OLDaily

Why I dread the thought of benign algorithms (Updated)
Terry Freedman, 2021/12/20

I think that when we look back on our current age we will remark most on how fearful everyone was. To be sure, there are plenty of reasons for fear, what with disease, natural disasters, crime sprees, and all the rest. But I don't think the world was measurably more dangerous when people my age were children and in the habit of being outdoors and at large every day like the feral wildlife that we were. And it's in the light of this new-found fearfulness that I interpret a lot of the worries about artificial intelligence and smart algorithms - the 'caring computers' of the future. When our computers encourage us, praise us, help us, take care of us, we will actually have fewer reasons to fear, not more. At least that's what I think.

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A bit about PURLs
Ed Summers, inkdroid, 2021/12/20

An old standard, permanent URLs (PURL) has almost vanished from the mainstream. I've written about it a few times over the years. I've been a bit sceptical because government and commercial organizations don't really have a good track record for maintaining persistent resources or services. This article describes what's been happening over the last decade or so with PURL, including the 2016 move of purl.org to Internet Archive, and subsequent rebound in usage. Even so, as this article shows, there's a good percentage of PURLs that resolve to errors or uncertain results. Via Tom Woodward.

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Woke
Doug Peterson, 2021/12/20

Doug Peterson points to this article in CBC about words and phrases we might not want to use. It's a list of expressions that embody negative connotations about various cultures and races. Some media sources "reached out and jumped all over the message", he writes. "The authors took some liberties with even the title of the post. Instead of 'you may want to think twice about using', toughened the language to read 'words you can’t say' and then went off on that particular tangent." This sort of thing is so tiring. It's not simply that it's dishonest, though it's certainly that. It's this idea being promoted that simply being nice to other people is this onerous burden that's too great to bear. How sad.

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Will the #hashtag destroy or reconstruct our communication?
Kaori Kohyama, Beatrix Lim, Liming Chew, The Leads Asia, 2021/12/20

so it's not exactly what I mean by 'connective' but you can see the connections: "There is the term ‘Connective Action’ as opposed to ‘Collective Action,’ explains Dr. Schäfer, a Political Scientist and Japanologist currently teaching at Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany... in contrast to Collective Action where people protest based on ideology, Connective Action (in this case) uses a hashtag to oppose a certain policy or political agenda. There is no ideology behind a hashtag movement, or no base structure to it." See also.

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence is Self-Organizing and Self-Assembling
Sebastian Risi, 2021/12/20

It might feel like I'm dredging this tired old trope from the early days of connectivism but this article came out this week, a sign that we're just beginning to see the mainstreaming of a lot of the ideas from that course and the decades of work in neural networks that preceded it. " Self-organizing systems are made out of many components that are highly interconnected. The absence of any centralized control allows them to quickly adjust to new stimuli and changing environmental conditions." What does this article offer? Actual examples of the process in action.

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Information wants to be free, but digital property won’t be
David Cohn, Nieman Lab, 2021/12/20

I was talking about a lot of these technologies back in my 2019 e-learning 3.0 course and we learned enough back then to know that it's not a magic 'everything will now be paid for' button. Yes, things like blockchain, NFT and DAO provide better mechanisms for paid content, but they also provide better mechanisms to preserve the openness of open content. The good news is that the new technologies will keep the line between the two from blurring, which should keep most of us out of the courtroom. And that's a victory for everyone. Image: CoinTelegraph

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Untangling chaos in discussion forums: A temporal analysis of topic-relevant forum posts in MOOCs
Bokai Yang, Hengtao Tang, Ling Hao, John R. Rose, Computers & Education, 2021/12/20

Interesting paper (13 page PDF) discussing the use of machine learning to classify the thousands of diiscussion posts in a popular MOOC to help sort through the clutter and find those that are on topic. The purpose of this work isn't so much to hlp students find posts as it is to enable an analysis of the relation between using the discussion board and liklihood of success in the course. The authors are a bit quick to assign agency (eg., saying such-and-such a usage pattern leads to success in the course) but overall this is a clear and well-written article that describes a process that could be replicated by others (and this should be the standard for published reserach articles), though the link to the full dataset (section 3.3) is missing, and the tools used (openNLP, quanteda, weka) are mentioned only in passing. I'm not sure how long this paper will be available so grab it while you can. I have a copy if access closes down.

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