OLDaily

Duck Hunters
Dan Shumway, Hacker News, 2021/12/13

The context for this untitled post on Hacker News is the failure of Log4j, a Java logging library, due to a zero day vulnerability. Log4j is used in commercial websites around the world, so the flaw is serious, but it's open source, so the story is being presented as (yet another) 'open source is broken' story. This article, for which I've created my own title, is a comment in a Hacker News thread, and it argues that the story is presented incorrectly. "It feels weird to me to have a criticism of corporate behavior where corporations don't know how to ensure the continued success of the commons they build on, and to title this that 'Open Source' is broken," writes Dan Shumway. "If a bunch of hunters go out and shoot all the ducks to extinction, you don't title an article that ducks have failed as a species, you say that duck hunting is a problem." Via Boris Mann. Image: XKCD.

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A Review of Online Learning in 2021
Tony Bates, online learning & distance education resources, 2021/12/13

It's not even half way through December, which leaves a full three weeks left in the year, but the year-end retrospectives have started. As usual, I will be judicious in my selections. So, Tony Bates. The observation: same as last year, only better. Well, except for the fires and the floods. "Given that Covid-19 is now endemic," writes Bates, "will universities and colleges be willing to take the risk of large lecture classes in the future? I am waiting for the first student (probably in the USA) to sue if they get sick." On the other hand, "2020 and 2021 was perhaps the greatest effort ever in professional development for faculty," which begins to correct a longstanding institutional failing. Meanwhile, "there was no major new technology that made a breakthrough in online learning in 2021."

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The New LMS Rule: Transparency Working Both Ways
Lance Eaton, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2021/12/13

For my latest MOOC, I made sure I gathered no information about participants - no registrations, no names. Maybe I should write an article for a journal like this one. It reports on one instructor's self-admitted over-use of the tracking features in Instructure, and makes the suggestion that students should have the same access to data about instructors that instructors have on students. It's an interesting thought, and is a good blog post. But if the author is going to say things like "the pandemic increased that (power) imbalance through a form of disaster capitalism that had much of higher education more worried," then in an academic journal I'd like to see some evidence for that.

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