OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Auto Moderator
Bluesky Feed Creator, 2024/08/21

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Because Bluesky allows fediverse services to access its content, people can create their own feeds, rather than relying on a central Bluesky algorithm to do it. That's what Bluesky Feed Creator does. "Posts are captured from Bluesky and inserted into your feeds in real time as soon they are created." What could be better than adding an auto-moderator to this? Right now the auto moderator is rule-based, which means it will be awkward and limited in what it does. But of course future iterations could be based on neural networks and hence be much more nuanced and responsive.

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The Academic Great Gatsby Curve in Philosophy
Justin Weinberg, 2024/08/21

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This is a really interesting post based on a recent study (7 page PDF) published by the Royal Society. It looks at the relations between journal citations in various domains, including philosophy and education, and how they're related to income inequality and social mobility in the field, which they describe as 'an academic Great Gatsby curve'. Not surprisingly, there is such a curve, and also not surprisingly, the greatest inequality is found in philosophy. Somewhat more surprising is that education ranks second to philosophy in citation inequality (though there is more social mobility). As Justin Weinberg suggests, "citation-based bibliometric indicators should be handled with care when used to assess the performance of academics."

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More academic freedom leads to more innovation
Klaus Becker, IDW, 2024/08/21

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This article references a paper (23 page PDF) published in PLOS One making the claim stated in the title. "Those who restrict academic freedom also limit the ability to develop new technologies and processes and therefore hinder progress and prosperity," says one of the authors, Paul Momtaz. "We see this trend not only in dictatorships, but also increasingly in democratic states where populist parties have gained influence." Obviously this discussion references national and government policies, but I wonder how much the same trend would hold for limitations imposed on people working in research labs (like the one where I work) and in corporate research.

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TB871: Systems vs Reality in CSH
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2024/08/21

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There are some important points made in this post, which though it starts as an excursion through American pragmatism, ends with some important comments about the distinction between representations (here cast as 'systems') and reality. "One of the traps that I now see people making... is that they see things like org charts and workflows as real things that exist in the world. They are, of course, constructs." Just so. And so is everything else we create: maps, models, representations, theories.  Image: David Bohm, via Imgur.

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Microsoft Releases Face Check Identity Verification for Enterprise Use
Chris Paoli, Campus Technology, 2024/08/21

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As described, "The verification process with Face Check will compare a person's "real-time selfie" photo with their Verified ID, which may be tied to that person's driver's license or passport photo." The service would be integrated into other applications, such as course registration or exam proctoring. Presumably OCR could be used to scan other elements of the ID, such as the person's birth date. "IT can custom build their own APIs, connecting employee faces to automated tasks, like automatically connecting users to password resets and virtual help desk assistance."

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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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