OLDaily

Feature Article
Evaluation of CL/4291 “Draft text of the Recommendation concerning Open Educational Resources”, UNESCO
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2019/12/05

This is the analysis of the UNESCO OER resolution I provided to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO prior to the discussion and vote. It is now a matter of historical record that the resolution did pass, but I think my comments may still provide some insight. Here is the final resolution.

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Exploring Identity Using Personal Narratives
Brent Gilson, Middleweb, 2019/12/05

This post reads a bit like it's from the 1980s (using paper-and-pen tools, reading physical books, etc) but at the same time has a very 21st century slant as it explores concepts like diversity and identity webs. Not that I agree with everything in it - Chad Everett notwithstanding I think the term 'diversity' should be used, for one, and I think the 'web' diagrams are very much not webs, for another. But no matter. I enjoyed this look at grade 9 learning and so will you, probably.

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Amazon CodeGuru
Amazon Web Services, 2019/12/05

This is an artificial intelligence that reviews your source code and mades recommendations (no doubt also gathering statistics as it scans). "It helps you find the most expensive lines of code that hurt application performance and keep you up all night troubleshooting, then gives you specific recommendations to fix or improve your code. CodeGuru is powered by machine learning, best practices, and hard-learned lessons across millions of code reviews and thousands of applications profiled on open source projects and internally at Amazon." 75 cents per 100 lines of code per month.

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Private Equity Firm Thoma Bravo to Acquire Instructure for $2 Billion
Phil Hill, Phil on EdTech, 2019/12/05

Phil Hill, who basically predicted this story a couple weeks ago, comments on the acquisition of Instructure. He comments, "it is worth noting that in the press release Thoma Bravo specifically mentions Canvas but not Bridge, which should give a hint about future plans. And perhaps more importantly, the press release explicitly mentions future growth that will or could include M&A – Instructure buying other companies.

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The LMS is dead! What next?
kgq962, Random Access Learning, 2019/12/05

I wonder whether we've reached a tipping point on self-managed learning (what I have for many years been calling 'personal learning' and people before me have called heutagogy (among other names)). First, the Inside Higher Ed post, and now this, from a completely different community: "From my viewpoint, the key is to think ecosystems not platforms. We should be encouraging learners to develop a self-managing mindset. Most importantly we need to realise that most learning doesn’t happen on the platforms we provide but 'out in the wild'." This time credit is being given to Dani Johnson and Priyanka Mehotra from Redthread Research; eventually the concept will be 'invented' by a researcher from MIT or Stanford and it will be a thing. (p.s. to the author of this blog: why don't you put your name on it?)

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How Tiktok oversees its users
Matthias Eberl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019/12/05

Tiktok is spying on and manipulating its users, but not in the way you may think. "The analysis of the data streams shows that Tiktok in his logic is not a surveillance network from the Communist Politburo, but follows a very Western, capitalist concept. Critics call the business model 'People Farming': people are held with psychological tricks as long as possible on a platform and look content that they have ideally created themselves. Then they will be shown advertisements, the resulting data about them will be re-marketed." Translated from the original German and based on a longish Mastodon thread which includes numerous technical details not covered in the article.

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