OLDaily

I made an EdTech Conference Proposal title generator. Any terms/tech missing?
Reddit, 2022/02/21

Here it is: the ed tech conference proposal generator. The adjectives don't really work but the titles are otherwise realistic. It would be a fun conference game to challenge people to give a two-minute impromptu talk based on generaled proposal titles.

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Seems like the peer review system has given up the ghost
Helen De Cruz, The Philosophers' Cocoon, 2022/02/21

There's value in this post, but also especially in the lengthy comment thread that follows. The premise here is that the associate editor of an academic journal writes, "it is my strong suspicion that the peer review system is finally broken beyond reasonable repair." So what can be done? Suggestions range from overhauling the system to something called slow philosophy. These days, though I am frequently asked, I rarely complete reviews. At first, I didn't want to support subscription-based journals. Also, journals stopped caring whether I was qualified. Then they treated it as an obligation after I've published a paper. But you know, we don't need a review system any more, at least, not in the sense of two blind reviewers deciding whether a paper deserves to see the light of day.

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NFT in Edu: What Does the Future Hold?
Rachelle Dené Poth, Getting Smart, 2022/02/21

OK, here's the slightly simplified explanation of what a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is. Take any digital content, and run it through an encryption function known as a hashing algorithm. This produces a unique identifier for that content. Next, create a unique identifier for a person (typically the address of their digital wallet). Write a statement saying the first belongs to the second. Embed this statement into a blockchain so that it cannot be altered. You have created an NFT. To the extent that this is useful in education, you can now define the future of NFT in Edu (your results may vary, but this article takes you through some of the possibilities).

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Personal Computational Environments: From Pedagogy to Technics
Improvisation Blog, 2022/02/21

Mark Johnson looks at the various tools he has over the years thought might lead to a personal learning environment (PLE) - "an idea that really came to nothing." Some of the tools for using AI are the latest candidate. "AI has the property of being able to return more variety than it is given." And this was basically what was true of the other tools. The idea was always to be able to begin with something relatively straightforward and easy to master, and to use it to open up a world of possibilities. I think that's a good insight. "The motivation to learn technical skill comes about through our hunger for greater variety. We need to design our pedagogy from this principle."

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Leaderless leading: How the pandemic has unleashed a collective impetus to ‘rethink’ further education
Carol Azumah Dennis, BERA Blog, 2022/02/21

This post in the BERA Blog is intended to introduce us to the inaugural edition of #JoyFE newspaper, "a group of further education (FE) professionals who want to ‘rethink education and take action’", and more to the point, to frame it as an example of "an example of ‘unleadership’ an embodiment, experienced and practised, rather than a theoretical construct." I'm not sure the language of 'leadership' really fits here, one way or another, and whatever I may think of the content of JoyFE or why this publication merits mention in BERA, I applaud the idea of practitioners taking to virtual pen and virtual paper to get their ideas out there and start sharing them.

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Cloud Caper
Ernie Smith, Tedium, 2022/02/21

One common experience with commercial online services is that they will eventually turn the screw, reducing services and increasing costs. Thus is the case with cloud storage, including DropBox, which has reduced services recently. So maybe you want to host your own cloud storage service. "Having spent time trying to do this for a little while," writes Ernie Smith, "I’ve started to realize why normal people don’t do this." He looks at a variety of services, including NextCloud, which I've also tried, but concludes, "it’s not for everyone, especially if you don’t want to spend your weekends hunting down bugs." Other tools included Syncthing for file sync across a variety of machines and Backblaze for long-term cloud file storage. But for now, he writes, "the average person is probably better off with something like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive, at least at this juncture." Via Aaron Davis.

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Neural nets are not "slightly conscious," and AI PR can do with less hype
Last Week in AI, 2022/02/21

Obviously, if we mean 'conscious like you or I', then neural nets are not conscious, because they're not like you or I. But that's not what OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever was talking about when he tweeted that large neural nets may be “slightly conscious.” It goes to the nature of consciousness. If, like me, you think that consciousness just is experience, then even a neural network can be conscious, albeit in a very limited fashion, not even equivalent to the consciousness of a worm. And if experience is just the stimulation of connected entities, then it's not wrong to say that everything possesses some sort of rudimentary consciousness. I'm fine with that. To me, it's a much easier proposition to defend than the one that says that by virtue of some special feature or another, only humans can be conscious.

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