OLDaily

The Open Database of Educational Facilities
Statistics Canada, 2021/06/16

This is "a collection of open data containing the names, types, and locations of education facilities across Canada, and is made available under the Open Government Licence - Canada." What's significant is, first of all, that it exists, and second, that it is openly licensed (readers may want to note that Canada's Open Government License "grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the Information, including for commercial purposes, subject to the terms below" such that you are free to "copy, modify, publish, translate, adapt, distribute or otherwise use the Information in any medium, mode or format for any lawful purpose." You can also visualize this data on a map using the linkable open data environment viewer.

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Student Selection of Content Licenses in OER-enabled Pedagogy
Katherine Williams, Eric Werth, Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, 2021/06/16

This is a small (too small, really) survey of student preferences in selecting content licenses (and teacher perceptions about the students' choices). The sample split right down the middle on whether to select Non-Commercial (NC) licenses. The paper (22 page PDF) notes, "Students are generally comfortable sharing material online, though they wish that this information be used fairly. For some the concept of fairness related strongly to not changing material or not making money off it."

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ARK Alliance
ARK Alliance, 2021/06/16

On Jisc today: "We are pleased to announce the formation of the ARK Alliance, an open global community supporting Archival Resource Keys (ARKs).... The ARK Alliance succeeds the ARKs-in-the-Open initiative, begun in 2018." ARKs are persistent identifiers for resources, but unlike (say) DOIs, you can "create unlimited identifiers without paying for the right to do so, add any kind of metadata, including no metadata, append extensions and query strings during resolution, link directly to an article, image, or spreadsheet that is immediately usable by people and software without making them first stop at a landing page." Obviously this is a step forward, however, in order to create an ARK you have to have a Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN). I've requested a NAAN for downes.ca butI have the feeling they're restricted to more, um, prominent organizations.

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‘Distribution is something computers can do better’: The Globe and Mail’s AI startup begins to make in-roads
Max Willens, Digiday, 2021/06/16

If you're like me, when you get to this article you'll be greeted with a notice that says "We hope you enjoyed your first free article. Become a Digiday subscriber for $349 a year with unlimited access." That's not going to happen, of course, because it's way over my budget for a niche publication. But I do pay for some internet services (ranging from Feedly to No Man's Sky to Netflix to baseball) and the idea here is to offer me free content that the publishers think will convert me to a paying subscriber. That's what the Globe and Mail's new AI Sophi does. It "uses natural language processing and machine learning to do things like assess the likelihood that particular users or pieces of content will convert to subscriptions." And like the Washington Post's platform Arc XP, "Sophi’s long-term goal, Edall said, is to move beyond the media business, and it has made inroads with non-media clients; Sophi has added the financial services company CIBC as a client, Edall said, using the software to automate its marketing messaging."

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In Online Ed, Content Is No Longer King—Cohorts Are
Wes Kao, Future, 2021/06/16

This article, published on Andreessen Horowitz 's new platform Future (more), makes a good point about the changing state of play in online learning: "the rise of cohort-based courses (CBCs), interactive online courses where a group of students advances through the material together — in 'cohorts' - with hands-on, feedback-based learning at the core." The article points to two major trends: first, the widespread availability of free learning content ("people view learning-related content on YouTube 500 million times every day") and the disappointing completion rates for content-only online learning. Why cohorts? "Live, bi-directional learning leads to more accountability," writes Wes Kao, and "the forced scarcity of fixed start and end dates adds a sense of urgency and focus." Also, " they are bi-directional, as opposed to one-way, meaning there’s an exchange of knowledge between the instructor and students, as well as students with fellow students. It’s a dialogue, not a static lecture."

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Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade
Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson, Emily A. Vogels, Pew, 2021/06/16

This Pew report is essentially a collection of responses from experts on a set of questions related to ethics and AI (you can find my contribution on page 2). The question asked was, "By 2030, will most of the AI systems being used by organizations of all sorts employ ethical principles focused primarily on the public good?" The short answer was "no", for a variety of reasons. That doesn't mean good won't be produced by AI, but rather, the salient observation that AI won't be (and probably can't be) optimized for good. Seth Finkelstein (page 4) draws a nice analogy: "Just substitute ‘the internet’ for ‘AI’ here – ‘Was the internet mostly used in ethical or questionable ways in the last decade?’ It was/will be used in many ways, and the net result ends up with both good and bad, according to various social forces."

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Why CBC is turning off Facebook comments on news posts for a month
Brodie Fenlon, CBC News, 2021/06/16

To be clear: CBC is only turning off Facebook comments. They continue to continue welcome comments on CBCNews.ca, where they say "we have more moderating tools and can focus our attention better on offering a respectful dialogue about our stories." The reason is simple: "compounding the stress and anxiety of journalists is the vitriol and harassment many of them face on social media platforms and, increasingly, in the field." For the last two days I've been in a long Twitter argument about the users themselves negotiating some sort of social contract for conduct on those sites. Well, I don't think they can. I don't think any real 'negotiation' or 'contract' occurs; it's just one group trying to be more persistent than another. In these discussions, too, people assume that what they think is polite reflects community values (ie., social projection), but if we look at what the community actually does, it's much less polite than that. I think, moreover, that what counts as 'politeness' reflects space, time and privilege.

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