Against mass consumption of ‘already certified’ credentials
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/02/06

Doug Belshaw bemoans the unsurprising co-option of digital badges by established institutions. "Even though the tools to do something radically different are available, people seem content to do as they’re told, going cap in hand to the existing powers that be." Sure, there were alternative credentials, but these were swept away by the mainstream. "If we have a landscape full of ‘alternative credentials’ provided by the incumbents," writes Belshaw, "then, I’m sad to say, this may all have been for naught." I don't think you can disrupt certificate-granting institutions with more certificates. I think you need an approach that makes certification superfluous.

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What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
Joseph Esposito, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/02/06

Meta is a tool that analyzes scientific publications. For example, in one study it predicted the number of citations a published article would receive. Now it has been acquired by Chan Zuckerberg. This, writes a Meta board member, is a good thing. "The acquisition of Meta by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) promises to transform scientific investigation. As a byproduct of this, it will likely transform scientific publishing as well." There's no doubt that scientific publication is changing; 'research' these days consists of running (more or less) intelligent searches against databases of hundreds of thousands of articles. People don't look at the content of the articles any more; they analyze global trends. That's what Facebook tries to do already with social media. And that's why they acquired Meta.

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What Research Says About Transferring Explicit Knowledge: To Share or Not to Share
Nancy Dixon, conversation matters, 2017/02/06

As always, convenience is the major usability factor when introducing new technology. "Acceptance of technology for knowledge sharing is directly related to how employees view the usefulness of the technology in supporting their job performance, without extra effort. Those last three words are key." Meanwhile, they are more likely to use the knowledge management system if it is useful: they need to be able to access content where they are, and they need efficient search (that doesn't take a training program to understand).

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