OLDaily

An Alt-Ac's publishing dilemma
Apostolos Koutropoulos, 2022/09/19

My interest in submitting formal academic publications is pretty minimal, precisely because of the overhead demanded as documented here, though unlike Apostolos Koutropoulos my employer does have an expectation that I author a few every year. And it's this separation between 'academic' and what he calls here 'alt-ac' that draws my attention. I think that it's important that what we consider 'academic' work be seen as part of - and continuous with - all other knowledge and information work. From my perspective, contributions such as blog posts, newsletters and correspondance, data collections and curation, etc., all play a role. As academic becomes more open, the idea of 'post-publication review' takes on a more prominent role, and with that there's no real distinction between an article published in an 'exclusive' publication, and an equally important comment posted on a web page. It's all one network.

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Five-year campaign breaks science’s citation paywall
Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature, 2022/09/19

This is an important milestone. "The more than 60 million scientific-journal papers indexed by Crossref — the database that registers DOIs, or digital object identifiers, for many of the world's academic publications — now contain reference lists that are free to access and reuse. The milestone, announced on Twitter on 18 August, is the result of an effort by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched in 2017." To this point, commercial publishers held a stranglehold over citation indices. "Free access to citations enables researchers to identify research trends, lets them conduct studies on which areas of research need funding, and helps them to spot when scientists are manipulating citation counts." Crossref is creating what it calls the 'research nexus', "a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society." (Contrast this vision with that of the Network State).

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What Can Decentralized Organizations Accomplish in Education?
Vriti Saraf, Mike Peck, Getting Smart, 2022/09/19

We need, I think, to be careful to distinguish between decentralized and democratic. I don't think this article is that careful. The article makes two key points: "Democratized organizations can align incentives for all stakeholders to improve outcomes," and "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) are paving the way to change how learning operates." The authors depict educational organizations (like, say, school boards) as being undemocratic in the sense that decisions are made 'top down'. Thus we read "political demands, broken funding models, and poor teacher training using standardized curricula prevented schools from focusing on students." I won't argue that there are not issues. But creating a decentralized educational organization does not introduce democracy, it eliminates it. Here's how it operates: "An action with precise rules enables a reaction without the need for a central governing authority or middle man." But the whole point of democracy is to have a governing authority. If it's not accountable to the people, it's not democratic. (This is the same sort of thinking that we see behind 'The Network State', and suffers from the same flaws).

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Attention is not a commodity
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2022/09/19

Doc Searls responds to a post from Scott Galloway comparing human attention to oil. "The scale of the world's largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention," writes Galloway. His column is intended to serve as a warning about external governments seeking to undermine national interests or domestic companies who don't care what damage they cause. Searls takes an ethical stance in his response. "My point here is that reducing humans to beings who are only attentive—and passively so—is radically dehumanizing," he writes, "and it is important to call that out. It's the same reductionism we get with the word 'consumers.'" Well, yes, it is, but this addresses mostly the style of the message, I think, and not the content. Do we need to be concerned about how companies seek to grab and monetize attention? As an educator, I would say that we do. How to respond? Searls advises that we should build tools and services to develop an intention economy.

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For God and 'The Network State': The crypto elite's endgame
Hirsh Chitkara, Protocol, 2022/09/19

According to Protocol, Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State is "a blueprint that, right or wrong, will inform how powerful tech leaders interact with governments for years to come." It suggests that individuals can organize themselves into a single (blockchain-based) network independent of traditonal nation-states. The appeal here is to the employment of blockchain mechanisms to promote and enforce the objectives of the state, and the suggestion is that they will become large enough, and organized enough, to negotiate for their own autonomy. I don't think this is how networks actually work, nor how they should work. To me, it reads like a new sort of authoritarianism, one that does not recognize the inherent interdependence among all states, and suggests instead that a particular population (of mostly wealthy white men) can opt out of governance by the rest of us, and (presumably) exert its power over us. Not interested.

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A revised application of cognitive presence automatic classifiers for MOOCs: a new set of indicators revealed?
Yuanyuan Hu, Claire Donald, Nasser Giacaman, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2022/09/19

The authors developed and tested a model to identify cognitive presence in a small for-credit course. They then applied the model to a larger scale MOOC and found "moderate level agreement". The interesting result of the study was that "the classifiers for cognitive presence developed for one discipline was not sufficiently generic to use in the others." It could be because "the different vocabularies and collocations used in each discipline may confuse the machine learning algorithm since most of the classification features that we used were linguistic features."

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