OLDaily

From Trump Nevermind babies to deep fakes: DALL-E and the ethics of AI art
Josh Taylor, The Guardian, 2022/06/21

"A neural network that can transform a text phrase into an artwork is transforming our understanding of creative thinking," writes Josh Taylor, but it is raising a host of ethical issues. "The nature of the neural networks in the AI makes it difficult to prevent DALL-E from creating offensive imagery." All you can do is try to filter the input and filter the output, but these already allow a lot of scope for content that's over the edge. He also worries about "the potential for text-to-image AI to replace jobs in graphic design." There will be much more design, and a lot of creativity, he says. "But graphic designers might have less work themselves." See also: Dave Truss.

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What We Now Know: Digital Transformation Reaches a Point of Clarity
Thomas Erl, InfoQ, 2022/06/21

This article is talking about digital transformations for things like banks and such, but the lessons are equally applicable to education, especially as they cut across a lot on what has become canon in our field. For example: "a digital transformation is about more than transforming business and technology." You're not just doing the same thing you were, only digitally. Digital transformation "can push an organization out of its comfort zone to transform its internal structure and hierarchy to break down product-centric department silos so as to enable the extent of collaboration and cooperation needed to establish true customer-centricity." Sorry about the business-speak, but you get the idea, right? It's a response to those who always say "it's about pedagogy first" that "you're not even doing pedagogy any more." There are similar points; they take some interpretation to apply to an educational context, but the effort is worthwhile.

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Engagement and the Survival of the University
Michael Feldstein, Argos Education, 2022/06/21

This is a very large headline for what is actually a fairly narrow article. The premise is this: "students still see value in college but are dropping out because they come to question the value of the particular college experience they are having." In response, Michael Feldstein suggests, creating educational experiences that are more engaging may be the ticket. "Our ability to support that kind of educational experience must include the ability to watch (and help) them do more than just answer multiple-choice questions." And he describes a product line that does that using condition-action rules to toggle different types of feedback.

My father always encouraged us to build stuff like clubhouses or treehouses and such, but also that they should eventually be taken down, out of respect for the neighbours. I would often respond by taking it down and rebuilding it, thinking that if only I made it better, it would be allowed to remain. This never worked. Even if it was better, it was still past its time, and had to go. That's what this feels like. It's scripted engagement, which is basically the same model used in the old programmed learning texts. Out of respect for the neighbours, it's time to move on.

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Indigenization Guide: Appropriate Use of Indigenous Content
Jaime Caldwell, BCcampus, 2022/06/21

"When selecting resources for your curriculum, it is important to incorporate authentic Indigenous resources," writes Jaime Caldwell. But this raises some tough questions. "What does it mean to be authentic? And how can such resources be incorporated in a respectful way?... it can sometimes be hard to know if efforts to bring Indigenous content and pedagogy into curriculum are a respectful inclusion or an instance of cultural appropriation." This article offers a way to reflect on such questions. It includes (and I'm paraphrasing here) involving Indigenous community experts, integrating the activity within  Indigenous pedagogical approaches, and recognizing spiritual significance by following proper protocols and values. The article includes a number of examples that illustrate these principles. See also: Decolonize First.

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How to Make the World Safe for Autonomy; or, How to Fodor-Kitcher an Albert-Loewer
Marc Lange, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2022/06/21

Many education theorists are non-reductive physicalists, that is, while they agree everything that exists is physical, they argue (inconsistently, in my opinion) that "there are metaphysically independent special-science laws that underwrite special-science explanations that are irreducible to the explanations supplied by physics." This article argues that the two views actually are consistent, and raises the question of whether the fundamental laws of physics are themselves irreducible to (what would be) the explanations supplied by physics. I think a lot depends on what you consider to be an explanation: if it's just probabilities, or patterns, or regularities, then sure, you get consistency, but if explanation requires a causal mechanism then the special science laws have to be reducible to that causal mechanism. Image: Hugh McCarthy.

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Course Materials for Educators
BCcampus, 2022/06/21

This is a really nice library of open educational resources created and hosted by BCcampus. Clint Lalonde writes in a Mastodon thread, "the vast majority of the heavy lifting putting this new BCcampus  #OER collection site together was done by Mel Meyers over the past year prior to her BCcampus secondment ending, as well as the BCcampus Dev/Ops team." Most of the resources are books, there is often supplementary material, and many of them are reviewed. Lalonde also writes, "we are using a headless CMS framework called Strapi. We built it from the ground up...  It will be open sourced at some point. This is just the MVP, but has some nice features including native LRMI metadata support. As a headless system, everything is accessible via an API so very flexible."

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Trading in the Rs for Ps
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2022/06/21

Alan Levine comments on what appears to have been the recent sale of Lumen Learning's OER content to Course Hero, which promptly enclosed it and used it as an advertising vehicle to sell additional paid resources. "So yeah, out with the Rights to R*5 and we start now with the Right to Profit from OER content. It's just P's all the way down," writes Levine. "If anything is a call to detach from profit oriented platforms and reclaim the web for your own, well this call has been screaming for a long time."

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