OLDaily

The IMS at an Inflection Point
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/06/13

This is a longish article about the recent successes of IMS Global (the learning standards organization). If I had to sum up the thesis in just one quote, it would be this: "Market pressures now favor interoperability. The same companies that were the most resistant to developing and implementing useful interoperability standards in 2007 are among the most aggressive champions of interoperability today. This is not to say that foundational interoperability work is 'over.' Far from it. Rather, the conditions finally exist where it can move forward as it should, still hard but relatively unimpeded by the distortions of a dysfunctional market."

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2019 Internet Trends report
Mary Meeker, Bond Capital, 2019/06/13

Mary Meeker has released her annual internet trends report. This year's report, wighing in at 333 slides, seems a bit weaker than previous reports; its education coverage (starting on p. 233, and again for China on p. 328) points to a few US-based cost and enrollment statistics, some data from Coursera and very broad trends in a few market segments. The 4.5B Annual Hours of ‘How-To’ YouTube Video Viewership is hugely significant, but it's just left hanging. The more interesting bits in the report are elsewhere. Highlights include: her discussion of freemium (p. 89), of the new role for data (p. 134, 147), on-demand work (p. 227), and Doximity, a million-member physician social network that can assist referrals by specialization (p. 282).

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Nearly nine in 10 Canadians fooled by fake news: survey
Jim Bronskill, CTV News, 2019/06/13

What if the story about fake news is fake news? How would you know? There are some reasons to be suspicious about this story, since we never find out what we mean by 'fooled' and 'fake news'. So what do we do? If nothing else, go to the source (214 page PDF) and read it. The word 'fooled' appears precisely once. "Fewer than half indicate that they were initially fooled by the fake news they saw, but it is clearly happening at least sometimes." (p. 61) The story focuses on social media, but the survey also covers fake news on television and print media. Overall, 6 in 10 report seeing fake news on social media, roughly half on traditional media, and only 40 percent on blogs. Also missing from the story, interestingly: "internet users in Canada (59%), Turkey (59%) and the United States itself (57%) were most likely to say that the United States is most responsible for the disruptive effect of fake news in their own country."

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