OLDaily

The future of personalization—and how to get ready for it
Julien Boudet, Brian Gregg, Kathryn Rathje, Eli Stein, Kai Vollhardt, McKinsey, 2019/06/20

The article identifies three major dimensions of 'personalized': "physical spaces will be ‘digitized’... empathy will scale... (and) brands will use ecosystems to personalize journeys end-to-end." This is actually a straightforward extrapolation of things like augmented reality, sentiment analysis and web services. To get ready for it, say the authors, we should "invest in customer data and analytics foundations... find and train translators and advanced tech talent... build up agile capabilities... (and) protect customer privacy." This advice is pretty empty, and is focused on the wrong skill set. Future prosperity will depend not on being able to develop these capacities, but on being able to use them in novel and useful ways. That's more the domain of the artist than the data analyst.

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Consciousness is (Probably) a Biological Phenomenon
Richard Brown, 2019/06/20

Commenting on a recent interview of David Chalmers Richard Brown discusses some (relatively) recent arguments regarding whether consciousness is a biological phenomenon (or, say, a functional or computational phenomenon), specifically, the dancing and fading quality arguments, and the partial reports argument (both of which are well-explained in this article). I don't think either argument impacts my own position (that consciousness is experience) but the discussion is interesting and helps us look more closely at what it means to have an experience. Image: Jerry Carniglia.

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Stigmergy
Steve Dodson, Language Hat, 2019/06/20

I've used the word 'stigmergy' on a few of occasions in the past. This article, in addition to referencing a definition ("the trace left in the environment by an action"), makes the point thet 'stigmergy' is a good word while 'sematectonic' is an undesirable alternative (I would also add that the Greek word στίγμα (stigma) allows for traces as both representations and non-representations, while the word σῆμα (sema) connotes representations only, which actually makes it a narrower and less useful term). Image: Susnea.

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Google's 'App Hub' for educators curates quality tools, lesson ideas
Colin Wood, EdScoop, 2019/06/20

Google has launched what we are told is "an easier way for educators to find enriching and district-compliant tools through what it’s calling the App Hub." The website used Google Certified Educators (or other partners) to suggest lesson ideas (eg. A Personal Hero's Journey); these in turn link to the relevant applications (for example, ClassCraft). You can't determine from the site what it would cost (which strikes me as a significant weakness). It would be nice if a site like this would link to free and open source apps, but I didn't see any (which I guess tells us how the site defines 'quality').

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Libra developer site
2019/06/20

Libra, recall, is the new global digital currency being proposed by Facebook and others. Here you will find a link to the Libra White Paper and to rather more than you might have expected. There are also technical papers, such as The Libra Blockchain, and also Move, a new programming language, and also state replication using LibraBFT. If you want, you can clone the Libra repository, run your own 'core', and try your first transaction. For the non-technical, there's also Libra the organization, and the conditions for being a founding partner (tl;dr: you have to be wealthy and influential). All this tells me that Libra isn't going to just go away, and moreover (and this is key) it isn't going to limit itself to financial transactions.

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Digital Media’s Alteration Mechanism for Informal Learning
Otto Petrovic, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2019/06/20

What's interesting about this paper (10 page PDF) is that it covers familiar ground from a quite distinct perspective. The result is that the terminology and approach is different - for example, we have "collaborativism" instead of "connectivism", and we read of "alteration mechanisms" where "Learning can be defined as acquiring new or modify existing knowledge, skills, competencies, and perceptions which lead to alterations in thinking, feeling, and behavior." I'm not sure how much of the unique vocabulary is due to translation and how much to the author's isolation from mainstream terminology. The study consists of "capturing learning episodes in  the field by learners themselves in form of video, pictures, and annotations is based on autovideography and photovoice." The outcome is a useful table of 'alteration mechanisms' divided into three major categories.

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