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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 27, 2017
Can We Afford Free Textbooks?
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This is an argument that can't be ignored. It runs as
follows: OER textbookss address the cost of higher
education, and while cost is a significant problem, the low
completion rate is an even more significant problem. Part
of the reason for the low completion rate is poor learning
strategy, a strategy that is entrenched with existing (and
now OER) textbooks. Compare that to what paid learning
materials provide: activities, interactivity, analytics,
and more. So we should continue to pay for learning
resources. It's a lovely argument and Robert S. Feldman
should be commended.
But. First, neither publishers nor professors were not
prepared to budge from the textbook model until free
textbooks came online. Moreover, only some OERs are
textbooks; the vast majority are learning resources that
are out in front of publishers in addressing real learning
needs and challenges. Finally, many features of progressive
education - interactivity, constructionism, etc. - really
work only with open learning resources. If we drop support
for OER we lose all this, and we lose the main force for
innovation in our field.
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Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous
algorithms are ruining millions of lives
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When I spoke Linkat
the London School of Economics a couple years ago, part of
my talk was an extended criticism of the use of models in
learning design and analysis. "The real issue isn’t
algorithms, it’s models. Models are what you get when
you feed data to an algorithm and ask it to make
predictions. As (Cathy) O’Neil puts it
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'Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.'" This
article is an extended discussion of the problem stated
much more cogently than my presentation. "It's E Pluribus
Unum reversed: models make many out of one, pigeonholing
each of us as members of groups about whom generalizations
-- often punitive ones (such as variable pricing) can be
made.
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Pisa data may be incomparable, Schleicher admits
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A change in the way the 2015 PISA tests were administered
may have resulted in changes in the outcome. “It
remains possible that a particular group of students
– such as students scoring [high marks] in
mathematics on paper in Korea and Hong Kong – found
it more difficult than [students with the same marks] in
the remaining countries to perform at the same level on the
computer-delivered tasks.”
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How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them
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Last week the U.S. Congress made moves
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to allow internet service providers (ISP) to track their
customers. This is a lot harder to block than Facebook or
Google; you can't use 'do not track' or anonymized
browsing. Even encrypting your data still allows them to
see where you go. As this story explains, there are really
only two ways to stop ISPs from tracking your internet
activities: route your traffic through a VPN, or use Tor.
With a VPN
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though, you're simply trusting a different host not to
track. Tor Linkmeanwhile, is
effective - but now you may be flagged as a security risk.
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Quality for news is mostly about solving the reputation
issue
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I hear this sort of sentiment a lot, and also with respect
to learning resource quality as well. The idea is to be
sure you're depending on authoritative sources, or at the
very least, reliable sources. But how is this established.
"A close look at a precise set of signals can reveal a lot
about journalistic quality," says the authors. What
signals? Awards, newsroom size, years of operation. But
wait, I say to myself. Awards can be manipulated, you have
to pay to qualify, and they reward conformity and
compliance, usually. Continue to the bottom and you see the
advertisement for the data journalism awards. Coincidence?
As it turns out, no. The author, Frederic Filloux,
is affiliated
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with the awards, and is on the board
Linkof Global
Editor News, the sponsor of the awards. OK, it's not
Watergate. But this is how you evaluate whether whether
journalism is credible.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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