e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Cass-Sunstein

  • Permissions and Openness

    I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

    I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

    I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

    Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

    At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

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  • The Intractable Problem of Informational Cascades

    Stephen Downes’ new column on e-Learn does a great job of showing that solving the informational cascade problem is more challenging than I had presented it to be in my own article on the topic. In fact, his own analysis reveals that the problem may be harder to solve than even he himself suggests. The problem, as is often the case, is largely due to those pesky externalities, i.e., reality stubbornly refuses to conform to an elegant theory (and alas, Stephen is even more of a sucker for an elegant theory than I am). (more…)

  • Book Recommendation: Why Societies Need Dissent

    If you liked my article on informational cascades then you will probably want to read Cass Sunstein’s Why Societies Need Dissent. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, writes in detail about the impact of informational cascades on democratic dialogue, the rulings of panels of judges, and other critical areas related to civil discourse. He also writes about their counterpart, reputational cascades (where people go along to get along) and about polarization effects (where people talking to like-minded people tend to come out more extreme in their positions than when they started the conversation). As a bonus, the end notes are just chock full of great references. Its the kind of book where you spend half your time jumping back and forth between the main text and the notes because you just want to know where he’s coming up with this stuff.

    This is a very important book, in my view. Oddly, it doesn’t read quite as compellingly as it ought to (possibly because it is taken from a series of guest lectures at a law school) but it’s not a terrible read by any stretch of the imagination. It just needs a few good stories to spice it up a bit. At any rate, the content is incredibly informative, and even if it doesn’t quite read like The da Vinci Code, it’s a page turner in its own way.