OLDaily

Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care: The MOOC
Stephen Downes, mooc.ca, 2021/10/05

This is the home page for my most recent MOOC, which launched this week. This first week talks about how to participate in the MOOC and get the most out of it. It's a connectivist MOOC, which means that it doesn't really have learning outcomes (you decide for yourself what counts as success in the course) and is organized in as decentralized a format as possible. You can sign up for the course newsletter, or add your blog to the list of participant blogs, follow the #ethics21 tag on Twitter, or you can simply read the web pages or watch the videos and I'll never know you participated unless you want me to know.

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15 Ways To Make an Educational Technology Project Successful (Updated)
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2021/10/05

As always, I ask the question of what constitutes 'success' in this context. Based on the language used in the text, 'success' means something like being aligned with the school development plan, scalable, cost-limited, and (among others) be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-related (SMART). Interestingly, almost none of this applies to my most recent experiments in MOOCs. Would limiting my work in this way make it successful? Not, to me, in any of the ways I value. In fact, one value I have embraced is designing ways participation and outcomes in my MOOC can't be measured. I don't know what will make my MOOC successful - but I think I'll recognize it if I see it.

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VR, AR, wearables, and smart home tech are now mainstream, research says
Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, 2021/10/05

This article summarizes a report from IDC (probably this one) asserting that "AR, AR, wearables, and smart home tech have passed the early-adoption phase and are all firmly part of the 'mass market.'" But there's 'mainstream' and then there's 'mainstream'. Would I be designing technology today expecting everyone to have an AR or VR device? No. These technologies are 'available' in the sense that you can go out and buy one, but while sales figures are expanding they are far from ubiquitous - we know that because the report is still saying things like "total value of three emerging categories of products... is expected to reach $372.1 billion by the end of this calendar year, and swell to $542.8 billion by the end of 2025. So, almost doubling, which tells me that at least half of the people who could be buying these products haven't yet.

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Facebook goes from bad to worse
Tom Jones, Poynter, 2021/10/05

So I hardly need to expand on the coverage that has blanketed the media over the last week, but I want to include a post just for the sake of posterity, so if I'm ever searching my database for Facebook stories, this one will surface. In a nutshell: amid revelations from a whistleblower that Facebook (the company) chose profits over safety (again), there was an hour-long outage of all three of their major services. The main lesson? In my view, the fact that a single failure can take down such a large swath of internet services shows the danger of centralization. So does putting the control of all that into the hands of just a few people.

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Where the Intention Economy Beats the Attention Economy
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2021/10/05

This is a long post challenging the idea of the attention economy, and especially the idea of 'capturing' attention by locking people into a platform (for example, Facebook). The theory is that "Free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace." How this manifests is in the idea that people, making choices for themselves, are better able to express their needs than algorithms or surveillance systems. I would want to see some proof of this. Anyhow, the way people best express these needs, says Searls, is by stating their intentions "to whole markets, but without being trapped inside any one company’s walled garden... this is called intentcasting." I can see the value of this in an educational context, but we need to keep in mind (where Searls does not) that people's intentions are very susceptible to marketing, manipulation, and other forces.

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