OLDaily

The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It
David Streitfeld, New York Times, 2017/05/22

@ev is Evan Williams, known for co-creating such things as Blogger, Twitter and Medium. One sold out to Google. The other simply sold out. The third is trying to sell memberships. There's a nice analogy in this: "The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them." 

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New AWS Training and Certification Portal
Amazon Web Services, 2017/05/22

Technical Certificate programs have been around for a while now - long-time professionals will recall things like the Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) exams, for example. So this portal by Amazon isn't new, particularly, except that oit's connected to their cloud environment so that when they say yopu need "one or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS" to qualify for an exam, they don't have to take you at your word. All of this surveillance is broken by ad blockers, though. 

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These are the arguments against net neutrality — and why they’re wrong
Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch, 2017/05/22

I am unambiguously in favour of net neutrality, but I think that the strongest argument against it isn't any of the arguments listed here but the unassailable fact that the net is not neutral now and that therefore 'net neutrality' pits one form of unequal distribution of wealth against another. Today, because of asynchronous internet access, people cannot run web servers from their homes. Additionally, because of content distribution networks, professional content will run more quickly than private content. Finally, overhead costs and technology (for example, digital certificates) make it more difficult for individuals to offer online content. These all favour technology companies, but their dominance is being challenged by media and telecommunication companies who feel their advantageous position ought also to be favoured by pricing advantages.

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From Pikachu to Patients: The Rise and Rise of Augmented Reality
Jeremy Miles, GP Strategies, 2017/05/22

It's an unusual "rise and rise" that includes a significant retrenchment, but that's what's documented here: "In 2012 AR, along with virtual reality (VR), was being hailed as the next generation technology to watch, with markets estimated at £600 billion (approximately $776 billion) by 2016. Today those estimates have been revised (reflecting passage along the Gartner Hype Cycle) to a more conservative $90 billion annually by 2020." Yes, there is a role for AR to play in online learning. But no, it's never going to be the whole.

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Toward an open empowered learning model of pedagogy in higher education
Shirley Reushle, Amy Antonio, Mike Keppell, ResearchGate, 2017/05/22

Relevant and realistic: "The separation of assessment from learning could have significant ramifications for the outcomes of learning because a schism could appear in the alignment of the curriculum in a disaggregated model. Quality assurance of learning and certification of its outputs become problematic so new ways of aligning and assessing learning outcomes and arranging academic support for students will be needed." We've been gradually drifting toward this outcome, and when we reach a tipping point higher education will appear to have been enveloped in crisis overnight. 21 page PDF. Image: Patricia B. Arinto.

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