OLDaily

New ‘digital wallet’ puts students’ credentials at their fingertips
Becky Rynor, University Affairs, 2021/02/17

The MyCreds website advertises itself as "Canada’s new, official credential wallet for post-secondary learners and graduates," though I'm not sure how 'official' that really means it is. This University Affairs article informs us that "the new system was spearheaded by the Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC) and officially launched in December" and that "it will allow students to securely store, view, control and share their official transcripts, diplomas, badges and other learning credentials." There is still a lot I would like to know as institutions (slowly) join the service. Why will it cost me money to obtain my own records? How will my institution know where to send email to notify me (as promised on the website). What do they mean by "secure and tamper-proof"?  What role does Digitary (an Australian company) play? Was there an RFP? What's to stop anyone from misusing the link they produce to share my records? Can I display my records on my website? Can I store records in any app other than MyCreds? Why should my use of my own records be subjected to fairly restrictive terms of use? Why can't we have a more open system that allows me to share records from all my learning, and not just colleges and universities? To me this looks like an ownership play to make sure there isn't an open system for sharing academic records. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.

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What are “scientific models”, and how much confidence can we place in them?
Roman Frigg, James Nguyen, London School of Economics, 2021/02/17

My Master's thesis, in a sentence, was this: the model is not the reality, and therefore, the properties of the model (rules, syntax, representation) should not be assumed to exist in reality. It was informed by people like Quine, Lauden and Feyerabend who talked about things like theory-laden data and the vageries of scientific method. Fast forward three and a half decades and the problem is still with us. This article links the two by means of representation theory, where you use a 'key' to 'translate' from the model to the reality. But as the article notes, the model is an abstraction. There is no 1:1 key; "there are aspects of the target system that it makes no claims to represent." Models are also idealizations: "they distort aspects of the target system that they represent." So, as the authors argue, we should avoid "the sheen of precision" models appear to offer. Prediction only takes us so far, which is why we should think of education as rather more than a predictive science.

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How to prevent AI from taking over the world
Ruth Chang, New Statesman, 2021/02/17

I think this column demonstrates a need for a deeper understanding of both ethics and AI if we are to address problems in a complex domain (and I recognize that I'm referencing the the Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford when I call for this deeper understanding). According to Ruth Chang, "the so-called 'value alignment problem' - how to get AI to respect and conform to human values - is arguably the most important, if vexing, problem faced by AI developers today." But I ask, what are those human values? There's no clear answer. And AI doesn't simply assume "that in a decision, there are only two possibilities", as Chang suggests. Deep learning systems weigh multiple complex possibilities, just as humans do. And that's the problem - the values an AI learns isn't what we tell them, it's what we teach them though our examples, the same examples that create the mountains of data they consume. An AI learns our actual values, not some idealized abstraction of them, and that makes the AI's responses difficult to predict, conflicted... and dangerous. Just like humans.

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The great rebundling is here
David Pierce, Protocol, 2021/02/17

Inch by inch the internet is moving toward he personal learning environment (PLE) model. Or maybe I should brand it more broadly and call it the personal productivity environment (PPE) model. Protocol is calling it 'the Switzerland of x'. Trello, for examplle announced a redesign "bringing all your documents and tasks and files into one organizational tool." Vimeo' Anjali Sud wants the company to be "the Switzerland for the creators." But there's a risk: when the rebundlers become the resellers, and start topping up their profits with paywalls, advertising and surveillance.

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Getting started with Digital Badges
Doug Belshaw, Google Docs, 2021/02/17

These are slides from a comprehensive workshop on digital badges, with lavish illustration from Bryan Mathers. With a slew of accessible analogies and a background working with multiple badging platforms, Doug Belshaw not only describes the mechanics in some detail and links it up with concepts like microcredentials and badge design aids. The tail end of the slides contains a multi-page list of resources (called the 'Library'). After that there are some 'spare slides'  introducing us to Trojan mice.

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Amit Garg speaks with Sam Taylor
Amit Garg, Upside Learning, 2021/02/17

According to Sam Taylor, a learning specialist with the World Bank, microlearning "is those short, very compartmentalized pieces of information or bite-sized learning that gets enough information to someone so that they can carry out a task." At the same time, microlearning doesn't provide "the deep level understanding, the intrinsic knowledge, the ability to kind of really take something on and be able to replicate and apply it over and over again." At the same time, you can't just throw up a PowerPoint presentation up there and call it microlearning, he says. "It’s not just learning by another name, it’s still learning and it still needs to be done properly in order to be effective." That means it needs to be planned: "figure out what place you want microlearning to serve or what purpose you want it to serve in your overall learning portfolio." Good interview with reasonable depth.

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The Heutagogy Hotchpotch
Mirjam Neelen, Paul Kirschner, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2021/02/17

Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner continue to frustrate me. Here's an example of their reasoning (as usual conflating 'learning' with 'content knowledge'), "Do adults really learn differently than children? An adult can be just as unknowing (i.e., be a novice) in an area as a child, and a child can have expertise in areas that adults might not know about." They also write, "Heutagogy is underpinned with assumptions grounded in humanism and constructivism... so, we can ask ourselves why we need a term like ‘heutagogy’ at all." Whatever the merits of the term, it is used in research. The authors cite a (paywalled, naturally) study by Robert Moore that rolls up "33 peer-reviewed publications published between 2000 and 2019" that reference heutagogy, then complain that it's a "hotchpotch of heutagogical stuff". Well sure, that's the inevitable result of combining 33 studies over 20 years. I agree with them that it would be nice if there were a clear and universally agreed-up conception of heutagogy, but as is the case with everything in the field, there is not. And as a result  their cherry-picked criticisms o the term as a generalization are not even remotely convincing. Image: Flemish Hotch-Potch.

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Afraid to Lead: Canadian Government Launches Timid Consultation on Implementing Copyright Term Extension
Michael Geist, 2021/02/17

One of the disappointing aspects of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement (USMCA) was the extension of copyright terms to the life of the author plus 70 years, well beyond the international standard of 50 years. One proposal from a committee studying the implementation of the extension was to require that copyright holders be required to register for it. This, says Michael Geist, "would allow for rights holders to easily obtain the additional protection, while ensuring that many works without commercial value enter into the public domain at the current international standard." A consultation document, though, says Geist, seems to oppose this provision, even though the government " knows that copyright term extension is bad policy that will lead to enormous costs for Canadians." The term to respond to the document is very short and expires March 12.

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