OLDaily

The Digital Revolution Will Not Be Powerpointed (nor MOOCed)
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/05/29

There's a lesson in the metaphor of a Stanford-based MOOC on activism that has students create PowerPoints and form teams to write mission statements. "I am deeply engrossed in reading Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas with her direct experience participating in the Mexican Zapatista uprisings in, Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and the protests in her home country of Turkey in Gezi Park," writes Alan Levine. "I have yet to read of any of these efforts starting with people crafting a mission statement." And as the course content seems so far removes from actual activism, so also the course itself seems so far removed from what can and should be done in online learning. "I am most certainly being judgemental, but I cannot be part of such a cloistered, bubbled experience," writes Levine. "I cannot see any relevance to what is happening right now."

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Micropub is a W3C Recommendation
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2017/05/29

You can find the specification here. "The Micropub protocol is used to create, update and delete posts on one's own domain using third-party clients. Web apps and native apps (e.g., iPhone, Android) can use Micropub to post and edit articles, short notes, comments, likes, photos, events or other kinds of posts on your own website." It defines a multipart upload specification that can include JSON data and attachments such as jpeg images.

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Google’s 3 Secrets To Designing Perfect Conversations
Mark Wilson, 2017/05/29

Google's approach to interaction is based on the work of British philosopher Paul Grice, who "theorized that people employ all sorts of norms (which are known as Grice’s Maxims) to make sure that conversations flow normally." What's interesting is that a lot of the time the response doesn't depend on having understood the other speaker. It might be more important to simply keep the conversation flowing than to ask for a clarification. Grice's maxims aren't rules per se but generally they distinguish between people we want to and people we find to be a bore. 

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Demystifying the Connections Between the LMS, LRS, and xAPI
Brian Carlson, Margaret Roth, Michael Hruska, Learning Solutions, 2017/05/29

The sort of this article is a set of use cases (they're hardly case studies though they're labeled as such) describing storage and use of "data in the Learning Record Store (LRS) from multiple platforms including asynchronous learning in an LMS, synchronous in-person training, a soft-skill development game, and team member collaboration in a mobile communication app." I think it makes a lot of sense (and would be surprised if this weren't done) were the LRS also used for performance data; we could see how a game, for example, and a real-life application could be very similar. Ultimately the purpose of the LRS is to be examined with data analytics, and comparisons of training and performance results would seem to be core to this. 

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How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything
Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 2017/05/29

"Google's geographic data may become its most valuable asset," writes Alexis Madrigal, "not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable." It makes sense. Location - specifically, geolocation - creates otherwise unknowable relations between entities. The map is the first representation of that set of relations, but eventually the map will also contain the data that my cup is located six inches away from my elbow (which, if it is well designed, will prompt it to close its lid, just in case). Via Doug Peterson.

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How Facebook's tentacles reach further than you think
Joe Miller, BBC News, 2017/05/29

It's frustrating not being able to click on the images in this BBC article to expand them, as the text is otherwise quite unreadable. But you'll be rewarded with much more than super-large images if you follow the references to the Share Lab website. The Facebook article (detailing the close-knit Stanford-Yale nexus infusing that company and much of Silicon Valley) makes it clear that the 'new normal' (as described by Audrey Watters) emanates from university values into Silicon Valley (and not vice versa). And there's much more: visualizations of browsing histories, maps of propaganda and information warfare, and on and on.

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