OLDaily

Hey Networks! Don't underestimate relationship
Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, 2021/03/04

Nancy White looks back at a 2017 article by Curtis Ogden offering offering 10 principles for thinking like a network. These are good principles, and I think I've endorsed all of them at one time or another. It's important to see the difference between "what is new and different when we call something a network, as opposed to a coalition, collaborative or alliance." White's post is an incomplete link at the ten principles (she has been pulling out and posting incomplete and (hence) unpublished work from her archives, a practice I applaud) so be sure to follow the link to the Ogden article. I think (based on her title) she was going to ask us to think about the interpersonal aspects of networking, and not simply the structural. That would be fair enough, I think - other people in a network aren't just disembodied objects - but there's a need for caution. When it becomes all about the relationship, and when personalities come into play in a significant way, it becomes more like nepotism than networking.

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A really bad idea
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2021/03/04

Doug Peterson, on reading this post in The 74, seems to be responding to this post from Education Next where Michael J. Petrilli is suggesting that teachers keep the cameras on in their classrooms after the pandemic. In response, he points to this list of 17 teachers whose day could use a serious, serious do-over to illustrate how always being on camera could have unwanted consequences. people sometimes freeze when they're on camera. "Knowing that my camera was capturing every move kept me in one place, and my hands from scratching an itch that had developed about half way through," he says." I don't think it's a good idea, no so much because cameras are inherently something to be feared (seriously, none of the 17 teachers really needs to have worried) but because it's inherently unfair. Petrilli should be suggesting teachers keep their cameras on only after his Fordham Institute offers a live camera feed of its decision-making process and meetings with funders.

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Famous Dorothea Lange photo brought to life...
Robert Gibson, LinkedIn, 2021/03/04

I don't know where to find the original source, but I don't want to lose track of this video animation of Dorothea Lange’s famous photo of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker in California in 1936. For me it highlights what's new, and what's not new with deep fakes. Commenters on LinkedIn said things like "it looks like someone said something when they didn't" and "some photos that are so iconic in the pain and suffering they convey thet should be left alone in peace." All true. But let's not forget that the original photo was staged and retouched. It may be 'real' (as opposed to deepfaked) but it's not clear that the sense and emotion that the photo suggests is any more or less real than the video.

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The Collective Intelligence Manifesto
Olivier Zara, Excellence décisionnelle, 2021/03/04

I saw this document first in French but the link from the title is to the English version. It feels a bit like an update to the Agile Manifesto, but is also more broadly applicable to idea-generating activities more generally. The process is essentially outlined in the first two points: of distinguishing between simple, complicated and complex; and of co-construction. The remaining seven points discuss how participants should conduct themselves, and says (for example) that leaders should speak last, that ideas should be juxtaposed for consideration, that speech should be distributed across all participants, and that participants have a duty to be benevolent.

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Evaluation of Cohort Algorithms for the FLoC API
Google, 2021/03/04

This feels like exchanging one model of ad-tech surveillance for another, and the EFF seems to regard it that way, but Google is touting it's new flock-based Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) ad campaign mechanism as "a privacy preserving mechanism proposed within the Chrome Privacy Sandbox." Their white paper (17 page PDF) describes "different methods for generating cohorts, showing clear trade-offs between privacy and utility." Readers are assigned one or more cohort IDs which are used to deliver ads. Cohorts are composed of people with similar interests, and the use of the cohort ID means individual users are not tracked from website to website. The key question is how to assign individuals to cohorts (in online learning, they simply join courses themselves) and the white paper discusses various mechanisms for doing this. Via Protocol.

It is an interesting idea, though. Imagine a similar approach taken with online courses. People identify themselves as being members of this or that course, and as they visit different websites different resources are offered to them to assist in their learning. Maybe a generalized system to allow all educational institutions to each define their own cohorts, or for groups of individuals to self-define cohorts, called Open FLoCs (I can just see edtech people rushing to the patent office now). I would not be a fan of a Chrome-only approach, though. And while Google can line up 1,000 websites to participate, I'm not sure anyone in the education system has that much clout.

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