OLDaily

The rise of dark web design: How sites manipulate you into clicking
Daniel Fitton, The Conversation, 2021/10/07

With the rise of regulations requiring that sites request permission before setting cookies we have seen a wide variety of tactics employed to convince the user to click 'OK' - things like: not offering an alternative, suggesting it's required, highlighting or prefilling checkboxes, and more. These are called 'dark patterns'. This article calls the field in general 'dark web design'. And it just goes to show how choice alone doesn't entail consent; people should have the right to free, informed and uncoerced consent. "A critical understanding of how dark patterns work, and what they’re hoping to achieve, can help us detect and overcome their trickery." Sure - but who's providing that? Via Nieman Lab.

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Tofology
TikTok, Media Matters for America, 2021/10/07

This post on TikTok looks at the TikTok recommendation algorithm and reports some concerning results. It does essentially the same thing YouTube's algorithm does (or did; I'm not sure of YouTube's status at the moment). If you follow one thing that might suggest you can be radicalized (in this case, trans-phobic videos) it will begin to suggest more and more radical things. I think it's good that Abbie Richards is reporting this on TikTok, though the algorithm is probably preventing it from reaching the people who could really benefit from it.

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“What I would like is for people to come at the world with lots of different ways of seeing things”; Dr Liam Kofi Bright on the philosophical canon
Sara Van Goozen, Justice Everywhere, 2021/10/07

I gave a talk at the London School of Economics a number of years ago and on the way in say their unofficial slogan, "Smarter than you since 1895", and I confess I went into the talk with, shall we say, an attitude. I may be from the sticks, but that doesn't make anyone smarter than me. Anyhow, this discussion, ironically from an LSE professor, argues against the sense of a 'philosophical canon' because "there are many, many, many thinkers, ideas and texts that are sufficiently interesting to merit serious consideration." Sure, you'll benefit from reading Descartes, say, but you'll benefit equally from reading one orf many many 'lesser' philosophers. We don't 'stand on the shoulders of giants', we 'stand on the shoulders of everybody'. I think the same is true of the philosophy of education and in education generally. Donald Clark is currently proving this point by finding name after name of highly qualified and interesting people who have worked in the field (I hope he doesn't stop, because he'll never run out of names).

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The need of a unified theory of imagining
Luca Tateo, The Junkyard, 2021/10/07

This is an interesting post that leads us to think in more detail about imagination. We usually think of imagination as wholly fictional, in the sense that we 'make up' a reality, and limit its purpose to things like creating art and literature. But Luca Tateo thinks of 'imaginary' and 'real' not as alternatives, but rather, two overlapping forms of 'real' which lead to the generation of new (and sometimes unexpected) knowledge. "Imaginative work supports the production of judgments and plans about past, present, and future. I am here stressing the feature of complementarity rather than alterity, something that already Hume envisaged with its thought-experiment of the shades of blue."

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When Returning to Campus, I Realized I Miss Virtual Courses
Shu Wan, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2021/10/07

My prediction about what will happen at the end of the pandemic, which I'll reiterate here, is that there will be a mad rush to return to 'normal', leaving everything to do with 'remote learning' and 'digital education' far behind, but then, once we're back, we'll realize what we've given up, and will seek to return to (at least some of) online learning. That prediction is reflected as reality in this article, with a great turn of phrase: "Perhaps some 'social butterflies' may disagree with my appreciation of the potential of the virtual class in facilitating my class participation.... I may respond to their commentary by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald's sentences in The Great Gatsby, 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'"

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Here Is How to Use Google Drawings to Create Digital Badges
Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, 2021/10/07

I tried this today. It actually worked out quite well and made for a (rare) successful episode of 'Stephen Follows Instructions'. It should be noted, however,t hat these instructions allow you to create a badge image, and not an actual badge.

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