OLDaily

Connectivism: My PhD journey in few lines
Alaa AlDahdouh, 2022/05/24

This article recounts a fascinating research program based in a solid understanding of connectivism and a desire to push at its limits and determine whether there's actually anything of value there. The article is a brisk overview of Alaa AlDahdouh's journey, punctuated with the publications he produced along the way. In the end, he argues that Connectivism "provides a valuable framework for interpreting how the higher education students learn," however, "connectivism suits only those students who are possessing suitable level of digital literacy skills, who are self-dependent, self-regulated, and know what they want." I wouldn't disagree with this, nor with the more specific criticisms her offers. Do read his personal statement at the end, because this is so often how academia rewards innovative research.

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Facebook Working on a Udemy Competitor?
Manoel Cortes Mendez, Class Central, 2022/05/24

Oh this is interesting. Manoel Cortes Mendez writes, "I got an email from Facebook offering $300 'for teaching your classes on Facebook.'... Facebook is experimenting with letting individuals offer courses through their platform, much like Udemy does." The program looks to be fully subscribed and Mendez has compiled a compelling account with screenshots and other information. "Facebook has the means to bootstrap an online course ecosystem," he writes. "And with its nearly 3B users, it can ensure those courses find their audience." They're not fully committed to it just yet. But for a company looking to increase its per-user revenue, learning must look like an attractive proposition.

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https://bdtechtalks.com/2022/05/23/machine-learning-undetectable-backdoors/
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2022/05/24

Other people look at an article like this and say "oh my, the tech is broken". I look at it and say "this is what's already being done to children". In this specific case, a 'backdoor' is a way of implanting secret behaviours into in a machine learning model. As a rough analogy, think of it as robot hypnosis. This article describes a way of encoding backdoors so they can only be triggered with an encrypted key, rendering them impossible for anyone else to detect. Think of it as like a hypnotist's code word. Or dog whistle. And that's a problem. And the same technique can be used when training humans. Not hypnosis, specifically, but the encoding of hidden 'backdoor' patterns into otherwise innocuous media. Like, for example, including references to 'replacement theory' as though it's a real thing into news broadcasts, learning materials, and popular cartoon television shows.

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Innovation in Higher Education. Wait, what?
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2022/05/24

So many articles on innovation follow this format. We are told that 'innovation' isn't about the creation of a new idea, it's the act of putting that idea into practice, or solving real problems. Alexandra Mihai has a good list of of what the term means, in this context. But what bothers me about this sort of article, and the discussion of what 'innovation' means, is that the meaning gets more and more specific, tending us toward content-limited problem-defined value-based commercial-foot-forward methodologies. It feels like a way of redefining what is important in research (and hence, the allocation of resources) to the business (or 'output') side of research, rather than the discovery (or 'input') side of research.

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Ethical Design Nudging Supports Autonomy and Transparency
Torben Jan Barev, DataEthics, 2022/05/24

A 'nudge' is "any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options, or significantly changing their economic incentives" and a 'privacy nudge' inclines the user toward opting for greater privacy. It is described in the first article in this mini-series. The second article considers the design process, arguing "architects should consider and assemble the ethical, legal, individual and societal standards that frame the digital nudge." This third article considers the ethics of design nudges, noting that "many individuals are nudged in a direction that supports the needs of a company, but not necessarily the needs of users." This is defined in terms of "the autonomy of the user (and) the transparency of the choice architecture." Related: Get Rid Off The Green Buttons. It's Pure Manipulation

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CORE: Our commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
2022/05/24

Based in the U.K., CORE is a large collection of academic research papers, including open access papers. Though it's based on service agreement between the Open University and Jisc, I think it can be used outside the U.K. (it gave me an API key without complaint). This post affirms COREe's commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), "a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be operated and sustained," and documents how that commitment is being maintained.

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Run functions on demand. Scale automatically.
Digital Ocean, 2022/05/24

To be clear, this isn't anything you can use right now without a lot of knowledge and patience (as the documentation would suggest). Imagine a future world, however, where you can create a web page that uses a function ('create a QR code from user input', say) that sits in the cloud. Here are some samples provided by Digital Ocean.

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