OLDaily

Learn With Facebook: A New Training Tool
Aysha Ashley Househ, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/11/14

According to this article, "Facebook announced Tuesday that it will launch Learn With Facebook, a career development site that focuses on both the hard and soft skills people need to advance in today’s digital workforce." Meanwhile, "Nearly 100 students walked out of classes at the Secondary School for Journalism in Park Slope last week in revolt against 'Summit Learning,' a web-based curriculum designed by Facebook engineers, and bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan." I would have thought Facebook would concentrate on fixing some of the things it has already broken - things like democracy, say, and civil discourse - but I guess not.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Sure, Third Party Service, I Will Give You Permission to Delete My Calendar (?)
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/11/14

Alan Levine was not happy with my selection of a calendar service for E-Learning 3.0. "I will also be vigilant and asking you, as well, to give some thought about the permissions you just give. It’s not that I think they are doing anything evil; I want transparency about their needs for these permissions." Makes sense. And also, as he says: "You can say 'no'." (As to: why did I use it? It was free, and I couldn't find any other service that did the same thing, and I wanted that thing.)

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

‘The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril’
Evan Goldstein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/11/14

This is an excellent interview with historian Jill Lepore, who has just released These Truths, a sweeping history of the United States from Columbus to Trump "asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them" (of course one truth would have been to start a few centuries earlier, but I digress).

The interview mostly talks about the work itself, rather than the argument it contains, but in the (very short) segment signaled in the Chronicle headline she argues that "the retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences" and "If we have a public culture that suffers for lack of ability to comprehend other human beings, we shouldn’t be surprised." Surprising insight for someone with a Harvard and Yale pedigree.

There's a lot more (this interview is to be savoured). The idea that American democracy represents the "transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing," for example. And also: "Anyone who makes an identity-based claim for a political position has to reckon with the unfortunate fact that Stephen Douglas is their forebear, not Abraham Lincoln."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Coming Social Economy
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2018/11/14

According to this article, "More than a third of the American workforce participates in the freelance economy." and "The majority of current high school students will spend at least part of their careers freelancing." They are thus becoming increasingly dependent on platforms like Craigslist, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Upwork that "match buyers and sellers". This leads the author to predict "a social economy of people helping people." There are ways this can be done well and ways (as we have seen with Uber) this can be done very poorly. But really interestingly, "Measured efficacy will unlock the new social economy. Data will tell the value creation story of how well one person supports the growth of another." Or as I've said in the past, the credential of the future will be a job offer.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

‘Secret sharing’ system keeps your personal data safe
Taylor Kubota-Stanford, Futurity, 2018/11/14

The article feels more like marketing than data but it does indicate a trend toward secure personal information online. And the Prio mechanism it proposes could work, I think. " Secret sharing is a method for maintaining the security of data that involves breaking up a piece of information into specially formulated parts. That way, if someone gets hold of only one part, they learn nothing about the original piece of information. Prio uses secret sharing to break individual data points—such as whether you chose to change your browser homepage from the default setting—into secret shares and then sends those to two different servers." More about Prio from Mozilla here.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]