OLDaily

Social networking, back in your hands
2022/05/03

The really useful part of this website is the video (ironically hosted on YouTube) explaining what the fediverse is. It's a pretty good explanation of a complex topic. The site also has a partial listing of fediverse projects and mobile apps and a mock-up of a search function (it looks like you can actually enter a search term, but it only works on a few predefined terms) to find people to follow according to their interests. The fediverse itself is the network of products and services that are connected by ActivityPub, a W3C standard for sending messages and following people. What it needs most, though, is a widely used way to 'log on as' your federated ID, the way you can today 'log on with Google'. See more here. See also this thread on Hacker News.

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Narrow Mental Content
Curtis Brown, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022/05/03

According to this article, "A (mental) state with content is a state that represents some part or aspect of the world; its content is the way it represents the world as being." And "A narrow content of a particular state is a content of that state... that does not depend at all on the individual's environment." For example, when Descartes says "I think, therefore, I am," the notion of the self would count as narrow content, because it is a mental state that represents something, but which does not depend on any external environment. The idea of narrow mental content is important because, if there is no narrow mental content, then all mental content depends on the individual's environment, leading to a sort of mental determinism. This article looks at the concept in all its permutations. To my own mind, this whole argument is a reductio - there is no notion of mental content that is coherent.

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Truly public spaces are not for sale
Paul Keller, Open Future, 2022/05/03

This is an opinion article by Paul Keller and you can see where it is headed from the title. "If Musks' attempt to buy Twitter should teach us one thing it is that democratic societies must invest into truly public spaces that are not subject to centralised ownership." The key question for us in this argument is as follows: ought we to consider schools as analagous to the public square? I always think of Rousseau in this context, who argues that if we are government by a wealthy minority, this minority will act to serve its own intrerests, at the expense of society at large. Keller argues "We need a new type of public institution that distributes the provision of interoperable public spaces across a wide spectrum of public institutions, civic initiatives and ultimately gives their contributors a stake in their governance." Does this, though, give us the governance we seek?

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From Access to Engagement: Building a Digital Media Literacy Strategy for Canada
Samantha McAleese, Kara Brisson-Boivin, MediaSmarts, 2022/05/03

This post summarizes a report (35 page PDF) from MediaSmarts with Digital Public Square on the foundation of a digital media strategy for Canada. It's based on foundational commitments that "emphasize the importance of digital media literacy for everyone, help build a case for a national strategy that facilitates empowerment, and emphasize a whole-of-society approach to digital media literacy." My own perspective is that this report addresses people almost exclusively as consumers of digital media who must be simultaneously empowered to access it and protected from its worst effects. It's not that this is bad, but that it is so incomplete.

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Device adds feelings to lips in virtual reality
Byron Spice, Futurity, 2022/05/03

OK, I never thought I'd have to write this, but: I do not want a VR device that stimulates feelings in my lips. Why would it even come up? "This effect is achieved by using multiple ultrasound-generating modules, or transducers... the ultrasound waves produced by one transducer can interfere with those of other transducers—constructively, to amplify the waves, or destructively, to nullify them... In this case, they targeted those points of peak amplitude on the lips, teeth, and tongue. " No. No. Just... no.

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Fine-Tuned BERT Model for Large Scale and Cognitive Classification of MOOCs
Hanane Sebbaq, Nour-eddine El Faddouli, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2022/05/03

There's a lot of creativity at work in this article (21 page PDF). Essentially, the objective is to create a mechanism of classifying MOOCs in order to be able to say something about their quality, but there are no good frameworks to speak of. So the authors took a BERT classifier, trained it on Bloom's Taxonomy, and turned it loose on some MOOCs. The authors dive deep into how this is done, but the upshot is that they come out with an analysis of 2394 learning objectives based on Bloom's, evaluating various applications of BERT to perform the work, resulting in "a model for the automatic classification of MOOCs according to their pedagogical approaches."

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Do We Know Ourselves Only Through Our Relationships?
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, 2022/05/03

For me the answer to the question is 'no' though with Dave Pollard the question of why I even write at all is a good one. He writes that "attention and appreciation and reassurance are inevitably a part of what motivates us to write in public 'spaces'." But now, he says, "I now write my blog basically to think things through for myself, to 'see my reactions placed before me for inspection'." I'm a bit different, I think. I see myself through my experiences, not my relationships, and my desire to create is borne out of a desire to share what I see and feel, not to define and shape who I am. Either way, it's interesting to reflect on these thoughts, because it's the age-old question: where is the space for self, how does it become what it is, and where does it go (if anywhere) when we're done?

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Educational data journeys: Where are we going, what are we taking and making for AI?
Sarah K.Howard, et.al., Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2022/05/03

Educational systems today are awash in data, but there isn't yet a good way to document and discuss how data is used. To address that, this paper offers a framework based on the concept of the 'data journey' in such environments (to my way of thinking, akin to a 'data workflow'). The framework is based on four "key dynamics of educational data journeys: the interrelationship between data work, power, identities, and literacies." It then describes the 'journey' of Australian National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data as involving stages of production, processing and distribution. Very clear, and well worth reading, but be sure to compare this work with similar work in other contexts: machine learning operations (MLOps), big data analytics (figure 1), and statistical analyses (figure 3).

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