Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

4th Euro heatwave, by the looks of it

TIL that Malaysia has a "Special Task Force on Jihad Against Inflation." (and check out that shirt on Minister Musa)

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2022/08/06/cooperatives-can-be-used-as-medium-to-fight-middlemen-minister-says-in-fight-against-inflation/21450

Meanwhile, US Federal Reserve has announced the convening of the "Committee on Continuing the Beatings Until Moral Improves"...

ICYMI: #Twitter exposed phone numbers linked to 5,000,000 accounts #privacy

https://privacy.twitter.com/en/blog/2022/an-issue-affecting-some-anonymous-accounts

Facebook Gave Police Teenager's DMs in Abortion Prosecution

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/08/08/facebook-abortion-teen-dms/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381

The coop movement maybe focuses a bit too much on how coops can best solve the biggest problems in society and not enough on identifying problems that coops are best suitable for solving.

There are many big problems that coops cannot do much about.

There are many boring but consequential problems that receive little attention and that coops could be an ideal fix to.

Yes, this is a real worry: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/472515/data-specialist-questions-where-his-personal-data-went-after-job-application our gov't is reckless with our data, and no one is holding them to account. Thanks for going public with this Dr Taiuru. I think we need a big dose of sunlight in the gov't IT sector, as I think there's some very very slip-shod/sloppy work going on there. And we NZers are paying handsomely for it. Not good enough.

Luxon has his head up his arse if he thinks being young and poor is easy. I was a beneficiary from the age of 16 until my early 20s through no choice of my own.

I’m grateful for the welfare state, it saved my sorry arse. But it was a grind every single day to get by. #nzpol #NZTwits

Many very good points. But I disagree with one thing: I seriously doubt that Bill Gates is a 'software genius'. https://www.climateandcapitalmedia.com/bill-gates-dumbest-idea-ever/ #nuclearfolly.

The question isn't whether people "care" about #privacy or not. Everyone does. The question is if they understand that less privacy is a #social issue, not just a #personal one. The question is if they understand what it actually means to be on commercial social media; who they're feeding & how. The question is if they have any other option.

It's the #capitalists we're fighting - not the "workers". So be kind, & keep #fighting, #thinking, #making, #feeling, #saying, #doing.

😽

We Are Not Freaking Out Enough About Climate Change
https://gizmodo.com/we-are-unprepared-for-worst-case-climate-change-1849361216 #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #LeadOnClimate

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) commissioned the OER Foundation (OERF) to deploy its open digital infrastructure to host a growing inventory of OER-enabled online courses for the Pacific Partnership for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning, thereby  providing an innovative and low-cost solution to widening access to the professional development of thousands of teachers.

The Pacific Partnership for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning (PPODFL) is a 5-year project (2020 – 2025) funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to enhance the capacity and efficiency of education sectors in the Pacific through greater use of innovative delivery mechanisms and technology. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), together with the Pacific Centre for Flexible and Open Learning for Development (PACFOLD) are implementing the initiative.

Building resilience in Pacific education systems is a key work stream that focuses on cloud-based services and open online courses to build capacity in online distance and flexible learning. The COL commissioned the OER Foundation (OERF) to deploy its Free and Open Source Software Digital Learning Ecosystem (FOSSDLE) for these courses. The OERF’s FOSSDLE (used for the design, development and delivery of OER-enabled open online courses) has achieved international recognition through the Open Infrastructure Award for Excellence conferred by Open Education Global. 

Over the past few months, the OERF has hosted the following  growing inventory of open online professional development courses:

Digital skills for OER Sharing (DS4OERS) – which supports teachers to improve digital skills using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to develop teaching materials for the classroom and to publish these as Open Educational Resources (OER)
Communication skills for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning (CS4ODFL) – which assists teachers to improve their communication skills in ODFL contexts
Assessment skills for open, distance and flexible learning (AS4ODFL) – which helps teachers to design online activity-based assessment in support of teaching and learning
Empowered digital teacher for online learning (EDT4OL) – is an intermediate level course for educators to develop digital skills for designing and developing online materials using the FOSS digital learning ecosystem.

To date, these courses have provided free online capability development to more than 3,500 educators from Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS). 

Using cloud hosting services (at a cost of only US$46 per month) the server performance metrics derived from the first courses indicated that for the duration of the cohort sessions, the virtual server was operating well below its potential capacity. For example, the CPU percentage typically averaged below 2%, with machine memory at around 11%. These metrics confirm that there is considerable scope for growth;  this infrastructure could readily scale up to accommodate 150 courses serving up to 10,000 learners at no extra cost. 

As demonstrated in the PPODFL initiative, the potential deployment of shared open infrastructure and the associated reuse of OER-enabled courses in all Pacific SIDS will:  

enable Ministries of Education and institutions to host their own customised FOSSDLE installations,  each with the capacity to support up to 10,0000 learners for less than US$50 per month, 
provide teachers in the Pacific region with ready access to online publishing tools,
scale-up significantly the number of educators capable of developing and sharing context-appropriate local content for online learning.

Image attribution

Bridge with light streaks by Anders Jildén published under Unsplash license.

https://oerfoundation.org/2022/07/31/oer-foundations-open-digital-infrastructure-powers-the-pacific-partnerships-open-online-courses/