OLDaily

Paulo Freire
Kim Díaz, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/02/05

The entry for Paulo Freire in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just been updated. It's worth taking a few moneths to read if you are not familiar with the man or his work. " A native of Brazil, Freire's goal was to eradicate illiteracy among people from previously colonized countries and continents. His insights were rooted in the social and political realities of the children and grandchildren of former slaves. His ideas, life, and work served to ameliorate the living conditions of oppressed people."

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A decade of living in the gift shop
Dean Groom, Playable, 2018/02/05

"Exit through the gift shop." The phrase says everything that needs to be said about the commercialization of culture and heritage. The same phenomenon seems to be inhabiting Ed Tech and things like the #EdTech discussions, suggests Dean Groom. "The culture of online discussions (especially those being directed by individuals (they call themselves ‘founders’) is to repeat the most popular ‘trend’ statements, rather than make any real effort to evaluate claims," he writes. Things like personalized learning and blockchain are more marketing slogans than they are concrete ideas, he suggests. Well, as long as you didn't read that here...

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How I coined the term 'open source'
Christine Peterson, OpenSource.com, 2018/02/05

This 'I' in this post is the author, Christine Peterson. She describes in this post her contribution to the origin of the term 'open source'. " The introduction of the term 'open source software' was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users," she writes. The account seems plausible to me, and the alternative names discussed (including especially 'freeware', a cousin of the then widely used 'shareware') are familiar to me from the community at the time. Via David Wiley.

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The End of Cash; The End of Freedom
2018/02/05

What is freedom anyways? Doug Belshaw posted this article from last July. It argues that the move toward a cashless society means the end of freedom, because government and corporations could then surveil your every transaction and cut off your access to money. But is freedom the same as skulking in the dark and operating outside the law? Maybe I have "some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics," as the author suggests. We need safeguards, yes.But it's hard for me to see how we would be more free when the will of the criminal and corrupt prevail.

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Quick update on W3C Community Group on Educational and Occupational Credentials
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2018/02/05

This post updates work in the W3C Community Group on educational and occupational credentials, which was launched November 27. "The aim of this community group is to show how educational and occupational credentials may be described with schema.org, and to propose any additional terms for schema.org that may be necessary. Educational and Occupational Credentials are defined as diplomas, academic degrees, certifications, qualifications, badges, etc., that a person can obtain through learning, education and/or training." Mostly, I think, the news is that this group exists.

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Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
Aza Raskin, 2018/02/05

Longtime readers of OLDaily will remember I created something called mIDm back in 2004. The idea was to put an identifying URL in the browers so I could automatically log into sites. Three days later (literally!) the first proposals for OpenID were released and that's the direction the web went. OpenID was basically replaced by Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which gives us the third party ID system we use today. It is not satisfying. See also: WebID and the W3C WebID Community Group.

As Aza Raskin writes in this post, "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company." Mozilla, he writes, has been working on a browser-based alternative (yay!). The full discussion is here. The first draft of the protocol is here. "The browser user requests 'connection' to the site. The browser negotiates account setup, possibly disclosing some personal information about the user, and learns a userid-credential pair. On a subsequent visit, the browser notices that it does not have an active session, and automatically establishes one."

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Educational Technology Magazine archive (1966-2017)
George Veletsianos, 2018/02/05

Nice.  George Veletsianos writes " Educational Technology was a print-only publication. However, Howard Lipsitz, Larry’s brother, has collaborated with JSTOR to preserve Larry’s legacy and make all articles available online where they can be read for free. Here’s the Educational Technology magazine archives (1966-2017)."

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