OLDaily

Google prepares publishers for the release of Chrome ad-blocking
Joe Mullin, Ars Technica, 2017/06/05

Joe Mullin writes, "At first glance, it's surprising that Google, the world's largest Web advertising company, would want to promote ad-blockers. But it can also be viewed as a defensive move to give the company more control over what types of ads flourish on the Web." My thinking is that Google wants Google ads to flourish on the web.

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The Five Biggest Fears that Kept Me from Empowering Students
John Spencer, The Synapse, 2017/06/05

What I like about this article isn't just that John Spencer reviews and gives a strong voice to the objections to student empowerment, but also that he doesn't gloss over them with superficial answers. Empowering students isn't that easy, he writes, and his own experience includes numerous mistakes and false starts.And not necessarily success in the end. "I realized," he writes, "that students sometimes struggled with so much student ownership. This is why I created a scope and sequence of how I would introduce additional ownership throughout the school year."

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MOOCs and Open Ed book Interview in China Ed Tech and Upcoming Preconference Symposium at E-Learn in Vancouver
Curtis J. Bonk, Travelin Ed Man, 2017/06/05

Curt Bonk has written two more books on MOOCs than I have, something I note with some surprise. This post catches us up with the traveling ed man as he prepares for a talk in Vancouver. He links us to a recent paper published in China, talks about his book, and discusses his preconference symposium.

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Monkey mafia steal your stuff, then sell it back for a cracker
Brian Owens, New Scientist, 2017/06/05

We like to think that certain things are uniquely human, things like language, tools, economy and culture. But we are increasingly seeing that these things are found in living beings generally. Take these monkeys in Bali, for example, who will steal your stuff, and then exchange the loot for food. This is a learned behaviour, culturally transmitted, that incorporates both economics and crime. Or take these spiders who use their webs to record information. All this says to me that whatever theory of learning and cognition we embrace has to apply not only to adult humans but to infants and animals as well. Cf. David Hume, Enquiry, Section 33, p, 28.

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The Silicon Valley method isn’t enough: A better way to build products
Phil Libin, LinkedIn, 2017/06/05

This is a launch announcement by former Evernote founder Phil Libin for All-Turtles, a company he described yesterday on TWiT as "a Netscape for artificial intelligence." He writes, "the rapid advancement of practical AI is happening right now. I wrote about it last year in A Charge of Bots, and I believe it now more than ever." Se also: coverage in TechCrunch.

Worth noting: "Consider these six attributes: If you’re a: (a) white or South Asian (b) male, (c)between the ages of 22 and 27, (d) with a computer science degree (e) from Stanford, and (f) you still live within 50 miles of Stanford, you have a pretty good shot of getting into the tech startup ecosystem. For each of those things that you aren’t, your odds decrease by a factor of two. Maybe a factor of ten!"

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