dynamic environments, because specialization fails when every discipline is connected, because scientific societies fail when they represent only vested interests, because voting fails when consensus matters, and because civic virtues fail when our leaders are bad actors. Rebuilding this will take time, and will require that we flip the script: we no longer say that the (one) community defines how we reach consensus, but rather, how (the many ways) we reach consensus is what defines communities. Image: emergent objective reality, Rotman.

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Quote, reply, and converse across the open web
Quotebacks, 2020/12/21

While reading Aaron Davis's post (see below) I took note of his use of a tool called Quoteback. The principle is simple: using a Firefox or Chrome extension, or the web-based interface, you can create a quotation from someone's post that you can embed in your own website. It doesn't really work for OLDaily (because I already include the link and reference in every post) but for more traditional author-focused blog posts it's a great way "to enable generous quotations, and to facilitate quoting all texts and voices." Note that the image in this post is just an image, not a functioning Quoteback. Also note that in testing on Windows the extension worked fine in Chrome but not in Firefox (v 84.0). For more, check out Introducing Quotebacks or Towards a Blogger Peer Review.

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Social Networking 2.0
Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 2020/12/21

I think Ben Thompson gets the broad strokes right. In traditional social media, you broadcast to the whole world. That's old-media thinking. It constrains what you might want to say, and it makes achieving any sort of consensus difficult. Social Networking 2.0, by contrast, is about having different identities where messages are constrained to smaller groups or communities. That's what I get with Mastodon and blogs and Imgur and Flickr - but would never get with Facebook, where as Thompson says "having one identity is a core principle," which is "great for advertising if nothing else, but at odds with the desire of many to be different parts of themselves to different people in different contexts." Via Aaron Davis.

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Two Good Sources of Virtual Manipulatives to Use in Your Teaching
Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2020/12/21

There's one good source of manipulatives, the Toy Theatre set, and one out-of-date one, the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (NLVM). The difference between them is that the NLVM requires that you download and install an application. That makes it needlessly complex for use in a classroom or on students' own computers, and anyway, in these days of powerful web technologies, a separate application is completely unnecessary. But it does point to a problem with a lot of free online learning content: so much of it depends on Java or Flash applets that are today recognized as security risks and no longer supported.

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Free Software and two forms of liberty
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2020/12/21

"There are those of us," writes Doug Belshaw, "who have enough technical skills to be able to self-host and spin up a VPS to run Free Software. We can experiment and express ourselves however we wish." True. I am one of those, and (from my perspective) it has given me an advantage over the last 30 years. But it is long past time everyone else had similar freedoms. But how? Belshaw writes, "I believe we need to focus on enabling that positive liberty with Free Software under socialism, even if that means compromising a bit of negative liberty." I'm not sure exactly what he means by that.

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