OLDaily

Reflections on Teaching through the Screen
Sean Michael Morris, 2021/02/23

The title of this article, a transcript of a talk by Sean Michael Morris to a virtual symposium at the University of Ottawa, alludes to the idea that we should "teach through the screen, not to the screen," which is good advice. Here he is making many of the same points to OEB in December. The key to teaching online, as Terry Anderson reminded us, is presence. The idea that there is a real person at the other end of the line. This is something we've known about for a long time, but indifferently practiced. The talk also reflects on the development of digital pedagogy, how practitioners adapted during the pandemic, and how "these and many other folks have taken on the pandemic with imagination, care, persistence, and a fortitude that are the hallmarks of lasting change." And also, most crucially, "education didn’t need COVID-19 to make it necessary to ask these kinds of questions." As Will Richardson points out in LinkedIn, 'normal' was and is dysfunctional; "why do we want to go back to that?"

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Substack, RSS, and privacy
Gardner Campbell, Gardner Writes, 2021/02/23

There's a bunch of stuff going on in this post, but they're relatively for a reader to follow. The first is the idea of RSS which persists to this day, which is that "new information that you are interested in, should be automatically aggregated into one place" and that you should be in control of that process. Two thumbs up. The second is the question of the privacy of these choices you make, both in terms of what feeds you follow, and what you read on the feeds you follow. Because, third, RSS readers want to be in the business of recommending content to you. Now I use Feedly, which has an AI-based recommender, and I select which data to send it. But, fourth, Gardner Campbell is looking at a reader that's new to me called Feedbro. The name does not fill me with confidence. It functions as a browser extension, not a stand-alone application, which means it gains access to all your browsing habits. And that leads to a fifth topic, Substack, which manages and recommends email newsletter subscriptions (that you sometimes pay for), which leads us to consider privacy and the RSS reader Substack has launched (previously in OLDaily).

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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources
Meredith Jacob, Peter Jaszi, Prudence S. Adler, William Cross, American University Washington College of Law, 2021/02/23

Overall, this document (46 page PDF) offers a pretty good approach to the fair use ('fair dealing' in Canada) of copyright resources for teaching and research. And it's important; while many people think you can't use copyright materials at all in open educational resources, as "the Copyright Act of 1976 provides, 'fair use of a copyright work... is not an infringement of copyright." This document describes acceptable type of use under fair use, and what sort of notification ought to take place (for example, a declaration that 'fair use' is being invoked). While I think attribution is important, I really don't think some sort of declaration that "this is fair use" is really necessary. I think this document should have offered greater emphasis on the familiar 'four factor' test, and indeed wonder why it didn't. Instead it seems to substitute this for an emphasis on type of use (criticism and commentary, purpose of illustration, learning resource materials) and fails to make any distinction at all between commercial and non-commercial fair use, while in fact this is a significant factor in the law. So while the document serves a valuable purpose in reminding people that there's a far greater scope for fair use of copyright content, this should be your only resource on the subject.

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Computing for all?: Examining critical biases in computational tools for learning
Breanne K. Litts, Kristin A. Searle, Bryan M. J. Brayboy, Yasmin B. Kafai, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2021/02/23

"Most efforts to design culturally responsive computational tools redesign surface features, often through making nominal changes to add cultural meaning, yet the deeper structural design remains largely intact," write the authors. But "the underlying structure privileges particular epistemologies and cultures," and in the case studied here, may inhibit the cultural practice of storytelling, and demonstrated in the cases of 38 indigenous American youth here being profiled. (Note: this is the first time I've used BJET's publication access service called Ingenta, which opens the article using a time-limited URL you can't share, so I've downloaded a copy and made it available on my own website - 16 page PDF. Annoying, and 'open access' doesn't really mean 'links that expire'. On the other hand, it's nice to see BJET articles in open access)

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Delta Chat
Delta Chat, 2021/02/23

This application is another example of the trend toward distributed and decentralized services. "Delta Chat is like Telegram or Whatsapp but without the tracking or central control. Delta Chat does not need your phone number... Delta Chat doesn’t have their own servers but uses the most massive and diverse open messaging system ever: the existing e-mail server network... Chat with anyone if you know their e-mail address, no need for them to install Delta Chat! All you need is a standard e-mail account." Maybe this will become popular, maybe it won't, but it does show we don't need centralized servers to make a chat system work. More.

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