OLDaily

Confirmation Bias/Belief Perseverance
Blake Harvard, The Effortful Educator, 2022/02/04

I personally find it funny how the concept of confirmation bias has become a psychological trope. It may or may not be true that people prefer to listen to things that confirm their pre-existing beliefs, but as I see it, this has much more to do with poor critical thinking skills than with cognitive psychology. The discussion of - and criticism of - conformation bias begins with the philosophy of science, and in particular of the theory of confirmation of hypothesis, an idea proposed by suck people as Carl Hempel and forming a core thesis of logical positivism. Critics, such as Karl Popper, argued that hypotheses ought to be tested by falsification, while contemporary philosophy of science offers a much more complex story based on models, semantics, evidence and theory. It should be hard to change our beliefs, but it should be possible. Meanwhile, I see this idea of 'confirmation bias' mostly as a dodge, a way to avoid talking about critical reasoning, and to reduce differences of opinion to differing states of mind where, you know, both sides have good ideas.

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NFTs and Schools – Could There be a Connection?
Chris Kennedy, Culture of Yes, 2022/02/04

We're now well into the phase where people who don't know much about NFTs are writing about NFTs. But Chris Kennedy is honest about that, and as he says, "writing is a great way to work through ideas." It's wrong only when the uninformed pretend to be authorities, but that's not what's happening here. We read these blogs as a discussion, not a Library of Authoritative Sources. This difference is important. Anyhow, Kennedy, thinking aloud, offers a list of possible uses: for transcripts, as graduation mementos, as something students can produce, and as parts of a modern portfolio. These are good applications for crypto generally, and we'll probably see some version of all four of these (I know, someone is going to ask "what problem are we solving with these," but they're the same people who were happy with paper-based records).

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Can We Cause Critical Change from the Inside?
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2022/02/04

The comments are as fun as the article (for example: is something inside your stomach actually inside you?) but the subject is serious: whether we can make change from inside organizations (schools, universities, governments...). Maha Bali offers an analogy to suggest that we can: "Viruses... enter the bodies of larger animals, supposedly much stronger animals, and can potentially not only defeat these animals, make them sick, kill them, but also transfer from one to the other." And then there are probiotics that actually make the animal function better. But does this happen in real life? Maybe. Sometimes. "We have to believe that underdogs and marginalized people and agents of critical change can make a difference," says Bali. I think it would be nice if they could, but I don't see why we have to believe it, and I'm quite prepared to work outside institutions to make the change they most likely won't make themselves, with or without viruses and microbes.

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Kids are falling victim to disinformation and conspiracy theories. What’s the best way to fix that?
Melinda Wenner Moyer, Nieman Lab, 2022/02/04

I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough: "Historians and students were often fooled by manipulative websites, but journalism fact-checkers were not. In addition, their methods of analysis differed significantly: historians and students tried to assess the validity of websites and information by reading vertically, navigating within a site to learn more about it, but fact-checkers read laterally, opening new browser tabs for different sources and running searches to judge the original website’s credibility." Educators and education writers need to be more like journalists, however unfortunately they tend to be more like, and recommend the approach, of historians.

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Jisc and Coherent Digital sign agreement for virtual reality and interactive video content
2022/02/04

I promise, OLDaily is not going to start obsessing over the deals large organizations sign with each other. But this agreement represents a reality that needs to be discussed: the high cost of VR content. It's not the sort of thing institutions and even national agencies can simply start producing; we've been working on one through the fall in our office and it's just a simple pilot idea, and would need commercial production to be viable. On the other hand, all the problems we currently have with learning resource and textbook publishers will most likely emerge in the world of VR, until (and unless) open educational VRs (which I hereby dub 'open virtual educational resources' (OVERs) become widely available. So when I look at a deal like this between Jisc and Coherent I hope it's with an eye toward producing OVERs but I fear it may not be.

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Why gamers hate crypto, and music fans don't
Casey Newton, Platformer, 2022/02/04

It's interesting indeed to see the reactions of the two communities. gamers have turned against Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) with a passion, seeing them as just another way for games to separate them from their money. On the other hand, music fans seem more than willing to pay for the crypto tokens. There are good reasons. First, "live entertainment has always done a healthy business in collectibles; gaming hasn’t." Additionally, "music NFTs can more easily be positioned as helping artists." by contrast, nobody loves game publishers, and the people who actually build the games would not receive any of the NFT money. Third, "the music NFT projects I’m describing this week are entirely optional." In games, however, they would be much less so. As newton writes, "there is wisdom in fandoms, and they’re already telling us what they want from the blockchain — and what they don’t."

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How not to write about the costs of higher ed: another example
Bryan Alexander, 2022/02/04

This is a pretty good article overall criticizing Scott Galloway's article on the high cost of college tuition. Still (and I say this without malice) it feels like it's just touting the party line. Yes, colleges provide discounts to some students, but at the same time Galloway is not wrong when he says higher tuition is a result of "is a function of limiting the supply of freshman seats at our best universities in concert with the continued fetishization of their brands." And he's not wrong when he says "Student loan debt ($1.7 trillion) is now greater than credit card debt." Alexander defends tuition costs by pointing the salaries paid to highly qualified professors, and compares it to other services such as health care or law. Nobody outside the U.S. would take such an argument seriously.

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