OLDaily

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa most affected as Meta halts low-cost Express Wi-Fi
Annie Njanja, TechDirt, 2022/02/07

Readers may recall when Facebook tried to create a limited Facebook-only version of the internet in India called Free Basics. As covered here, that was prohibited by the government in 2016, but Facebook continued its efforts with a more open (but still tied to Facebook) wifi access program called Express Wifi. By last year it covered 30 nations across Africa, Asia and South America. Anyhow, the news today is that the program is being shut down. "While we are concluding our work on this program to focus on developing other projects, we remain committed to working with partners across the telecom ecosystem to deliver better connectivity,” said Meta in the notice.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

We Are Still Not Living in a Simulation
Justin E. H. Smith, Hinternet, 2022/02/07

This post is a great example of how to create a full article from what is in essence a simple argument. Here's the argument (all quoted or paraphrased from the text): experience itself that gives our perception the structure it has, so all experience of reality is experience of 'augmented' reality. So there's no reason at all not to take experiences grounded in the encounter of the conscious self with pixels or bits as real. But it does not follow that reality itself, independently of experience, must be explicable by appeal to the same principles and mechanisms that underlie our most recent VR and AR technologies.  I am prepared to accept that a couch in VR is a real couch, but this does not compel me to accept that the couch on which I am currently sitting is digital.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

50 Ways to Make Media Pay
Damian Radcliffe, What's New in Publishing, 2022/02/07

This is a five-part series published over as many weeks. It summarizes a report from Sovrn, but this report is behind a nasty spamwall that's so suspicious it won't even load in my browser (I had to check it in Edge to make sure it even worked). No matter; the full report is available on ResearchGate (49 page PDF). This summary covers all of the 50 ways (I counted) and pretty much all of the report's content; after the short introduction Damian Radcliffe covers advertising, subscriptions, paywalls, content, and emerging ideas. Surprisingly, the report misses some obvious methods, including selling user data and paid placements (both of which are probably in operation in this WNIP series).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Can AI predict autism with 96% accuracy?
Richard Taylor, mediataylor, 2022/02/07

So the answer to the question is, of course, "no". But still, British educational technology company Century Tech's claim that "AI can also predict with 96 percent accuracy whether a child is autistic by assessing how they tap the iPad screen" was repeated in the The Times newspaper's supplement titled ‘Learning for the future: Interim Report’ by The Times Education Commission. The report itself is behind a subscription fee barrier, so I'm trusting Richard Taylor that they actually said this. And as he says, "diagnosing ASD is medically complex and when you claim that a proprietary AI technology product can predict ASD with 96% accuracy, verifiable evidence is required." No such evidence is forthcoming, and I doubt that it ever will be.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Learning design to support student-AI collaboration: perspectives of leading teachers for AI in education
Jinhee Kim, Hyunkyung Lee, Young Hoan Cho, Education and Information Technologies, 2022/02/07

I don't think this is a great paper (36 page PDF), but I'm including it because the subject is timely and the overall organization is sound. Readers should be aware, though, that wen to go out and interview ten people as the basis for your paper, even if they're experts (in this case, professors in Korea), you haven't produced a research paper, you've produced an opinion paper. And the assessments here of what AI can't do, and what sort of supports teachers need, and of the instructional design needed to support AI-mediated learning, are therefore opinions, and shouldn't be cited in future papers as having been established. That said, this paper is a good way for you to begin to organize your thoughts on the subject.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]