OLDaily

Disagreement and Values in Science
Zina B. Ward, Routledge Handbook on Philosophy of Disagreement, 2022/06/06

Why do scientists and theorists disagree? It's not a matter of the evidence, which may be the same on all sides. It may, however, be an epistemic question: should we prefer simpler theories? Unifying theories? Or, it may be a non-epistemic question, a matter of how we interpret theories. This article considers two: the descriptive gap argument, and the logical gap argument. Let's focus on the second, and in particular, whether we should apply Morgan's canon, "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." Now I ask (where the author doesn't): why are we so likely to apply this principle to animals and computers, but so reluctant to apply it to humans? Do such questions pique you? Then do read this clear and well-reasoned article. Image: Psicologia y Mente.

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Open Source Encryption Still Rocks!
LMS Pulse, 2022/06/06

Every few days (because I have a lot of websites) I receive another notification from LetsEncrypt that my site security certificates have successfully updated. I never take this for granted. These certificates are what makes it possible for people to browse my corner of the web securely. They're your guarantee that the site you're reading actually came from me, and isn't someone trying to pretend to be me to, say, collect data or solicit input from anyone. LetsEncrypt is a free service, which is important, because certification services are otherwise expensive (and part of the reason  people depend on third party sites like Blogger or Twitter rather than hosting their own). If you don't know about LetsEncrypt you should read this article and learn.

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KQED launches free media literacy training course
Haje Jan Kamps, TechCrunch, 2022/06/06

What I like about these courses (there's actually a set of ten of them) is that they're free and they appear to be of decent quality (I signed up to take a look and do a quick evaluation for myself). I don't like that you have to register for them with an email address. I imagine I'll be receiving prompts and reminders for the rest of my life now.

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Alt CV for DS106 daily create and MyFest22
Christina Hendricks, You're the Teacher, 2022/06/06

This distracted me for the morning (I am way too easily distracted). Today's Daily Create is to "Introduce yourself with a creative alternative CV"–"something more creative than an dry traditional CV." So even though I don't follow DS106's Daily Create (for this exact reason) and am not participating in MyFest22, I couldn't resist creating my own alternative c.v.

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How an AI tutor more than tripled my school’s literacy rates during the pandemic
Jaclyn Brown Wright, eSchool News, 2022/06/06

This article reads like a product endorsement for an AI tutor called Amira (by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It may well be; the article doesn't say one way or another. Amira "listens to children read and provides micro-interventions at the phonetic level just like a real reading interventionist in real time, one by one, for every child simultaneously." I'm not sure pronouncing words correctly constitutes 'literacy' but the main point here is that if and when AI tutor tools produce results, they will be used. That's the future of learning technology we should bank on. It's a pretty easy prediction.

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