OLDaily

Science Doesn't Work That Way
Gregory E. Kaebnick, Boston Review, 2021/05/03

If you followed up on the reference to Imre Lakatos from last week you'll be right at home reading this article. Here's the main point: the authority of science "derives not from unbiased scientists but from the institutions and norms that structure their work." Or, as I would say, it's defined by the way it arrives at consensus. So, writes Gregory Kaebnick, "Fighting mistrust requires more public engagement with policy, not unqualified deference to experts." Quite right. That's why 'critical thinking' must depend on so much more than just finding sources you can trust. But when Archon Fung says the U.S. public is in a “wide-aperture, low-deference” mood, he has it exactly wrong. From my (admittedly third-party) perspective, the problem is exactly the opposite: people feel encouraged to adopt a narrow perspective and to trust authority. That's what creates fundamental disagreements with no way to resolve them (or even to talk about them).

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There's no such thing as "The Perl Community"
Neil Bowers, NEILB's Blog, 2021/05/03

This post talks about the community around the Perl programming language, but it could be talking about any of the ed tech communities that so often refer to themselves as (say) the OER community or the learning technology community. At best, as in the case of Perl, "what we have is a loose, and at times fraught, federation of communities." Some things to note. "In a grassroots community of volunteers, like ours, I think that culture has to 'bubble up': not be imposed in a top-down fashion, and leadership should be seen in terms of service to your community." Image: opensource.com

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That Alberta PSE Strategy (Finally)
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/05/03

Alex Usher reviews the Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy and the related background research (217 page PDF) from McKinsey. He writes, " only one out of the six priorities concerns skills and mostly it’s about finding ways to get better employer feedback into institutions, expanding apprenticeships, and making work-integrated learning available to all." The good bit is that "Alberta will move to a system where institutions get to nominate a majority of their board members," which will give them more independence. The bad bit consists of tuition increases and undercompensated aid programs. "This just seems like the government is being parsimonious," he writes. Missing from both the report and Usher's analysis is any real sense of change as a result of covid; while the report acknowledges a significant increase (illustrated) in online learning, for example, it doesn't really appear anywhere in the plan. As Usher suggests, the plan appears like it's ten years old, and I would add that in addition to emulating Ontario's 2010 work skills plan, its innovation stategy seems to be taken from the 2010 federal government.

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Reinforcement learning challenge to push boundaries of embodied AI
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2021/05/03

This article (and also this one, in the fourth point) discusses the idea that intelligence is more than just brain states. This is known generally as the concept of 'embodied cognition', and hence in AI, as 'embodied AI'. "Human and animal brains have evolved along with all other body organs with the ultimate goal of improving chances of survival. Our intelligence is tightly linked to the limits and capabilities of our bodies." In this article, the concept of embodies AI is put to the test using reinforcement learning for navigation tasks in 3D worlds. It seems simple; we do it all the time. In fact, though, it's the result of a complex interaction of human vision and agency. This helps explain why practice and hands-on activities are so important for human learning.

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Learning from a Māori worldview
Education Gazette, 2021/05/03

According to Wikipedia, "Kapa haka is the term for Māori action songs and the groups who perform them. It literally means 'group' (kapa) and 'dance' (haka)." Also, 'Te Ao Māori' is the Māori world view that "acknowledges the interconnectedness and interrelationship of all living & non-living things." This article describes the integration of these into New Zealand curriculum and how they have helped build a resilient response to Covid. "For many students, kapa haka is an access point to engaging with te ao Māori. To engage with Māori Performing Arts, students must engage with tikanga, reo, and Māori culture and identity. It’s rooted in, and elevates, Māori culture and language." At points the article describes the Māori as a "lens" through which to see the world, which I guess provides people outside the culture with a frame of reference, but I think cultural identity (anyone's cultural identity) is much more than just a lens.

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Preparing Educators to Teach in a Digital Age
Mohsen Keshavarz, Andrea Ghoneim, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2021/05/03

This article provides an overview of the SECTIONS model as outlined in Tony Bates's Teaching in a Digital Age and then describes its application in an e-Education Program at Danube University Krems. Here it wasn't used as a decision model for administrators but rather to define an assignment structure for students. It was then applied in the same way at Torbat Heydariyeh University in Iran and helped introduce instructors to digital technologies in preparation for national MOOCs to be offered by the Virtual University of Medical Sciences on the ARMAN (a Farsi abbreviation for New and Massive National Computerized Education) MOOC platform.

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Mighty
Mighty, 2021/05/03

"We're headed for a generational overhaul in the way web browsers work," said this intro in Protocol, "and this looks like part of the answer." 'This' is called Mighty, and the idea is to take your entire web browser and put it into the cloud. It's an intriguing idea that solves some problems for web users: first, the need for greater bandwidth to access heavy websites, and second, the need for local processing of Javascript and video-heavy web sites. And while it may seem inefficient to stream your browser from the cloud, at a certain point, it's more efficient than doing all the page requests and processing on your own computer. My only problem is that it's Chrome, and what I really would want is Firefox. It's waitlist only right now; I've signed up and if I get access I'll describe how it feels.

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