OLDaily

Where is Technology Taking the Economy
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2017/11/20

Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers projections about the new technological environment. "Machines have started to exhibit associative intelligence," he writes, "Associative intelligence is no longer just housed in the brains of human workers, but emerges from the constant interactions among machines, software and processes." It made me think of e-Trucks interacting with each other to form convoys, for example. Then I began to imagine road construction priorities being automatically determined by automated vehicles reporting bottlenecks and slowdowns. Anyhow, Wladawsky-Berger identifies several key changes in our political economy that result from this trend (quoted):

• The criteria for assessing policies will change from 'growth' to 'job creation' (or maybe simply access to goods and services)
• The criteria for measuring the economy will change, as virtual goods "generate unmeasured benefits for the user, cost next to nothing, and are unpriced"
• Free market economies will be regulated. “In the distributive era free-market efficiency will no longer be justifiable if it creates whole classes of people who lose.”
• "The next era will not be an economic one, but a political one... until we’ve resolved access we’re in for a lengthy period of experimentation"

I think these changes mught be even more significant than depicted here. If we're looking decades ahead, as Wladawsky-Berger, we may be looking at the replacement of money as a mechanism for exchange, as the assumulation of trillions of unused dollars in secret accounts has undermined its effectiveness for the purpose of regulating commerce.

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Pearson, WTF? Badges, patents, and the world’s ‘least popular’ education company
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/11/20

Doug Belshaw has two bits of news about Pearson in this article. First, he reports on Pearson's new application to patent digital credentials (you know, like badges). It's only something Belshaw and others have been working on for years now. "he ‘background’ section uses language very similar to the Open Badges for Lifelong Learning working paper published in 2012 by Mozilla."  Additionally, he notes that " they have closed their DRM-Free ebook store, and will now proceed to delete all ebooks from their customers’ accounts." Well, I'm glad I didn't buy any eBooks from Pearson! "Perhaps I should have been more cynical, as they obviously are," writes Belshaw. "I note, for example, that Pearson waited until Mozilla handed over stewardship of Open Badges to IMS Global Learning Consortium (who have said they will not contest the patent) before filing." Will not contest? Seriously, IMS?

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Innovation Culture
Rideau Hall Foundation, 2017/11/20

This website, and the associated project around it, are an outcome of the previous Governor-General of Canada, David Johnston, working with Tom Jenkins (of the Jenkins report on science and technology in Canada). The site says "Innovation is the creative combination of anything that, once done, makes something better." I have mixed views. The Canadian Museum of Science and Technology, now part of co-sponsor Ingenium, was one of my favourite childhood destinations. It just reopened (yay!). I should visit. And you can submit Canadian Innovation Stories (note that the site is slow). But innovation seems to me to be more than just 'combining' things, and more than just 'making something better'. The Governor-General's Innovation Awards, associated with the site, are almost exclusively for medical innovations and/or businesses. There are education resources, including a children's resource, that defines innovation as "creating or improving a thing (product) or action (process) to make a difference (impact)." This seems even narrower to me. It's not all about business. Disclosure: I was peripherally involved with the education resources and my name appears in the acknowledgements.

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Open In Order To...
OpenCon2017, 2017/11/20

These are all papers submitted to OpenCon2017 in response to an essay competition that closed today. The conference is tomorrow. You might be able to vote but I encourage reading rather than voting. The papers run in the 500-1000 work range.

• Daniel Machado, “Open in order to [promote cooperation over competition]”
• Paula, “Imposed embargo”
• Imogen, “Open in order to…level the playing field”
• Andrea Bertino, "Open in order to [create a new balance between innovators and the rest of humanity]"
• Jerome Samson, “Open in order to [mess with a winning formula?]”
• Peifeng Wang, "Open access to foster universal value"
• sarah, "Optimize Scientific Research Process"
• Devin Berg, "Open in order to open engineering"
• Fulco Scherjon, "Open in order to reproduce"
• Asura Enkhbayar, "Open in order to ... have a plan B"
• Sara Bosshart, "On Open Access, Dandelions and “Open in Order to Grow”"
• Edit Gorogh, "Open in order to expand horizons"
• Marina Lubenow & Jens Crueger, "Open in order to think multidisciplinary!"
• Peter Murray-Rust, "Open Notebook Science Means Better Science"
• Leo Mack, "Open Science is Science at Web-scale"
• Isabel Jordan, "Open Access for Quality of Life and Partnership in Care"
• Dasapta Erwin Irawan, "Openness for the inferior: a view from Indonesian Scientist"

The conference is subtitled 'Empowering the next generation to advance open access, open education and open data'. I like how the essays represent a variety of different agendas and benefits all revolving around the idea of open access.

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Learning Experience Platform – WRONG
Craig Weiss, The Craig Weiss Group, 2017/11/20

The 'wrong' in this article refers to the term 'experience'. Craig Weiss argues that the term houl be 'engagement' instead. Beyond that first argument he offers a pretty good overview of the platform, what is is, what it contains, and what it's supposed to do. He names a number of them at the end of the article: Learn Amp, Degreed, Grovo, Pathgather and Linkedin Learning. Based on both the description and the examples, my inclination would be to call them Learning Resource Platforms, because they are for the most part providing or selling access to learning content and resources.

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Creating a Safety Net — Why Double-Dipping Is the Wrong Term and the Right Approach
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/11/20

Kent Anderson launches a spirited defense of "double dipping" - this is the practice of charging publication fees on articles published in journals where there are also subscription fees. His argument, based on the collapse of advertising revenue for digital publications, is that companies need to support diverse income streams. No doubt this is true, however, charging different people for the same thing is something else. It's like when you pay the full cost of your internet bandwidth, and then your ISP charges someone else extra for permission to send data to you. It's the sort of price-gouging that would not be possible without people being locked into your service. Related: There's a Digital Media Crash, Talking Points Memo.

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