OLDaily

2018 update on the OERu Technology Stack
Dave Lane, OERu Technology, 2018/11/01

After reading about how they set up various services, including websites, chat instances, survey tools, and more, and after you read about the 27 Docket containers they've deployed to support some of these services, you get to the best line of the article, about halfway through: "Total annual software + infrastructure budget: $4800." Most of that goes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) which hosts the containers in the cloud. They do get some help - "$5000/year worth of Microsoft Azure hosting services (plus) $500/month sponsored hosting services from the NZ-based hosting provider, Catalyst Cloud." Still, how many universities are running all their online services for prices like this?

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Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education
Shane Dawson, Kristen Eshleman, George Siemens, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/11/01

I think longtime readers of OLDaily will find most of the core concepts discussed here pretty familiar. They include complexity ("many simple parts [that] are irreducibly entwined"), networks, emergence, self-organization and social coordination, feedback sensitivity, and agility. The article gives a brief mid-level definition of each, and then orients to to a management perspective (for example, "if the operational balance of control is weighted toward administration, an organization is unlikely to be able to quickly respond to complex pressures"). Mostly, though, this reduces to how management can attempt to influence an otherwise self-organizing system. For example, "a complexity leadership approach seeks to balance the interplay between the administrative and the adaptive functions in an organization." But that's probably the limit of what can be done in this article's context.

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On Distributing Distributed Technology, Long Tails, and Scaling
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2018/11/01

In any technology cycle (including learning technology) "Long tail forming as an adoption pattern is a good way then to see if broad distribution is being achieved," writes Ton Zijllstra. This is the proposition he asserts of Mastodon, which has a big head (or a big spike) of a few very large instances, but only a stubby tail of very few small-scale adopters. To expand the tail you need (among other things) a "lower thresholds of adoption (technically, financially, socially, intellectually)." This is the contradiction most technology faces: easier adoption is best facilitated by a few large instances (think MoodleRooms, WordPress.com, Facebook, Mastodon.social) but for a genuinely decentralized network you need to minimize these large instances and promote the long tail. Because in decentralized technology, it's all tail. Image via Alan Levine.

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Server to Client
Ali Alabbas, A List Apart, 2018/11/01

This article, the first in a series, is a very detailed explanation of how a web page gets from a remote server to your browser. If you have never heard of HSTS lists or service workers, this article is for you; it explains these concepts so clearly you'll think they're obvious. It also gets into DNS, caching, and CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) (a big deal for people writing web applications). The next article in the series is Tags to DOM by Travis Leithead and is equally recommended. It looks at parsing, tokenization and the Document Object Model (DOM). There are two more articles forthcoming in the series, so keep an eye open.

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Your Kid’s Apps Are Crammed With Ads
Nellie Bowles, New York Times, 2018/11/01

Advertising is the original fake news. "The vast majority of ads were not marked at all. Characters in children’s games gently pressured the kids to make purchases, a practice known as host-selling, banned in children’s TV programs in 1974 by the Federal Trade Commission. At other times an onscreen character would cry if the child did not buy something." There's no difference between this and the army of Twitter bots driving conversation about the caravan.

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