OLDaily

The Gates Foundation And Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Want Your Ideas On The Future Of Education
Fast Company, Jim Shelton, 2018/05/11

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have opened a Request for Information (RFI) about work that can help increase student success in math, non-fiction writing, and "executive function (the skill set concerning memory, self-control, attention, and flexible thinking)" (I couldn't help but giggle a bit when I read the third one). "The RFI represents an invitation to researchers and practitioners to deepen public understanding of where the most important, ambitious, and innovative work is being done in a variety of disciplines." I found the submission process a bit off-putting. They note that "All responses generated by this RFI become the property of BMGF and CZI" and they ask for a lot of biographical information up front. all what a to be a closed online form.

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Everything Is a Subscription Now and It’s Too Much
Justin Pot, How-To Geek, 2018/05/11

The conversion from a sales model to a subscription model may well have worked for software vendors, but as the trend has taken hold it is becoming clearer that it is unsustainable. "Netflix. Spotify. Newspapers. Office365. Dropbox. Everything is a subscription now, but how many services can people afford?" This (very) short article suggests that bundles may be the answer ("Microsoft, Google, and Apple seem intent on copying the Amazon Prime model, likely for this reason: they want to be the one subscription their customers pay for." But I can't imagine that this is what customers want.

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Commission on Creating the Next in Education (CNE)
Office of the Provost, Georgia Tech, 2018/05/11

This report "is an effort to draw with broad strokes the nature of education that defines the technological research university of the year 2040 and beyond." The core outcome, I think, is in the initiatives section (here are the links, because the page deign obscures them: Whole-Person Education, New Products and Services, Advising for a New Era, A.I. and Personalization, A Distributed Worldwide Presence). Just as interesting (maybe more so) are the seven trends outlined on the initiatives page. There's a comparison of MOOCs to "early twentieth century Chautauqua, the traveling tent shows that moved across the plains of the American Midwest to bring interesting lectures, performances, and novel cultural experiences to families," and the blunt assessment that "most analysts agree that transactional pricing (tuition per credit hour) is not a sustainable model."

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Educational Technology and Education Conferences for June to December 2018
Clayton R Wright, Stephen's Web, 2018/05/11

Clayton R. Wright offers the 39th version of the Educational Technology and Education Conference list. It comprises 1,782 confirmed events between May-December 2018. MS-Word Document. He writes, "The events for May and June have been updated since distribution of the previous list. During the last 20 years, as I have compiled the list, I have viewed tens of thousands of conference, symposium, and workshop websites. I am still amazed at the number of event organizers who do not link one year's website to the next or who think of the website as a treasure hunt.

"The leading page of an event should be attractive, but it should also be informative. It should provide basic information such as the title, an alphanumeric date (including the year), and the specific location while using few abbreviations so those who are not in the 'in-crowd' can figure out what the conference is about and where it will be held. Using 'code' or shorthand may be acceptable for those who attend an event regularly or attend an event held in the same place each year, but how does this presentation style successfully attract interest from others, especially those new to a field? How does the lack of easily accessible information help a person decide among several professional development opportunities?"

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Why Great Employees Leave “Great Cultures”
Melissa Daimler, Harvard Business Review, 2018/05/11

According to this article, "there are three elements to a culture: behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values." Issues arise when there are gaps between them, for example, "Maybe your company tells people to be consensus-builders, but promotes people who are solely authoritative decision makers (behavior-practices gap)." What I like about this characterization is that members of the culture don't need to share an objective, a common language, set of beliefs, or single ethic - the culture is built on actions, not attitudes. Behaviors, systems, and practices are all about how to interact, not how to think or believe. Maybe that wasn't the intent of the article, but that is the outcome.

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Sunsetting Klout
PeteH, Lithium Community, 2018/05/11

Remember Klout? It is a service that collects your activity on impact on various social media and gives you a ranking - your 'klout score'. Anyhow, Klout is being shut down. The explanation: "The Klout acquisition provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities but Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy." Because the Lithium page will probably disappear, here's the Metafilter story which will exist (for a while?) to provide historical context to those of you reading this post in the 2020s.The Metafilter author notes that "It's unknown what Klout's parent company will be doing with all that data."

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Inside the Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers
Adrianne Jeffries, Bloomberg, 2018/05/11

This is the debate in a nutshell: "online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits." So how can advertising possibly work online? "The Pi-hole team recommends a renewed focus on subscriptions, affiliate links, and curated endorsements for products and services that might truly interest users." As described in the article, Pi-hole is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi (that) blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps." The development of ad blocking technology is depicted in this article as being motivated by "resentment", but I think this really is the wrong word. They probably said "resistance."

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