OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
Clive Thompson, UX Collective, 2022/11/29

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There was no issue yesterday because of travel, so today's Mastodon/Twitter update is a bonus double-sized edition. I'm sure the news will slow eventually... but today is not that day.

Clive Thompson begins our coverage with a good explanation of how Mastodon is designed to be anti-viral, creating necessary friction in a world-wide social network. Also: Andy Piper with a way to test Maston embeds in html content like web pages. Also, "NodeInfo is an effort to create a standardized way of exposing metadata about a server running one of the distributed social networks." Alan Levine gizmos the Daily Create on Mastodon. And bloggers should discard their Twitter meta tags, says Wouter Groeneveld.

Chris Aldrich on crediting your WordPress website when syndicating to Mastodon.  Why host a Mastodon instance, asks Miguel Guhlin: "shouldn't folks ask why when someone else does something without apparent gain or benefit to themselves?" Geoff Cain on moving to Mastodon. Tim Bray on moving to Mastodon.

Something just for me: a new instance for Ottawa (maybe we'll see many more place-based instances?). Or maybe I could join CoSocial.ca, an all Canadian Mastodon co‑operative. Something about platform co-ops on Nora Young's CBC Spark podcast.

Yanis Varoufakis discusses how Elon Musk is attempting to become a digital landlord; "The pertinent question is whether it will grant its new owner secure membership in the new techno-feudal ruling class." Another Twitter alternative, Post, tries to recreate the Twitter experience for journalists. But critics say we should not use services like Post that hate the internet (green on black text, yikes). More criticisms (naturally on a Twitter thread, so probably misinformation). Image: Xataka en español.

 

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Philosophical Disquisitions: Debating Meritocracy: Arguments For and Against
John Danaher, Philosophical Disquisitions, 2022/11/29

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This article is not only a really good summary of the considerations for and against meritocracy, it is a textbook case of how to approach an issue of this sort. And that, to me, is its real value. What it does not do is offer a one-sided argument for or against meritocracy. Readers can decide for themselves. A requirement of a presentation of this sort is a principle called the 'principle of charity' - that is, the obligation to provide the best possible case for each side. Only in this way do you appreciate the genuine merits (heh) of each point of view. The trick in journalism (including my own) is to preserve the principle of charity while still having a point of view.

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The biggest challenges facing education now and ways to meet them
George Siemens, EduResearch Matters, 2022/11/29

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The talk delivered here by George Siemens feels very similar to what I want to say this week in Lleida. It requires truly coming to grips with Artificial Intelligence. "AI presents humanity with a unique challenge that we have not faced before: an agent with intelligence that rivals our own in a growing range of domains," he says. "The accrual of inefficiencies – doing the things afforded by previous philosophies and technologies – is confronting education. How should we teach when AI is better at many cognitive tasks than we are? What should we teach when we can find and access the world's information from our phone?" Ah, but we need answers to these questions.

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View of Relationships Between Cognitive Styles and Indigenous Student' Mathematics Academic Outcomes
Murni Sianturi, Riska Suliantin, Hariani Fitrianti, Journal of Learning for Development, 2022/11/29

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I have lots of questions about this article (17 page PDF), and in particular the tiny sample size (which is not resolved by the assertion that the topic must be studied qualitatively), but at the same time it highlights to me the need to consider cognitive styles (or learning styles) in an environmental or cultural context. In the current case, the context is three different groups of Indigenous West Papuan (New Guinea) students. "Higher education students' cognitive styles significantly influenced their learning outcomes," write the authors. "This may occur because of the way teachers deliver mathematics material that is not relevant to the students' environment. Yunkaporta (2009) argues that educators often focus on linear viewpoints, a part of Western-oriented pedagogy, within school practices, which further marginalizes Indigenous students by preventing them from reconstructing their own knowledge." Learning styles scepticism, it seems to me, erases the possibility of culturally specific learning needs, which seems wrong.

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Designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy
Jane McFadyen, Laura Parker, Rachel Malic, Design in government, 2022/11/29

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This is a poster, along with background information, provided by the U.K. Home Office. "Dyscalculia (Dis - Cal - Coo - Lia) is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers. It makes it hard for someone to read, understand and work with numbers." (As a Canadian, I would pronounce it Dis - Cal - Q - Lia). The core recommendations are to "remove unnecessary numbers... leave lots of space... (and) involve people who struggle with numbers in the design process." The poster is available to download in accessible formats from the DWP Accessibility Manual.

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Is AI Generated Art Really Coming for Your Job?
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2022/11/29

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The answer to this question is "yes", or at least, "it's complicated". Every job will be impacted, and a lot of work will disappear entirely. But the point of this article is to deny deny deny. "Whoa, now. Time for a reality check," writes Matt Crosslin. "There is still an element to creativity that involves blending those influences into something else that transcends being strictly derivative of existing styles." Quite so. But why would anyone suppose AI is limited to being strictly derivative of existing styles? Techniques such as transfer learning allow an AI to combine input from any number of sources, as illustrated, just as a human does.

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Alberta’s 'World Class' University Risks Collapse, Says Expert
Charles Rusnell, The Tyee, 2022/11/29

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I don't know what the point would be of wrecking Athabasca University, but this seems to be the plan, at least as seen from the outside. Says one observer, "I cannot think of another situation where government is mandating where employees live." It would likely result in a loss of staff, not merely senior executive, leaving the university. The real loss would be of faculty and staff, without whom the university could not operate.

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