OLDaily Text Edition ~ Mar 20, 2017

Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 20, 2017
Teach schoolchildren how to spot fake news, says OECD
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I know we would all love to do this, but I don't think you
can simply 'teach children to spot fake news'. That's a bit
like trying to 'teach children to spot mathematical
errors'. Yes, it's a great skill, but you need to acquire a
mathematical education to do it; you can't specialize on
spotting the errors. In the case of fake news, mastery of
critical literacy is required (not just '21st century
literacy', but a deeper understanding of how knowledge is
created and verified in general). The Guardian article
doesn't talk about any of this, but does outline "the
OECD’s plans to test young people’s attitudes
to global issues and different cultures, their analytical
and critical skills, and abilities to interact with
others." There's no link in the article, but here is an
outline (44 page PDF
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of the OECD's plan. See more
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Teacher wins $1M global prize for work in northern Quebec
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Salluit
Link0x7979107c6c31dfbe!8m2!3d62.1450667!4d-75.5683447 is
an an Inuit community of abut 1450 people in northern
Quebec accessible only by boat (in summer) or by air.
Maggie MacDonnell has been teaching in the community for
six years, facing and witnessing first hand the everyday
struggles faced by the community, including 6 suicides in
2015. "I didn't know until I came to Salluit that that was
a Canadian reality," she said. But it is, and it's easy to
ignore in the affluent south. But it's a little bit harder
to ignore now after the award of the $1 million US 2017
Global Teaching Prize by the Dubai-based Varkey Foundation.
And that's a good thing. See also BBC
Linkwhich lists the
other finalists.
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YaCy: The P2P Search Engine
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The YaCy search engine actually exists and actually works,
and I can even find myself on it. But "unlike centralized
search engines like google, bing, and duckduckgo, YaCy is
decentralized, and run entirely by a network of users,
giving you lots more options, and a greater chance of
privacy." I like things like this, which is why I'm linking
to it. But I'm under no illusion. YaCy started in 2012 and
it's not the sort of thing that becomes widely popular.
Even now Linkonly "more than 600
peer operators contribute each month [and] about 130,000
search queries are performed with this network each day."
Here it is LinkRead about it here
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Unpaywall
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Are you or your students trying to get work done but get
stuck at a paywall? I know it happens to me often enough.
That's why some developers have created Unpaywall - it
points you to open access versions of the paper the
publisher is trying to charge you money for. Now I can't
vouch for how well it works - the Firefox extension is
still in the review process. But I like the idea a lot. As
Heather Piwowar writes, "We want everyone in the world to
have a 'read it free button next to the “pay us
money” button on research articles, powered by open
access in repositories worldwide."
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Artificial Intelligence and Law : 
A Six Part Primer
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The 271 slides in this presentation might make you balk,
but there are blank slides, and the rest of them move along
at a brisk pace. It's a great introduction to the use of AI
in law, and you will learn quite a bit AI itself in the
process. It describes the impact of rules-based systems in
law (50 slides or so) and then shifts to data-driven AI,
which is the predominate method used today. This approach
does not resonate with lawyers; "there is a borderline
pathological numerophobia among lawyers, says slide 87.
Despite that "quantitative legal prediction" is coming to
law. Where is it doing? Machine Learning as a Service
(MLaaS). Enterprise open source. The future is in how to
assemble these systems for specific applications. Great
presentation. Don't miss this.
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Rebuilding a national university after decades of war
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For more than a decade Somalia was a lesson in how a
country functions without a government. In a word: poorly.
I take it as the definitive refutation of libertarianism.
Now that it is emerging from years of violence and chaos
control of the Somali National University
Linkis being handed over to the nascent
government and facing challenges in everything from finding
staff to enrolling qualified students. SNU has free
tuition, but a sign of the recent lawlessness is the
proliferation of private 'universities' who "cash in on the
thirst for education.... Unless regulations are in place it
will be hard to deal with this problem. If not checked, we
will have too many graduates with no relevant skills."
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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