OLDaily

The Good Web
Ethan Zuckerman, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022/06/30

"What well-meaning regulatory proposals lack is a vision of social media that could be good for society," writes Ethan Zuckerman. But what would a proposal that leads to a 'Good Web' look like? Some argue that better regulation of centralized media could do it. "Large platforms have demonstrated the ability to combat some of the worst content in social media at scale." Others argue that alternatives sites should exist for deplatformed users. Still others, advocates of Web3, say nobody should regulate the internet. "The problems of Web 2.0—notably the concentration of corporate power—will be undone by a novel system of token-based democracy." Zuckerman argues "there's very little evidence that adding market mechanisms to social media makes things better." Finally, he says, "there are advocates for small networks" such as PubHub, a new network in the Netherlands.

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Games for Teaching/Learning Quantum Mechanics: A Pilot Study with High-School Students
Maria Luisa Chiofalo, Caterina Foti, Marisa Michelini, Lorenzo Santi, Alberto Stefanel, Education Sciences, 2022/06/30

The bad news is that I was utterly unable to play the game - there's an android app but it only plays classical TicTacToe unless you pay the $3.50 (Canadian) but it isn't accepting payments. And the online version doesn't work right. But - the idea of using games to teach quantum principles is a really good one. Quantum mechanics is officially very weird and as this article (37 page PDF) says, "teachers must overcome the traditional narrative approach." It doesn't work to just explain quantum concepts; people have to play with them to get a sense of how they work (the same is probably true of traditional mechanics, but we've all had lots of experience playing with that in our everyday lives). There's also a nice blog post from a couple of years ago describing the game.

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Byju’s Makes Its Move to Acquire 2U
Phil Hill, Phil on EdTech, 2022/06/30

This post covers some uninteresting information about 2U's market cap and the possible billion dollar acquisition of the company by Byju's (which itself just laid off hundreds of staff). But then it gets into a more interesting discussion of the attempt "to define a new online education platform market that relies on network effects enabled by consumer-level flywheels (i.e., beyond the heavy digital marketing based primarily around institutional brands)."

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Data training videos from Statistics Canada
2022/06/30

I just thought people might be interested in these resources:

• Data ethics: An introduction
• Statistics 101: Confidence intervals
• FAIR data principles: What is FAIR?
• The Data Journey: What you need to know for successful navigation
• What is Data? An Introduction to Data Terminology and Concepts
• Types of Data: Understanding and Exploring Data
• Data Quality in Six Dimensions

They're pretty basic but together form a nice primer on data, data ethics, and data management. Data devoitees can dive into online lectures much more detailed webinars.

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