How the Occupy School Movement is Pushing Connected Learning in Brazil
Carolina Rodeghiero, DMLcentral, 2017/01/05

"In response to the critics, a Paraná 16-year-old’s speech addressing her state Parliament went viral: 'Who is school is for? It belongs to whom? It’s an insult to us, who are there, dedicating ourselves, looking for motivation every single day, being called indoctrinated. It’s an insult for us, students, as well it is for the teachers.'" Yeah.

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Baby’s First Virtual Assistant
Felix Gillette, Bloomberg, 2017/01/05

After all the talk of digital natives and the live, what will we make of children who grow up with having had the services of a virtual assistant since birth? That's the scenario we face according to this article. "My purpose in life," it says in an engaging, even-keeled female voice, "is to help comfort, entertain, teach, and learn from you."

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How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist
Tristan Harris, Medium, 2017/01/05

This title of this post should be "How to use technology to hijack people's minds." There's nothing inherently technological in these methods; they've flourished for thousands of years (as the reference to magicians should tell us). Here are the tricks (paraphrased with some quotation and links added):

• disempowering by design - if you control the menu, you control the choices
• intermittent variable rewards - you immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing
• fear of missing out -  it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important
• manipulation of social approval - I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me but I don’t see how Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place
• manipulation of social reciprocity - creating social obligations for each other (by accepting a connection, responding to a message, or endorsing someone back for a skill)
• bottomless bowls - to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore
• maximizing interruptions - to heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity
• bundling your needs with theirs - make the thing customers want (milk, pharmacy) inseparable from what the business wants
• nudging - make choice inconvenient to focus on one outcome or another
• foot in the door - asking for a small innocuous request to begin with and escalate from there

Originally published in the Observer last June.

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Pearson Releases Rights to its Learning Design Principles
Leo Doran, EdWeek Market Brief, 2017/01/05

The meat of this short report is found in the link to the release of the research and rubrics (102 page PDF) Pearson uses in its learning design projects, all under a CC-by license. Previously covered here. "Pearson also issued a shorter report on how the company says it is “Using Learning Design to Build More Effective Engaging Products” and a promotional blog post," writes Leo Doran.

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Medium's pivot catches publishing partners by surprise
Peter Sterne, Kelsey Sutton, PoliticoMedia, 2017/01/05

Medium is one of the better content sources out there; I follow a number of their publications. It has had a variety of business models over the years, most recently being a traditional ad-revenue system. But yesterday co-founder Evan Williams Evan Williams announced that Medium is getting out of the advertising business. "It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet," he wrote. "It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to." So what next? I assume they have a plan, but it wasn't part of the announcement. It's "a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people." But I will be curious to see the direction they follow. Photo: Christopher Michel

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Decoupled Drupal with Ember: Introducing Ember and JSON API
Preston So, Acquia, 2017/01/05

Content management systems are making the transformation from being website hosts to being data services. In this way a single CMS can serve any number of different applications, websites, or data services. This article describes how a Javacript framework called Ember is performing this task with the Drupal CMS.

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