OLDaily

Pressbooks sustainability question
2022/08/01

Here's another object lesson in being careful when you choose your technology provoder. Justina writes, "At my university, we do not have an enterprise license for Pressbooks, but we did purchase about 20 "Individual Faculty" licenses a few years ago. These were advertised at the time as perpetual; that is, $99 for life. Well, apparently that life is ending on 9/29/22. Our faculty are faced with three choices: 1) opt in to the new platform for $500/year, 2) move their e-book to a different platform, or 3) let it be deleted on 9/29/22." Ouch. But fortunately, PressBooks is open source, and the books can be transferred to another location. If PressBooks weren't open source, the university would be stuck.

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E-learning is a burden for the deaf and hard of hearing
Filipa M. Rodrigues, Ana Maria Abreu, Ingela Holmström, Ana Mineiro, Scientific Reports, 2022/08/01

I was drawn to this item (10 page PDF) because I would have expected the opposite, based on what I have heard from people's experiences with online conferencing. The authors argue that "faced with higher fatigue rates and lower performances, the DHH population might be at disadvantage in the several dimensions of academic challenges, leading to further inequalities and constraints that affect well-being and participation opportunities." But the study is, in my view, significantly flawed. The e-learning design employed was, to my view, idiosyncratic, throwing as many different visual elements as possible into a small screen (illustrated). But more significantly, while we would expect the study to compare online and offline learning for DHH students, it in fact studies online learning for DHH and groups of hearing participants. So I would take the results of this study with a very large grain of salt.

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Unleashing the power of Open Educational Practices (OEP) through Artificial Intelligence (AI): where to begin?
Ahmed Tlili, Daniel Burgos, Interactive Learning Environments, 2022/08/01

Using AI to support open educational practices can be a blessing and a curse, write the authors. "A blessing, as AI-based OEP will help provide more adaptive and engaging learning and teaching experiences; while a curse, as researchers and practitioners need to pay an extra eye to the challenges merging from both areas together (i.e. copyright, privacy, and data normalization)." Outlining the topic briefly, this article (9 page PDF) introduces a collection of papers (and includes a call for more papers) on "how responsible AI in open education (i.e. the use of AI with OEP) should be designed and developed." Image: UNESCO.

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Bonfire’s latest trick shows Google+ circles came a decade early
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/08/01

Bonfire is a decentralized social network application, much like Mastodon. Circles were a way of subdividing your friends or contacts into subcategories, such as 'family', 'work', 'baseball', each with their own permissions. Twitter adopted something similar back in May. The main issue with Circles is that they're a pain to maintain. Who wants to go through their friends list sorting them? "What I'm hoping," says Doug Belshaw, "is that this bridges the gap between social networking as we know it (e.g. Mastodon, Twitter) and group chats (e.g. Signal, Telegram)." I don't think this is it, though I think there is certainly an opportunity for someone somewhere to get online group formation right. I think members need to be more or less self-selected from an eligibility pool, not assigned, and management needs to be fluid and seamless.

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