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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed

Network Weaving for Equitable Wellbeing
Curtis Ogden, Networkweaver, 2022/12/06

---

This is an introduction to networks that begins "Networks are collections of nodes and links' and continues just fine until it €list the principles of "is a healthy network". Here the authors demonstrate conclusively (to my mind) that they very much misunderstand what a network is. Here's the introduction to that section: "A healthy network is one that is able to achieve its collective purpose/core functions, while also addressing the interests of its members..." No. Networks don't have core purposes. Any agency exhibited by a network is an emergent property, a result of individual actions and interactions. The authors are merging the properties of a system, which is designed to serve a specific purpose, and a network, which grows and evolves through the individual actions of its members. They are not the same.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Splintered Mind: A Chatbot's Take on "Moralometers"
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2022/12/06

---

This week's AI flavour of the day is chatGPT, an updated interactive AI model capable of reframing comments and admitting error. I've read a number of them, and this was the most fun, in which chatGPT was asked "whether it would be possible to design a moralometer, which accurately measures people's moral character." The AI replied, in part,  "it may be possible to create a moralometer, with the right approach. The key would be to develop a device that could measure a person's moral values and tendencies, as opposed to their specific moral judgments." It also considered the question of whether a moralometer would be beneficial.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Federating research infrastructures in Europe for FAIR access to data: Science Europe Briefing on EOSC | Zenodo
Zenodo, Science Europe, 2022/12/06

---

This is a very brief briefing paper (6 page PDF) on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). According to the paper, "The findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIRness) of research publications, data, and software in the digital space will define research and innovation going forward." It also describes the transition to open research and open access as a "new normal". It would be nice if open education walked hand in hand with that process.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Open Science Infrastructure as a key component of Open Science
Jadranka Stojanovski, 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, 2022/12/06

---

"The Open Science movement is a response to the accumulated problems in scholarly communication, like the 'reproducibility crisis', 'serials crisis', and 'peer review crisis'," writes Jadranka Stojanovski. This short paper (8 page PDF) discusses the various crises, the findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) principles for research data, the open science infrastructure (OSI), along with some concerns, such as economic inequalities between countries, ownership, publication costs, and the open review processes.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Journalists reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic relied on research that had yet to be peer reviewed
Alice Fleerackers, Lauren A Maggio, Academic Matters, 2022/12/06

---

OK, here is the concern, expressed in a sentence: "Our peer-reviewed, published study found that preprints have become an important information source for many journalists, and one that some plan to keep using post-pandemic." I wonder, did we really need a peer-reviewed study to determine this? And was it worth the two year wait for the results to be published? No, the real challenge is this: "it was important to label preprints as 'preprints' in their stories or mention that the research had not been peer reviewed." Or maybe better, rethink the slow formal peer review process and conduct the entire process - posting, reviewing, correcting - in an open and public manner, especially when we need freely accessible and current research, as during a pandemic. Yes, there was confusion during the pandemic, but peer review would not have solved that. We would have had nothing but confusion for two years - and then confusion as studies still reached different conclusions.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Year-End Letter from our Executive Director - Let's Encrypt
Josh Aas, Let's Encrypt, 2022/12/06

---

For most people Let's Encrypt sits quietly behind websites, never seen or felt. For people like me who host their own websites it's an essential part of the infrastructure, allowing us to create the certificates we need for secure access for free, instead of paying hundreds of dollars to commercial providers, like we used to do. "A particularly big moment," writes Josh Aas, "was when Let's Encrypt surpassed 300,000,000 websites served." The post also mentions Divvi Up, "a new service that will bring privacy respecting metrics to millions of people." Via Boris Mann.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]