OLDaily

T. M. Scanlon on What We Owe to Each Other
T. M. Scanlon, Yascha Mounk, Persuasion, 2022/04/05

Good interview with T. M. Scanlon, the author of What We Owe to Each Other, which takes on the question  "why be moral?" He argies that "the largest number of people really do care about the aspect of morality that I'm talking about: that is, the ability to justify their actions to others." But I think there's an important distinction between this approach and one based in, say, a philosophy of care, and that's the transactional element. It's much harder, I think, to say "I don't care" than it is to say "I don't owe you anything", because when we talk about something being "owed" it's easy to fall back into an economic argument that allows you to maximize your personal gain. Morality isn't something that can be quantified, like debt, it's something that is felt, like care. Still, read the article and see whether you agree.

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A New Twist on a Publishing Scam: Ghost-authoring Book Reviews for Fun and Profit
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2022/04/05

Rick Anderson reports being asked to write book reviews that would be credited in full or in part to other authors, for which he would be paid an honorarium of $800. It's note the same as other more common forms of ghostwriting, he says, but I personally don't see the difference.

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AISEO Paraphraser
Dilyar Buzan, AISEO, 2022/04/05

Paraphrasers are getting better as AI becomes more and more capable. This product is touted as "a direct competitor to Wordtune and Quillbot." Here is an image of how the paraphaser handled an OLDaily article, reducing it to 40 words from about twice that, and perhaps more importantly, achieving a 'uniqueness' score of 80%. I'd rank the content accuracy at a similar grade (it misattributes the pandemic as the cause of the problems with hybrid learning, but is otherwise accurate). I also tested it on a 500 word article I wrote yesterday (I had to sign up for the free plan) but in this case the paraphaser failed miserably. You can see the results here. That's a good thing for teachers assigning essays. Paraphrasers will be effective within the decade, though, which really reshapes the whole discussion around plagiarism.

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Blank stares and black screens: The pitfalls of virtual learning and the challenges of post-pandemic education
Ari Gandsman, Academic Matters, 2022/04/05

Before it launched there was a chorus of warnings from experts that hybrid learning was a bad idea. Now this article is mostly anecdote, but it still seems to reinforce this warning. "Cases of students so completely and utterly lost in a virtual haze have become commonplace during the pandemic... the semester proved anything but normal—especially for those like me who taught in the hybrid format preferred by many institutions. Hybrid is an inherently flawed format for large classes, in which it is impossible to simultaneously manage virtual and in-person components."

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The Dog That Didn't Bark
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/04/05

This is one of those weird Alex Usher posts where he tries to make us believe something didn't happen when his own statistics show clearly that it did. He focuses on three predictions about access in the developing world: that private university enrollments would increase, that public institutions would become less dependent on public funding (ie., that tuition would rise), and that student loans would increase. Now he doesn't cite any actual sources making these claims (a sure sign he is making something up). But in any cases, all three things happened by his own admission, it's just the scale wasn't as pronounced as his unknown pundits claimed. Usher delivers first-class economic analysis. I don't kn ow why he feels the need to put what appears to be a politically-motivated thumb on the scale.

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