OLDaily

From Headache to Helpful—Teachers on Using TikTok in the Classroom
Paige Tutt, Edutopia, 2021/03/23

When you do this job long enough you see the same old story repeated over and over again, even though there are new technologies being introduced every day. This is one of those stories. Here's the format: new technology is developed, kids love it, teachers hate it, then later teachers learn to appreciate it and use it in the classroom. Still to come: the bit where students complain that the teachers have ruined the technology. Today's technology is TikTok and the article is, of course, a description of teachers using it in the classroom. "According to Shauna Pomerantz, TikTok can help educators connect to students because it 'is a lingua franca for young people.'" Yawn.

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The Problem of Complexity: Knowing Complexity
Keith Hamon, Learning Complexity, 2021/03/23

There are two senses of 'reduction' at play in this article; you can see it precisely at the point where Keith Hamnon says "complexity reveals that knowledge always reduces reality." I don't know whether the origin of this confusion is in Rika Preiser's The Problem of Complexity: Re-Thinking the Role of Critique or in Hamon's own interpretation. It doesn't matter: it's worth taking time to clearly distinguish between them. The 'reduction' of anti-reductionism consists of the idea that all knowledge can be derived or deduced from a set of statements of a certain type. The classical example is the idea in logical positivism that all knowledge is based on logical inference from observation statements. This is different from another sort of 'reduction' that is really a type of abstraction, that is, you create a model of something by selecting a few key properties and representing those. When we 'reduce' something to a painting, or a story, or a causal explanation, that's what we are doing. These two types of 'reduction' are very different processes, their semantics are different, and the inferences they support are different.

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Distraction, not partisanship, drives sharing of misinformation
John Timmer, Ars Technica, 2021/03/23

I'm not totally sure I would accept these results without some sort of follow-up study, but the first indications are interesting. The authors of the study (27 page PDF) observe that "people are generally capable of judging the accuracy of the headlines" and that " ideology doesn't really seem to be a major factor in driving judgements on whether a headline was accurate." But when it came to sharing, "politics played a big role, and the truth receded." Now that may seem like the opposite of the headline (and it is!) but what the authors did was to nudge a sample population (namely, contributors to Breitbart and InfoWars) by reminding them that they thought accuracy is important, which changed their behaviour. So the conclusion was that "people do value accuracy but don't necessarily think much about it when they're using social media." Or maybe, they don't care whether the headline is accurate unless they think they're being watched.

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The rise of community-curated knowledge networks
Sari Azout, Check Your Pulse, 2021/03/23

This was a Twitter thread found via Boris Mann's new Ghost-based blog, though you'll probably get more value out of the full post. Anyhow, Sari Azout has a good point right in the middle of it: "Our feed-based information architecture  has made us obsessive consumers of the present, yet largely indifferent to the archives of the past." Quite so, which is why a trend toward associative context-rich knowledge resources is encouraging. It was mainly the Venn diagram that attracted me to the post, covering as it does three key aspects of such a network: knowledge management, curation, and community. But we need more. We need the key component of creativity, which is what draws on and feeds the system in the first place.

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What comes next is up to us
Gregg Behr, Remake Learning, 2021/03/23

What I like about this post is that while it discusses something we're all facing - how to begin anew after the pandemic - it is focused on a particular community, in this case, the city of Pittsburgh in the United States. There are details specific to Remake Learning, which will be irrelevant unless you're in that network, but the message and the examples are useful to all. There's a number of useful links to local initiatives that developed over the year, and as the author says, "our task will be to sustain that community, building a future that’s more loving and more just than the yesterdays that came before." Just as every city's response to the pandemic was different, so also will be every city's recovery. "It will require listening to ourselves and to our neighbors. And it will require unlearning old methods, old assumptions, and old systems."

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Zoom introduces new SDK to help developers tap into video services
Ron Miller, TechCrunch, 2021/03/23

Every application will soon have embedded videoconferencing capabilities if Zoom has its way (and probably even if it doesn't). This is the intent of Zooms new software development kit (SDK) for its video platform. The SDK will allow developers to leverage "video, audio, and interactive features to build video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces." The service is free for "up to 10,000 session minutes per month," which translates to, say, a 16-hour 10-person meeting. Here's Zoom's blog post and here's the SDK page itself. See also: Zoom Developer Blog, UC Today, siliconAngle, ITPro.

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