OLDaily

Publishing the 23andMe Way
Joseph Esposito, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/09/26

Read both parts of this article (part one, part two). The key bits are in part two, but you need part one to set up the context. The first part describes how 23andmMe has set up it's data collection website (badly, in the author's opinion: "They could have hired someone from Netflix or Facebook, but apparently the head of end-user experience comes from Verizon or United Airlines." Burn! The second part contains the zingers. It describes 23andme's long term plan as a publisher selling access to a database.

This, he argues, is quite reasonable, since they are producing the value (he does note the contradiction with other academic publishing, where the researchers who produce the value receive no part of the value). He then notes that this model is different from acdemic publishing, because price is based on that value, unlike journal articles. "Libraries, in other words, have been exploiting publishers economically for years. It’s good to have 23andme come along and stick up for the economic rights of the purveyors of content." Wow. Brazen. (Note: Beverly Hillbillies photo was uncredited on the original Scholarly Kitchen article).

[Link] [Comment]

Young people oppose Fitbits in schools
Charlotte Kerner, Mikael Quennerstedt, Victoria Goodyear, The Conversation, 2017/09/26

The generalization in the title is based on published research surveying 100 pupils aged 13 to 14 from two UK schools, which is to say, not reliable. I was able to access some of the original work at NRC, though I imagine it is paywalled elsewhere. Here's another paper from the same work (with none of the references to Foucault etc. cited in the other paper). I question not only the unrepresentative sample but the study itself. "Each pupil was asked to respond to a statement in turn that was presented to them by the interviewer. For example, statements introduced were ‘I would recommend using the Fitbit to other people my age because … ’ and ‘as a result of wearing the Fitbit I learnt … ’." There's no indication that the study was sponsored by FitBit (the authors credit Richard Benjamin Trust, whose website is several years out-of-date). Personally, I think there's a big difference between  being required to wear devices, and then being surveiled, as these studenmts were, and choosing to wear the device on one's own, keeping the data private. I think there's really interesting work to be done on the relation between education and surveillance. But this isn't the way to do it. 

[Link] [Comment]

How Big is the LMS Market?
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/09/26

The answer is, of course, pretty big. But Joshua Kim points to some apparent discrepencies in the research.  He writes, "Instructure (Canvas) has about a 20 percent market share. In 2016, Instructure’s revenues were about $111 million." That gives us a total market of about %550 million. "What explains the discrepancy of this LMS market size estimate (between $555 and $832 million), and those from the market research companies and the press of between $3.2 and $5.2 billion?" Two things. First, Instructure's 20% market share is for the U.S. only. Instructure has a much lower share outside the U.S. And second, it's for higher education only. There's a much larger LMS market in corporate learning, which Instructure has barely touched. Is it possible that the U.S. higher education sector is only about 15% of the global market? Well, yeah. The numbers Kim points to as inconsistent are actually pretty consistent. Having said that, the real questuon mark isn't current size. It's growth.

[Link] [Comment]