OLDaily

(Open) Educational Resources around the World
Victoria I. Marín, Laura N. Peters, Olaf Zawacki-Richter, Center for Open Education Research, 2022/09/16

This is a substantial open book built around eight detailed descriptions of open educational resources (OER) and open education in nine countries: Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Spain and Turkey. It is interesting to compare across the papers, for example, the description of the centralized Chinese system authored by Junhong Xiao and Jingjing Zhang as opposed to the decentralized Canadian approach as described by Dianne Conrad and George Veletsianos (indeed, readers will recognize most of the author names in this volume). The volume concludes with a comparison of the systems at the national, institutional and teaching level, noting how social and cultural differences between the countries has led top differences in policy and implementation.

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Pistols, pills, pork and ploughs: the structure of technomoral revolutions
Jeroen Hopster, et al., Inquiry, 2022/09/16

This paper explores "the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change." Drawing on a series of case studies, it identifies five patterns of such phenomena: redefining 'action spaces' and altering payoffs for decision-makers, destabilizing entrenched norms, creating 'moral niches', and enabling empowerment and repression. These can be described through the 'affordances' of the technology; "Affordances can... be understood as relational properties that make, for certain subjects in certain circumstances, certain actions likely." So, for example, better pistols led to a decline in duelling, the pill reduced the risks of intercourse, artificial pork made vegetarianism more palatable, and the plough influenced gender norms in agriculture. It would be interesting to explore whether similar patterns characterize changes in ethical norms in education. Image: Jeroen Hopster, Centre for Ethics and Technology.

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70-year-old quantum prediction comes true, as something is created from nothing
Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 2022/09/16

This doesn't really have anything to do with online learning, but it's a finding worthy of note: "in early 2022, strong enough electric fields were created in a simple laboratory setup leveraging the unique properties of graphene, enabling the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all." This not only illustrates that quantum physics is changing our understanding of the world, it also shows that graphene has some remarkable properties. I still think the future of technology is carbon, carbon and carbon. The image is from the article, but I found a much better quality version via ScienceBlogs.

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Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability
Cory Doctorow, Locus, 2022/09/16

I attended Cory Dotorow's talk (in person!) at the CIRA annual general meeting yesterday and this article essentially summarizes what he said at the meeting. "Here's the amazing thing that makes tech the poster child for a new anti-monopoly movement: interoperability... Why can't you switch from Facebook to a rival and still stay in touch with your friend on Facebook? It's not because of the technical limitations of networked computers. It's because Facebook won't let you." While I agree that monopoly is a problem, I don't think it ends there. I think the business model where companies are required to prioritize shareholder profit over all other concerns creates a harmful set of incentives to bend or even break the law, reduce employee wages and well-being, and contribute to wider social harms.

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