OLDaily

The Free, The Nerd, The Disunited or Just One King of the Metaverse?
Pernille Tranberg, DataEthics, 2022/09/05

This post summarizes a white paper from the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (the paper is locked behind a spamwall requiring you subscribe to their newsletter). It's interesting because of the summaries of four possible futures of the metaverse: the free 'verse, the nerd, The disunited or one Metaverse to rule them all. The article projects some version of the latter two. "The open-source community has fallen on hard times because authorities demand governance and certification that the decentralised open-source organisations find it difficult to live up to, such as checking all content against copyright and trademark violations and policing forums against hate speech and fake news. Most successful open-source systems have been de-facto acquired by commercial interests that can afford to handle the complex and extensive regulations." I find this a very interesting assertion.

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Where Do Memes Come From? The Top Platforms From 2010-2022
Aidan Walker, Know Your Meme, 2022/09/05

This is a fascinating exploration of the sources of memes (with numerous examples) over the last dozen years. It is a progression that evolves from YouTube and 4chan in 2010 to TikTok and Twitter in 2022. The article also looks at the evolution of individual memes over that time, such as the development of Rage Comics. " Rage Comics, like the oral tradition which produced the Iliad, are still vibrant and alive, albeit in forms their original creators might never have anticipated: memes like Cover Yourself in Oil have kept the story of Rage Comics developing into the TikTok era."

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The Future of Assessment
SchoolsWeek, 2022/09/05

This article links to a supplement (23 page PDF) on the future of assessment. It's a mixed bag of articles focused mostly on testing and assessment, all in partnership with NCFE ("an educational charity and leader in vocational and technical learning"). There are only a couple of mentions of artificial intelligence, one dismissive and another a more interesting reference to a system called FirstPass being used in pilot trials at Bolton College, which is likely where the real future of assessment lies. They (Bolton) write, "if we make use of natural language classification, natural language understanding and other tools a computer can indeed be taught to analyse and assess responses to an open-ended question."

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Blockchain-based Solutions for Education Credentialing System: Comparison and Implications for Future Development
Zoey Ziyi Li, Joseph K. Liu, Jiangshan Yu, Dragan Gasevic, 5th IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, 2022/09/05

According to the authors, "none of the existing blockchain initiatives in educational credentialing seems to meet their original goal of global adoption." Based on an analysis of the industry workflow, the paper (8 page PDF) "identifies six practical problems in the industry, and proposes five desired attributes of ideal credentials infrastructure." The problems are: difficulty in getting credentials recognized, damaged or tampered credentials, the cost of screening for hiring, loss of confidence in traditional credentials, identity theft, and centralized credentials governance. The attributes are: learner control, verifiability, tamper-proofing, portability, and employability-driven. The suggestion is that, properly designed, blockchain can address these issues. They offer a four-layer model for developing such a system and recommend "users involvement strategies to improve social understanding and acceptance of blockchain technology."

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Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?
Dirk Van Damme, Doris Zahner, OECD, 2022/09/05

I am somewhat frustrated by this report which argues that there is a need for higher education to address the growing need for "critical thinking and problem solving" skills in the workplace with no real statement of what those are. Maybe there are parts missing from the online publication (the PDFs are locked behind a paywall - maybe organizations that call for "more transparency about the skills students acquire" and complain "this has not been a strength of most higher education systems" should rethink their pay-to-view policy). There's more information in cartoon form and in OECD's skills for 2030 document. It's interesting that universities resisted the OECD study with the result that this report only "reports on the work pursued between 2016 and 2021 to assess critical thinking and written communication, and associated skills in higher education institutions in six countries."

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