OLDaily

Ethics and Educational Technology (thoughts on #altc22 keynote)
Rob Farrow, 2022/09/26

Obviously, since I created my own Ethics, Analytics and Duty of Care course, I had an interest in what Rob Farrow had to say about ethics and education technology. I felt the work was in various respects incomplete (ethics, for example, is more than just three theories wide). Obviously he can't do much more than a surface presentation in an hour; as he says, "I think one could probably make a 10 week university course out of the bare bones of what I presented." He does point to a current tension in both ethics and education - "between the intended objectivism/universalism of traditional philosophy and the emphasis on the particular and recognition of identity in perspectives that start from acknowledging historical injustices or power differentials."  Anyhow, he offers 77 slides and some retrospective in this post, and I'll add it to my list of resources (especially the Framework for Ethical Learning Technologies (FELT), which I'll add to the pile of almost 100 similar efforts from other organizations). P.S. for those who are interested, I will be offering a full-day workshop on the topic at Online Educa Berlin in late November.

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Adobe can’t Photoshop out the fact its $20bn Figma deal is a naked land grab
John Naughton, The Guardian, 2022/09/26

I honestly don't see why a company like Adobe needs to be bigger, nor how it helps anyone (including especially essential social services like education) to have it clamp down on a potential competitor. And I like the analysis in the article: while the two applications are in different niches, Figma provides a workflow where Adobe products (and, for the moment, any others as well) may be used. It's a lot like Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. "The deal should be challenged, investigated and banned," writes John Naughton. And if it isn't, then we will know that tech companies still have little to fear from regulators."

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South Korea’s MSIT Announces Ethical Principles for Metaverse
Rupal Sharma, The Crypto Times, 2022/09/26

According to this article, "South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) has revealed the first draft of the core ethical principles for metaverse." The document (available in Korean only; I had only limited success translating it) is based on three 'values', "an intact self-identity, safe enjoyment, and sustainable prosperity." These are implemented through eight 'principles': "authenticity, reciprocity, autonomy, data protection, fairness, respect for privacy, responsibility, and above all, inclusion." I would observe that these are very similar to a lot of the ethics statements concerning artificial intelligence and analytics, and that (therefore) it is really in the details that the ethical foundations are actually revealed.

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The Implementation Stage of Microcredentials
Anne Reed, Mark F. Hobson, Lesley Voigt, Jenn Dale, 2022/09/26

This is a 'lessons learned' type of article where "several experts in the field to share lessons learned from their experiences implementing microcredential programming at their institution." Some of the insights aren't especially insightful (eg. "it has taken collaboration, research, communication, and key partnerships"). It's interesting to see the institutions rely on centralization and coordination, and in addition, "having one vendor to manage your 'supply chain' of credentialing is both a benefit and a challenge... a challenge is getting all the needed name brand products from one source." Pretty light reading, but important because it shows that the commercialization of microcredentials is well underway.

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Enrichment programs can only do so much to end systemic education injustices
Shawna Young, Hechinger Report, 2022/09/26

The key message here is that "school experiences appear to exert relatively little influence, explaining just 10 to 20 percent of the differences in student outcomes. Effective schools can mitigate social inequality, but they govern only a fraction of students' lives and eventual outcomes." What explains the rest? A variety of factors, of course, but Shawna Young points to what she calls "the opportunity embargo", which she says "encompasses all the injustices and inequalities that students and young people face outside of the classroom, such as political disenfranchisement." I don't disagree with this observation, and would add that a lot of the focus on 'educational reform' seems to serve as a distraction from the real social and political reforms needed in society. Image: Good.

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Interactive PDFs for eLearning – How and Why?
Ted Curran, 2022/09/26

It's not the approach I would choose, precisely because it takes a lot of time and skill to design interactive PDFs (enough that this article suggests you hire a vendor) but I think it's worth taking note of this incremental step in a longer-term trend, which is that content is becoming less static (and less like traditional books and articles) and more dynamic and interactive. It my feel like nothing is changing, but at a certain point the static nature of paper becomes a real liability. Meanwhile, though, authors keep writing them and publishers keep publishing them. But this is the last generation, unless for some reason we have a global technological collapse.

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