OLDaily

Prevalence and Characteristics of Manipulative Design in Mobile Applications Used by Children
Jenny Radesky, Alexis Hiniker, Caroline McLaren, et al., JAMA Network, 2022/06/22

Stories like this just make me sign with exasperation. Of all the things we could be doing with technology and we get this: "Preschool-aged children, especially those from low-income homes, often exposed to sneaky ads and other tactics aiming to profit from their game playing." Here's the link to the full study (11 page PDF) that finds dark pattern tactics such as "parasocial pressure, time pressure, navigation constraints, and lures" used to "prolong gameplay, prompt children to re-engage with the app, exert purchase pressure, or make them watch ads."

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Good online learning – affordances and the online shift
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2022/06/22

This post concludes a series of posts that looked at groupwork, asynchronous delivery, learning design, assessment, resources, and now affordances and ther online shift. Martin Weller offers here what I think is a good take: "consider what you can do differently online rather than just replicating f2f". I think this is important. People often talk about designing ed tech based on use cases or problems to be solved, but I find that these are often rooted in existing practice. What new technology affords us is the opportunity to go beyond existing practice and do things we haven't been able to do before.

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Canvas will let students connect to health services directly from the LMS
Emily Bamforth, EdScoop, 2022/06/22

I once had a conversation with a very good developer who said, and I quote, "calendars are solved". But no, calendars are not solved - I still can't share calendar data from home and work to have a single seamless calendar, and the same sort of problem afflicts anyone working in closed proprietary systems like institutional LMSs. Against this background, being able to share calendar data between two closed proprietary systems is a big deal. But what we want and need is a way to access our own calendar data without having to be inside some closed system. This is actually a hard problem, because these systems usually deal with sensitive and proprietary data. But 'Canvas, and TimelyMD share data' isn't the way to deal with it (especially in a privatized health care sector that has incentives to monetize personal data, as in the U.S.).

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Flawed AI makes robots racist, sexist
Jill Rosen, Hub, 2022/06/22

According to this post, this study "is believed to be the first to show that robots loaded with an accepted and widely used model operate with significant gender and racial biases." It's certainly not the first AI to show such traits; there are many examples. I'm not sure why putting the AI into a robot body should make any difference. Anyhow, this study is making the rounds, so yeah, evil robots. "We're at risk of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots but people and organizations have decided it's OK to create these products without addressing the issues." I don't think anyone thinks it's OK, and what's important here isn't the study itself but the traction it's getting.

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https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/pocket/reflecting-on-10-years-of-time-well-spent-with-pocket/
Matt Koidin, dist://ed, 2022/06/22

Mozilla's Pocket is one of my go-to tools as I prepare my daily newsletter. I use it as a staging area - I'll read RSS feeds, email newsletters, discussion boards, social media, etc., and save interesting links for future consideration using Pocket. I'll then go through my saved articles to decide what to write about in OLDaily. Not I post everything goes into Pocket, but most things do. Curious? I can't share from Pocket directly, but I've set it up with IFTTT to feed saved links into a throwaway Tumblr blog - think of it as OLDaily uncommented and unfiltered.

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Your AI pair programmer
GitHub, 2022/06/22

GitHub has announced the general availability of Copilot, an AI tool that integrates with the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor and suggests lines of code and even entire functions, based on context and input. "Trained on billions of lines of code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages." I haven't tried it yet but I will. This would be key: "Generating code suggestions from comments: you can describe something you want to do using natural language within a comment, and GitHub Copilot will suggest the code to accomplish your goal." I would imagine it's less reliable with a less popular language like Perl, but we'll see. It's free for students and some open source projects, but reasonably priced otherwise. This sort of project has been a long-time ambition for Microsoft and if it actually works this time could have a significant and widespread social impact.

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Cornerstone acquires SumTotal, marking ‘the end of an era’
Ave Rio, Chief Learning Officer, 2022/06/22

Cornerstone acquired Saba in 2020 and EdCast last March. Now it acquires SumTotal for a mere $200 million. I mention this here for the sole purpose of quoting Donald Clark: "The lights are going out in the LMS world, one by one, as the platform market moves on to more dynamic systems and wipes out some of the older tech. These acquisitions are about defenestrating competitors and customer acquisition... Skillsoft, fresh out of bankruptcy (sorry restructuring) just want you to buy buckets of courses - they're part of that old world."

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Workforce Wanted: Data Talent for Social Impact
data.org, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, 2022/06/22

This report (88 page PDF) focuses on what it calls the the data for social impact (DSI) sector, though its findings could be more broadly applied. The focus is to "bring visibility to an emerging pool of talent: data professionals focused on social impact in developing contexts" and to consider how to "accelerate this labor market segment, particularly when it comes to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA)." Because this is an emerging sector, there is limited capacity in traditional institutions, and there is concern that the "proliferation of non-traditional training models, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), lack evidence of efficacy." The advice, therefore, is no surprise: "invest in applied learning and stronger links to professional placement and advancement" and "coordinate complementary efforts... to advance DSI as a field." Via Inge de Waard.

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