February 8, 2012
Employee or Employer: Who Owns the Twitter Followers?
David Kravets,
Wired, February 8, 2012.
A headline like that just makes you feel like property, doesn't it. The people who talk about the dehumanizing aspects do have a point, I think.
Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business are Hollow Shells without Democracy
Harold Jarche,
Life in Perpetual Beta, February 8, 2012.
I have long argued that a nation is not democratic if its institutions are not democratic. To date, however, we have managed to enact democracy in only a very few of our institutions, while the vast majority - companies and corporations, departments, schools and institutions - are governed by command, not deliberation. Harold Jarche writes, "David Korten in The Great Turning, described America, the Unfinished Project: Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all."
Richard O’Dwyer, a student and his computer
Jim Farmer,
Fortnightly Mailing, February 8, 2012.
I think we ought to be really careful about where this is all going. What we have here is a set of cases where people around the world are being arrested and held on behalf of the United States for violating American law - even though they are not Americans, have never set foot in the U.S., and have done things that are not crimes where they live (and might not be in the U.S. either). The crimes, of course, have to do with copyright infringement - nothing else (save perhaps the crime of being Afghani) seems to be worthy of such worldwide prosecution. Moreover, the putative 'crimes' are things like 'linking to files in an index' and 'inducement to copyright infringement'. Like I say, the content industry should be very careful about what it wishes for. Because it's not a great leap from this to a future in which a film producer in Britain is held and extradited to Beijing for the crime of criticizing the central leadership.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Great Britain, United States, Leadership, China, Linking and Deep Linking, Copyrights]
Open Textbook Authoring Tools Part 2 – WordPress and Pressbooks
Scott Leslie,
EdTechPost, February 8, 2012.
This is Part Two of a series begin by Scott Leslie last week. Today he covers WordPress and the closely related PressBooks. Once again he experiences difficulties exporting content from an LMS into the system. Interestingly (and perhaps worryingly) the components that create PressBooks out of WordPress have not been open-sourced.
LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release
Phil Hill,
e-Literate, February 8, 2012.
Phil Hill writes: "The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article:
- LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
- The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery."
My own view is that these are incremental changes, not game-changers. They are, however, worthy of note as they set the bar in a slightly new position.
Web literacy? (v0.1)
Doug Belshaw,
Weblog, February 8, 2012.
Oh my, I think this is simplified to the point of trivialization. To make the point by analogy, the diagram (and the other version on Mozilla) is equivalent to covering the history and geography of the United States under the following headings: colonialism, the Star Spangled Banner, the Bronx, the Great Plains, St. Louis, the Hopi Indians, corn, Eli Manning, the San Francisco Earthquake. Seriously - how do you have a topic called "calling an API" in a context that includes no other programming methodologies or concepts? It boggles the mind. Boggles!
Education – whose business is it?
Derek Morrison,
The Auricle, February 8, 2012.
Derek Morrison refers to and transcribes segments of a recent BBC report on the business of education. "The edition includes some pretty insightful perspectives about the advance of the private sector into all levels of education," he writes, "(it) also offers some thought provoking contributions particularly from people like Martin Bean, the UK OU VC." I think the main lesson here is that educators cannot remain complacent - there is an entire business community out there wanting to prove it can do a better job, and motivated by the business opportunities, now and in the future, the education industry affords.
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