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EDUCAUSE launches generative AI readiness assessment tool for higher education with AWS
Amazon Web Services, EDUCAUSE, 2024/04/12

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I was going to build my own tool (a simple link to a website that says "No!") but while I get that ready (I've applied for funding) you can rely on this tool that "offers a curated list of questions designed to provide visibility into factors related to the institution's readiness for identification and adoption of generative AI solutions across three core focus areas: strategy and governance, capacity and expertise, and infrastructure." Here it is: 12 page PDF.

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Decentralizability
Gordon Brander, Subconscious, 2024/04/12

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We want to make decentralized, but if we start there, we break a key principle of software design, which is that we must start with the user experience. Which sounds great, but when you start with the user experience it's really easy to make software that is very hard to decentralize later. So what, asks Gordon Brander, is the minimum we need to build to make our user-focused software decentralizable? His answer: Immutable data, universal IDs, user-controlled keys. "If you have all three," he says, "you have a fair shot at building first, decentralizing later." Sounds easy - but how to get even this far is hard.

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On the way forward for SDG indicator 4.1.1a: our proposal - World Education Blog
Silvia Montoya, World Education Blog, 2024/04/12

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Gobal Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 4.1.1a measures the proportion of kids in grades 2 and 3 "achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, by sex." As reported here, data for this indicator has not been forthcoming and it faces deletion "because of a technical debate about measurement and a turf war between testing agencies." This UNESCO article "attempts to sketch the outline of a sustainable solution." It's an important indicator, because it measures where children "pass from the 'learning to read' to the 'reading to learn' stage". But it involves a series of tests, some of which only measure foundational skills (like phonological awareness) and not the overall objective (reading comprehension). This article recommends "a reporting scheme that relies on disaggregating or 'unpacking' the reporting of the minimum proficiency level by skill or subskill and to allow partial reporting if the assessment is not measuring the minimum proficiency level."

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Research Notes: Does Lower Tuition Attract More Students to College?
Jingnan Sun, FutureEd, 2024/04/12

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Consider the following research: I wonder what makes cars go forward. I get into 100 cars, press the accelerator in each car, and nothing happens. I conclude that pressing the accelerator does not make the car go. So what do you think? If you think this is pretty poor research, then consider the current study (65 page PDF), which looks at changing one variable - lower tuition fees - to see whether things move forward. They do not. "Relative to a synthetic match constructed from public universities in the Southeast, NC Promise did not affect first-year enrollment at the Promise institutions." There's some backpedaling in the discussion - "a need for comprehensive strategies that not only make college more affordable but also address other barriers" - but it feels to me that the five years of the program were really time wasted rather than an actual effort to effect change.

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Trust Link Contract Network
Timo Hotti, 2024/04/12

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I saw this mentioned in the SoLiD discussion Matrix, and there are obvious links. This short post links to a longer document (66 page PDF) describing a distributed trust-based network. Now we've been down this path before, with things like Web of Trust (WoT). This is a bit different, with a basis in modern technologies like Distributed Identity (DID). And unlike Blockchain, it proposes a network of micro-ledgers, instead of a centralized ledger. I think, though, that schemes like this are putting the commercial cart before the relationship horse. We're still figuring how how to make distributed social networks work. We can't make the leap to a distributed contract network before we've even figured out how to talk to each other (without spam, harassment, disinformation, etc.).

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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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