OLDaily

AI and education: Guidance for policy-makers
UNESCO, 2021/11/08

From the introduction: "This publication offers guidance for policy-makers on how best to leverage the opportunities and address the risks, presented by the growing connection between AI and education." This report (50 page PDF) begins by outlining AI essentials and then takes a risk-benefit approach to assessing the impact of AI on education. It then looks at the linkage between AI and the UN's strategic development goal on education (SDG4), surveys a range of policy approaches, and makes key recommendations, none of which will strike anyone as particularly surprising, flowing as they do from a fairly orthodox management strategy of defining an overall vision, interdisciplinary planning and inter-sectoral governance. The report recommends steering "AI-and-education policy development and practices towards protecting human rights and equipping people with the values and skills needed for sustainable development  and effective human-machine collaboration in life, learning and work."

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Virtual academic conferences as learning spaces: Factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual conferences
Nina Seidenberg, Maren Scheffel, Vitomir Kovanovic, Grace Lynch, Hendrik Drachsler, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2021/11/08

Sometimes the bias in a study is really hard to detect. In this case, it takes some digging, but it's there. We read that "with its undeniable focus on networking – next to learning – we see participating in traditional f2f-conferences to remain an important activity in the future for most researchers, even for technology-savvy ones." Now this may actually be true, but in this study data was collected from participants in three conferences. But note: "All conferences were originally planned to take place in Germany but were moved to the virtual space." So the sample is weighted toward people who had already chosen to attend the conference in person. It leaves out those for whom a trip to Germany, even in pre-pandemic times, was an impossibility.

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Google Docs Intros Updated Citation Tool
David Nagel, Campus Technology, 2021/11/08

This is a really short article but it introduces readers to what is potentially a really significant Google Docs tool (I know this because I've been working toward building the same sort of functionality into gRSShopper to make writing articles and these newsletters a lot easier). Basically, the idea is that " When adding citations in Google Docs, you can now search for books and online sources, then automatically populate some attributes for those sources." That may not seem like much, but tools like Overleaf make a huge difference in the writing workflow, and connecting similar functionality to search just seems to make a lot of sense. What's missing? Open access. Too many of Google's searches point to paywalled and closed access resources (this applies especially to Google Scholar). Just having an 'open access' flag on search results would make a huge difference. The publishers would probably never allow that, though.

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The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts
Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw, Communication Research, 2021/11/08

I'm glad to find I am not the only one arguing against registration requirements online. Here we have a a paper on the hidden cost of requiring accounts (25 page PDF) in wiki conmtributions. "Requiring accounts leads to a small increase in account creation, but reduces both high- and low-quality contributions from registered and unregistered participants." And "although the change deters a large portion of low-quality participation, the vast majority of deterred contributions are of higher quality." Via Community Data Science Collective.

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