OLDaily

Who’ll Pay for Public Access to Federally Funded Research?
Susan D'Agostino, Inside Higher Ed, 2022/09/12

Inside Higher Ed (IHE) is paywalled, but I have 2 of 5 free page views left, and I'll use one to demonstrate why something like this isn't worth paying for. In this article author Susan D'Agostino outlines why publishers are "expressed concern" over the U.S. government's open access mandate for federally funded research. The article cites without irony an objection from Ithaka (think: JSTOR): "If I can get $1 million from a grant maker, do I use $100,000 [of that sum] to pay for another postdoc or to pay for open-access publishing charges?" What, like that's the only way to provide open access to research results? Seriously? Here's a better plan (and this plan has been around for decades): take the money you've been spending on book and journal purchases, and instead spend it on institutional archives, then share your archive with everybody. That's how you pay for open access (and save a bundle in the process).

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Mediating mediation
Philip Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2022/09/12

I studied mediation practices as a member of a conflict resolution group at the University of Alberta in 1990 or so (applications ranged from labour negotiations, responding to sexual harassment, and interpersonal conflict) and employed what I learned numerous times over the years. So whatever may be Philip Kerr's specific criticisms of the MiLLaT (Mediation in Language Learning and Teaching) guides for Language Teachers (here and here), I would certainly take issue with his reduction of the terms used to describe mediation as 'group work' and 'writing'. I'm also concerned that "a selection of the activities suggested in MiLLaT" leaves him "wondering what some of this has to do with mediation" because - from my perspective - it's pretty easy to draw the connection between the skills being developed and the actual practice of mediation. Now it may be that merging mediation training with a language teaching is maybe not the best idea in the world. Each is hard enough on its own. That said, I think that for the small of funding (€80K) they received, the MiLLaT  group did a decent job.

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Most Students Are Not Coming Back to Class So Get Used to It
Tom Worthington, Higher Education Whisperer, 2022/09/12

"Victoria has made a pitch to absent international students to return," writes Tom Worthington. He suggests "this is domed to failure, and counterproductive" because it "signals to potential students that Australia's higher education system is inflexible, unwilling to cater to student's needs, and that our academics don't understand that things have changed." I'm not sure how true this is, but it's somewhat true, and probably going to become more true over time as people find they miss the good things about being online. Where is it not true? Well, in the intangibles - it's a great experience to travel to another country for a few months or years, even if this does not show up on the transcripts. Seeing how things really are, as compared to what you had previously believed, leads you to reassess the state of your knowledge and how you learn generally.

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The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us
Charles Arthur, Social Warming, 2022/09/12

The main point of this article is that "we're unready for the coming deluge of video, audio, photos and even text generated by machine learning to grab and hold our attention." I would hasten to add that this includes learning materials. This article draws together a series of examples, many of which we've previously seen here, documenting this trend. But as Charles Arthur warns, "conceiving what will happen when things scale up is really, really difficult. We can see a lone tree and grasp it; but imagining how a forest of them will change the ecosystem is incredibly hard." Most of what we've talked about here for the last two decades - learning management, instructional design, open content, etc. - may quickly become irrelevant.

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Introducing Multiverse Degrees
Multiverse, 2022/09/12

I just want to point to this and add the largest eye-roll I can in printed form. "Multiverse has been granted new Degree Awarding Powers, giving us the ability to issue Multiverse Degrees." I'm not sure who would have granted them such "powers" - the front page says "the Office for Students" but the article doesn't mention them - but I can say that the business community and investors are certainly on board. No doubt virtual and extended reality have a role to play in education. I've flown in a full-size virtual helocopter and performed VR neurosurgery and am convinced. But it's one thing to name yourself 'Multiverse' and quite another to deliver on what that word suggests. Some companies labeling themselves 'Multiverse' are getting far ahead of themselves, this being one.

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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
Carlos Fenollosa, 2022/09/12

To be clear, the author's experience is exactly my experience as well, which is why today my personal email routes through Gmail and my mailing list is distributed using Mailgun. "The era of distributed, independent email servers is over. Email deliverability is deliberately nerfed by Big Tech...  Hellbanning everybody except for other big email providers is lazy and conveniently dishonest. It uses spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition. Nowadays, if you want to build services on top of email, you have to pay an email sending API which has been blessed by others in the industry. One of them. This concept may sound familiar to you. It's called a racket." I've been through this. Everybody gets flagged eventually, because they ban entire IP blocks, not individual servers. Once you are flagged, you cannot get it reversed. It's an instant lifetime ban without appeal. What a scam.

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