OLDaily

Stand Against Proctorio's SLAPP - Update 23
Ian Linkletter, 2022/07/20

So this is nice news. Ian Linkletter writes, "We won today... Proctorio's claim of "circumvention of technological protection measures" has been dismissed. Proctorio's claim of copyright infringement for one screenshot of the "Proctorio Academy" has also been dismissed." Nice.

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Privacy-preserving user verification for Web3
Dock, 2022/07/20

Another small step closer. "In Web2, users sign in with centralized identifiers like email addresses and social media profiles. In Web3, users create and own their Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). DIDs are cryptographically verifiable identifiers stored on the blockchain, and independent of any organization. DIDs contain no personal data or wallet information." The way this works is, if you log on using your Web3 ID you are presented with a QR code. Scan the QR code with your phone, and your identity provider sends your credential to the service. You can use it to perform authentication tasks (verify age, membership in an organization, possession of a degree or credential, payment of a token) anonymously. Here's live video (warning: long, boring) of me trying to make it all work.

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Why BeReal is breaking out
Casey Newton, Platformer, 2022/07/20

BeReal isn't "breaking out", it's being promoted, and it is more likely to be a flash in the pan than anything significant, but it creates a good opportunity to make a point, which is what Casey Newton is doing here. The point is this: "BeReal is simply applying what we have learned about kickstarting new social networks over the past two decades. A creative constraint is essential — think Twitter's 140 characters, or Vine's 6-second loops — and BeReal's two-minute countdown timer has inspired similar ingenuity. The company's early focus on making inroads with college students is also straight out of the growth marketing handbook." But also: it forces users to be viral, sharing photos with friends, which means you have to have some...

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Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
Not Just Bikes, YouTube, 2022/07/20

Not Just Bikes is an excellent video channel that analyzes the dysfunctional nature of urban design in Canada and the U.S. and how it makes conditions worse for the people who live there. One thing it touches on in this video is the phenomenon of parents driving children to school. Now I don't want to sound like an old crank, but when I was young, that was exceptionally rare, and it still feels weird to me to see a row of cars waiting at a school to pick up kids (it also makes walking to and from school a lot more dangerous). But the deeper implication is how it impacts children's independence. And it makes me ask, is a car an example of educational technology? Do we properly question the use of the car in education?

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SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs
Jon Udell, O'Reilly, 2022/07/20

This is an article touting a product called Steampipe, but ignore that. The value here is the really lucid account of structured query language (SQL), the specification widely used to retrieve data from databases. Jon Udell argues that the app is great because it converts API calls to SQL tables. Treating remote applications using the same logic you would use to work with a database is maybe a good idea (though keep in mind that a single API call that returns data in JSON will require multiple tables). Understanding what's going on is what's interesting here, and that's what the description of SQL makes easy. It helps the reader see how data is piped from one query to the next to the next to do complex things, not just in SQL but in more advanced tools like Pandas.

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AI in education – what can we expect in the future?
Emilie Hayter, Technology Enhanced Learning, University of Sussex, 2022/07/20

This article references an AI technology maturity model for education ending with a scenario in which "AI has transformed the teaching and learning experience" where the "tutor" is freed from all routine tasks and the learning experience is "fully personalized". But it also (as do so many similar posts) focuses on the limitations. "AI tools will only be as good as the data they're fed," writes Emilie Hayter. Well, yeah - but imagine, for a moment, that the data is perfect. Then what? We're still looking at this through the lens of the provider. "In relation to this, using sensitive data related to individual learners requires university systems to have technical robustness and effective data governance." But suppose that I, as a learner, can have my own AI and can feed it everything (and have it learn from the external world). Then what?

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