Five Reasons #Gamergate Connects to Educational Technology
John Spencer, Education Rethink, 2014/10/23

We teach people this stuff. We who create technology and media, who shape thought and opinion, who set examples and and work in public - we are the ones who make it OK to shame and harass and threaten and all the rest.

Today I read that Felicia Day, creator of the (great!) online show about gaming, The Guild, has been doxxed for writing a post on #gamergate (to 'doxx' someone is to expose their personal information, such as their home address, online, thus opening them up to harassment and stalking). She had been mostly silent, she says, because "I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline." It turns out her fears were justified. In this post, John Spencer directly draws the link between #gamergate and education. "People are way too quick to minimize the misogyny that exists online," he writes. "I wrote a post about not shaming girls who break dress code and faced a barrage of trolling." He adds, "the misogyny and sexism is rampant at tech conferences. Go visit the vendor hall and see the number of companies that hire women based upon their looks to be the 'booth girls.' You don't have to look hard to find the objectification."

[Link] [Comment]

Rights, restrictions and photos of Cats
Stuart Myles, Slideshare, 2014/10/23

This is one of the pieces that operates behind the scenes and is necessary for smooth automation of e-learning systems. "IPTC's RightsML, based on W3C CG's ODRL is the standard for expressing permissions and restrictions for digital content for the news industry. The latest report on progress in implementing RightsML, including a new Python library for creating rights expressions in XML and JSON." Good shoer presentation with a bunch of workflow flow charts describing how rights are managed. The author, Stuart Myles, is Director of Information Management at Associated Press.

[Link] [Comment]

AU profs argue for a new online learning model in Teaching Crowds book
Terry Anderson, Jon Dron, Athabasca University, 2014/10/23

This nice thing about this book is that you can download it for free. OK, that isn't the only nice thing. The goal, as outlined by Terry Anderson and Jon Dron, is to “provide methods of learning that are fitted to the subject and people learning them, not the needs and capabilities of institutions teaching them. This is what (networked learning) allows.” As readers here will note, this has been the subject of our work at NRC for some time, dating from the early days of the PLE to the present LPSS program. Their book looks at Athabasca Landing, which is an implementation of the Elgg platform developed by Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller.

[Link] [Comment]