OLDaily

W3C Strategic Highlights April 2019
2019/04/23

The work of designing the web continues apace (it will probably never stop) and now consists of some 30 separate working groups and a dozen interest groups. To discern future directions it's probably easiest to look at the pipeline of innovations (illustrated). Some of the big things coming up: distributed (self-sovereign) identity, secure web payments, and interledger protocols. These reflect a desire on the part of web designers to decentralize and distribute control somewhat - an internet dominated by entities such as Google and Facebook makes people nervous, especially if they have a proprietary grip on identity, payments and data.

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23 Digital capabilities to support practice and learning in social and health services
Keith Quinn, Scottish Social Services Council, 2019/04/23

Keith Quinn writes on LinkedIn, " Our 23 Digital Capabilities learning resource has been incredibly popular since it was launched. It’s designed to help social service workers build and develop their skills in using digital technology in their work and private lives. The resource is a nice example of how to use some pretty basic technology (WordPress, YouTube, Open Badges) to create a useful and informative learning opportunity for staff. The content is CC-by, the interactivity is limited by IP address, and if you want to build your own Quinn suggests that "you might be interested in our upcoming 'Build your own 23Things' toolkit."

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Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark and Neo4j
Mark Needham, Amy E. Hodler, O'Reilly, 2019/04/23

You will need to provide your name and email to access this free eBook (this is what I call a 'spamwall') but in this cases the trade is probably worthwhile. The book offers a very accessible introduction to graph theory and graph-based data processing that clearly illustrates the difference between this and statistics-based modeling. There is some practical instruction concerning the installation of Apache Sp[ark and Neo4j which you can follow of skip. Then the meat of the book: graph algorithms - even if you don't work with these directly, the chapters offer a good overview of the sorts of things graph algorithm,s can do (pathfinding, centrality, community detection, more).

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Challenges and Opportunities for use of Social Media in Higher Education
Terry Anderson, Journal of Learning for Development, 2019/04/23

Research in social media in educational institutions has shown "continuing and expanding use in campus based, distance and blended learning contexts and, at least, preliminary results suggesting significant educational benefit." At the same time, writes Terry Anderson, there is growing awareness of the risks. For example, " Some critical reviewers suggest that social media is not conducive to education as it contains an explicit bias towards conviviality and homogeneity and lacks the critical components of disagreement and discourse." The paper is a straightforward discussion of the topic, but near the end - almost as an afterthought - is a mention of decentralized social media and the observation that "Verborgh (2019) shows how this individual ownership of data, stored in personal owned data pods is differentiated from the current model."

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