Stephen Downes

When SlideShare was acquired by Scribd a number of years ago I closed my SldieShare account and move all my presentations to my own website. I had seen Scribd lock down access to papers, and didn't want this to happen to my presentations. In this article, Wikimedia coordinator of the KB, the national library of the Netherlands, explains why he decided to migrate all their publications from Scribd to Zenodo. There's a lot to like about Zenodo, as is detailed at length in this article. It's the publication repository of choice for many projects and institutions, especially those based in Europe. It's dedicated to open access, and offers some 500 different open access licenses authors can choose to use.

Credential Engine has released its first Global Micro-Credential Schema Mapping report (19 page PDF). The intent is to provide clarity, global transferability, and guidance for decision makers. It introduces a Data Ecosystem Schema Mapper (DESM), "a specialized web application designed for creating, editing, maintaining, viewing, and exporting crosswalks between different data models (schemas)." The authors argue that "Expanding the scope of micro-credential mappings to encompass more aspects and formats will further enhance interoperability." My own feeling is that this is a lot of work being devoted to something artificial intelligence will shortly be doing.

Those who know me know I would answer "no" to the question in the title, because I believe that I (mostly) serve as a counterexample. But where then do ethics and morality come from. For the author (who is using this post to promote a book) the answer is 'cooperation', and he lists a set of 'universal' moral principles: "More specifically, seven principles of cooperation are judged to be morally good everywhere and form the bedrock of a universal moral compass. Those seven principles are: help your kin, be loyal to your group, reciprocate favors, be courageous, defer to superiors, share things fairly, and respect other people's property." How did he arrive at these (which I would adjudge to not be universal). "To qualify for inclusion, each society had to have been the subject of at least 1,200 pages of descriptive data pertaining to its cultural system." So what we have here, in my view, is morality as expressed by an established power based. But seriously - defer to superiors? reciprocate favours? No. That's not how morality works. Morality - for me - begins with empathy, a sense of ethics, and is not governed by any sort of universal principles but varies on a case by case basis.

This is a great article telling the story of 'one million checkboxes' - a website the author created with a million global checkboxes (meaning that if one person checked a box, it would be checked for anyone viewing the site). "I thought hundreds of players would check thousands of boxes," he writes, "instead, 500,000 players checked over 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online." Not just that - they used the checkboxes to write code in ASCII, to generate moving images, to refer people to websites and more. The users created a Discord channel about it. "Getting to watch it live - getting to provide some encouragement, to see what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of anger - was deeply meaningful to me." Via Danilo Campos.

Useful list of AI resources from Jisc. "We think the value is understanding how people are using them.  So we are going to focus on sharing details of AI tools and features that we hear people are using and link to any story or information about how.  Defining 'AI tools' is getting increasingly hard, as AI is built into more and more tools, hence the mention of both 'tools' and 'features' - the latter which might be in any application."

I don't think I would have characterized this as 'the Geek Way' or any similarly branded methodology created by an MIT business professor, but these four features do characterize a new way of doing business (quoted):

• ownership: giving employees higher levels of personal autonomy, empowerment and responsibility
• openness: a willingness to hear what other people have to say, and being receptive to arguments, reevaluations, and changes in direction
• science: conducting experiments, generating data, and arguing about how to interpret the evidence
• speed: a preference for achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively

These new processes are necessary because of the changing nature of the workplace. Central planning and control are not sufficiently responsive. But doing it like this requires new skills.