The Changing Rules of Trust in the Digital Age
Rachel Botsman, Harvard Business Review, 2015/10/21

According to this article, "A new world of trust is emerging: one where trust lies in the hands of individuals, not in the big bellies of institutions." As an example, Rachel Botsman cites the case of AirBNB, where she is rated as a guest by the proprietor, while she rates the lodging as a guest. It changes hr behaviour, she writes. "It’s easy to see how one careless towel toss could impact my ability to transact on Airbnb in the future." Maybe - but I fail to see how this is a case where trust lies in the hands of the individuals. It's still in a big institution - AirBNB - against which you have no appeal, no recourse. AirBNB is no more 'personal' than it is 'sharing'. 

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Open educational resources: Maximize teacher time and engage students
Blackboard, 2015/10/21

I have mixed feelings about this item. On the one hand, I'm glad to see support for open educational resources (OERs) no matter where it takes place. But on the other hand, all these OERs supported by Blackboard are visible only inside Blackboard, using the xPlor application. Well, OK, there are other ways to view resources from the CK-12 Foundation or Khan Academy. But it gets squiffy when it comes to resources created inside the application. "Intuitive authoring tools enable you to easily create, edit and align standards to your learning materials to store in the repository, all through your existing LMS," readers are told. Are these being called OERs? It seems so, but I hope not, because if they're only available inside Blackboard, they are in no sense open.

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This News-Writing Bot Is Now Free for Everyone
Klint Finley, Wired, 2015/10/21

So I have my own newspaper that's almost completely automated (most days I do nothing but read it) but this bot doesn't just assemble the articles, it writes them. On one level, this is pretty simple - give the program some data sources (sports scores, stock markets) and add some rules to select templates and manipulate data. But over time, with experience, these can become sophisticated. And now you can use them. " Automated Insights, much like its competitor Narrative Science, works with large customers to create the templates that the Wordsmith software fills in. This new service allows anyone to create their own templates and dump data into them on their own."

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Mobile Learning: Apps vs. Web?
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2015/10/21

This is one of the key questions facing educational technology in the next few years. Of course platform developers (Apple, Google, Facebook) would like you to build apps, for several reasons: it's specific to their technology, it can create a better experience, they can control distribution (in some cases), and they can get a cut of app purchases or in-app purchases. But to reach the full audience, it means content providers are looking and creating multiple versions. Why not just write a responsive web application? I wish Joshua Kim tried answering some questions rather than just asking them.

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