OLDaily

National centre for AI in tertiary education launches chatbot pilot
2022/01/26

I think something broken must have been fixed or simply expired because I got a flood of Jisc posts in my reader this week. So I'm catching up a bit. The chatbot in question "is based on Ada – a chatbot created by Bolton College where it has been supporting students since April 2017." The objective is to reduce staff workload (but, one hopes, not by increasing client workload, which is what so many of these 'automated' systems do). Despite any shortcomings, I'm generally supportive of this sort of technology, because it's only by reducing the bottlenecks that we can support an education system that is genuinely accessible (though of course technology by itself won't create open access; we need an actual commitment by policy-makers to do that). See also Jisc's National Centre for AI in Tertiary Education.

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Pilot scheme gives students the chance to benefit from free e-books and resources
2022/01/26

Though the words don't say so specifically, this is presented as though it were a type of open access, though it really is not. It is, at best, open access for UK students attending institutions that are Jisc members. That said, we are told that the plan provides access to "the Kortext Open Resources Collection – a curated collection of open access (OA) books and open educational resources (OERs)." I went looking for them on the Kortext website, and spent a fair amount of time digging around, but without that Jisc login I really have no access at all. So mostly what I see here is a mechanism designed to block access to open access books and OERs - surely the opposite of what the authors involved had in mind.

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The Context of the Social Age
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2022/01/26

This is a useful post from Julian Stodd because it puts broad swathes of his thinking into context. The social age is here presented as a landscape (as is so much of his work) and the article takes on a tour of some of the key landmarks, including connection, leadership, learning and culture.  find all of this interesting but at the same time too easy. By that, what I mean is that if we explain away all these phenomena as social phenomena, we elide the key questions of what the actual mechanisms are that produce such observable phenomena as connection, leadership, learning and culture (if indeed these are even the right terms to use). But there's no denying the depth and insight of Stodd's work, though it takes paying attention to it over a longish period of time to get a sense of the whole.

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TechScape: everything you need to know about DAOs
Alex Hern, The Guardian, 2022/01/26

If you've been following OLdaily you've known what a DAO is for several years, but for the many who find this new, the Guardian has a tongue-in-cheek overview of the concept. Essentially, a DOA is a company (but not a 'company') with assets in the blockchain that is managed by a decentralized group of shareholders (but not 'shareholders'). "In that idealised vision of the organisation, there barely needs to be any human-level structure at all – hence the “autonomous” part of the name. The DAO itself exists as a smart contract."

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If web3 is the financialisation of the web, then ed3 is merely the (further) financialisation of education
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/01/26

"A blockchain can be thought of as quite a boring technology," writes Doug Belshaw, "a back office solution where an append-only database (i.e. one can be written to, but then is read-only) is stored on multiple machines instead of centrally." True. And it's the mechanics of the decentralization that make it interesting (and the financialization part is the least interesting). Proponents of web3 and ed3, he writes, talk of it "as being disruptive, egalitarian, and a step-change in how society operates."

Belshaw disagrees. "The hard yards when distributing power involve emotions and, well, being human," he says, referencing this article by Austin Robey on the difference between distributed autonomous organizations (DAO) and co-ops. Reading it, it seems to be that the real division is that in co-ops it's one-person one-vote while in a DAO it's (mostly) one-token one-vote. Do people vote, or do dollars vote? That's the age-old tension between democracy and capitalism.

Robey also argues that co-ops are distinct in that they often operate on the basis of shared principles. Perhaps. But you can't base a society on shared principles. Society is a set of laws, protocols, structures, languages and mores. It's a way to allow people with different beliefs to interact, not a way to shape them all into someone's picture of an ideal world. I stepped my way carefully through all this in my E-Learning 3.0 course. But I guess people are more interested in this week's over-the-top proclamations for and against.

My link to the history of web3 and related topics on OLDaily in a previous edition was broken. Here's the correct link.

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