OLDaily

Transforming Impact : how evaluation and impact are shifting
June Holley, Brendon Johnson, Network Weaver, 2021/11/23

This post dovetails nicely with another one in this issue of OLDaily, and sandwiched between them are various considerations on evidence and policy. Here's the argument here: "current approaches that fund individual projects (requiring clear outcomes, and evaluating progress towards those outcomes) have actually inhibited the kind of innovation and transformation needed to completely shift the many interrelated systems that make up our world. This means concepts such as evaluation and assessment of impact need to shift as well." Be sure to follow up with the collaborative document being written on the subject, on Google Docs, as well as this panel video.

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On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy
Chris Coyier, CSS Tricks, 2021/11/23

I wonder how most educational institutions would respond to this stance: "We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong." Are there any educational institutions who do not track their users (aka students)? It's all just turned off by default. Chris Coyier notes, for example, that in MailChimp "I can literally see exactly who opened the email (by the person’s email address) and which links they clicked. I didn’t even realize that until now, but wow, that’s very super personally identifiable analytics information." I've always had it turned it off for OLDaily, but this was a conscious decision I had to make. On the other hand, the industry (including education) is structured so as to make tracking necessary. "I’m not ready to tip my apple cart yet," writes Coyier. "I have a mortgage. I have employees to pay. I absolutely do not have a war chest to dip into to ride out a major income shortage. If I lost most of my advertising income I would just… fail."

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Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean?
Danielle Carr, Psyche, 2021/11/23

Danielle Carr writes, "It’s true that fMRI is a valid scientific tool with manifold research uses illuminating what happens in the brain. It’s also true that deciding what fMRI images mean is fraught with multiple moments of contingency and interpretation." This is true for all evidence, not only for fMRI. It's just that fMRI requires rather more interpretation than most forms of evidence.

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Twitter API v2 Adds Spaces, New Endpoints, Friendlier Developer Policy
Sergio De Simone, InfoQ, 2021/11/23

Twitter has officially launched its v2 API. Significantly, Twitter "removed a number of restrictions from its Developer Policy to make it easier for developers to create new Twitter-based solutions, including moderation, customization, curation, and so on." If you intend to build a product based on these looser restrictions, fair warning. The hand that giveth taketh away.

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The Impact of Impact
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/11/23

I find it ironic that Alex Usher complains about the lack of evaluation and measurement of impact in academia in a column that contains not one shred of evidence in support - no concrete examples, no statistical basis for the trends he cites, no objective rationale for saying things like "(impact) is in many cases not much more than a creative writing exercise." And - even more ironically - when he (misleadingly) says "in practice, 'impact' is not that different from 'knowledge mobilization'" he contradicts his main point, given the enormous amount of time and effort spent on knowledge mobilization and its wayward sibling, knowledge translation. Perhaps it would be better to do the research rather than to simply pass along uninformed opinions shared with him in the boardroom. Image: TBS, Guide to Rapid Impact Evaluation, Canada.

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Critique of Pure Reason by Kant (1781) in a series of tweets
Helen De Cruz, Twitter, 2021/11/23

This is a great Twitter thread that takes on one of the most difficult works in philosophy - Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - and expresses it in a little over 100 tweets. And it's done with grace, sensibility and humour. If I had to summarize Kant's Critique in one tweet, I'd say something like: he defines the necessary conditions for the possibility of perception (beginning with space and time). But now I don't have to; readers can enjoy this thread and, when sufficiently piqued, explore Kant more deeply. But I suspect that the main result is that they'll find numerous concepts (eg., the analytic - synthetic distinction) and recall, "Oh yeah, that was discussed by Kant." Via Mini-Heap.

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