OLDaily

Life360 app is selling data from millions of families, report says
David Priest, Cnet, 2021/12/08

CNet reports that "Life360, an app that enables family members to share their location with one another, sells its user data to "approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it," The Markup reported Monday. The report landed less than a month after Life360 bought Tile, a well-known location tracking company." I haven't found independent confirmation of The Markup's report, but Life360's privacy policy is pretty clear on this: "We may share your personal information, including your precise location data, driving sensor data, unique identifiers or AD IDs and other data with our partners, such as Cuebiq and its Partners, for their marketing and business purposes." This (again) is why we need personal data applications, not commercial cloud services.

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WTF is a CMP and how to select the right one?
Nial Ferguson, What's New in Publishing, 2021/12/08

This is marketing content (a.k.a. a 'guest column') on WNP, and normally I would simply ignore it, but it's useful because it introduces the notion of a consent management platform (CMP). According to the article, "a CMP is a software solution that is used by publishers to request, receive, and store users’ consent with regards to how they allow their data to be used; to present a list of preferred vendors and partners alongside the reasons they’re collecting user information; and to allow the user to update and make changes to their consent preferences at any time." Of course, what we really need is an enforceable client side consent management platform (CSCMP) so we can answer such questions once and not every time the publisher wants to make another attempt to get your permission (the lineup to pay me royalties for the idea starts to the right).

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If You Think Cloud Data is Forever, Think Again
Dave North, Daniel Bryant, InfoQ, 2021/12/08

I see in my email that Reclaim is requiring that we move all "advanced CloudLinux applications" from cpanel to Reclaim Cloud, which means for me the long-anticipated migration of my whole website to cloud containers, something I've been hesitant to commit to because clouds can go poof! "This risk is important to understand," write the authors, "otherwise, all the vital SaaS data you rely on each and every day could disappear in the blink of an eye." Of course, there are ways to minimize that risk, and it's a risk that exists for any digital data, not just cloud data. But the main point here is that "a data continuity strategy is essential," and that's as true for individuals like myself as it is for large enterprises (indeed, maybe even more true).

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The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy
Bongrae Seok, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/12/08

I have talked about sentiments and emotions as though they were things that we simply experience, by analogy (I suppose) with the other senses. This article remonds me that I need to be broader in my thinking - just as vision or taste is a complex interplay between what I emperiencing and what I have previously experienced, so are sentiments and emotions. "In Chinese philosophy... emotions are not fully explained by inner subjective feelings or inexplicable passions. Rather, they are understood as interactive, responsive, and holistic affectivity that plays broad psychological, cognitive, and moral roles in one’s understanding of the world (its objective reality, nature of things, and their situations and circumstances) and one’s dispositions and reactions to external stimulation." That's the starting point for this article, which is focused throughout on the  notion of qing (情), which Bongrae Seok  writes is commonly understood, in modern Chinese, as affective states of the mind. Image: Wikipedia.

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Questioning the ethics of online proctoring
Kari Zacharias, Ketra Schmitt, University Affairs, 2021/12/08

This article begins with an interesting perspective. “It would be a neat trick,” wrote physicist Alvin Weinberg in 1966, “if the social problems could be converted into technological problems.” It would be neat, however, technological solutions provide intractable problems of their own, as evidenced in the current case, online proctoring. "When we rely on deeply flawed systems to govern important aspects of students’ education, we model precisely the type of irresponsible behaviour that we want future (people) to understand and avoid." Yet we somehow can't resist taking the shortcuts ourselves that we want our students to avoid.

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Exploring Student Emotional Engagement in Extreme E-service Learning
Valerie Bukas Marcus, Noor Azean Atan, Shaharuddin Md Salleh, Lokman Mohd Tahir, Sanitah Mohd Yusof, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2021/12/08

I picked this paper because I wanted to explore what was meant by extreme e-service learning (XE-SL). The concept actually dates back to Waldner, McGorry and Widener (2010), who define it as "service learning where both the instruction and the service occur 100% online". It was new to me, but I love the concept. In the current study, Valerie Bukas Marcus and colleagues investigate student emotional engagement in XE-SL. They suggest there are three essential elements: "course design with proper online platform, (ii) role of instructors and peers and (iii) personal value." I would imagine deeper study will minimize the role of the first and emphasize the importance of the third.

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The Benefits of Learning Analytics to Higher Education Institutions: A Scoping Review
Adedayo Taofeek Quadri, Nurbiha A Shukor, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2021/12/08

This is a very short paper (12 page PDF) with a really limited analysis, but it does show how narrow the focus has been on what learning analytics can do for education. This to me is a start contrast to the wide range of possibilities to explore.

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How Snap is sidestepping the metaverse
Casey Newton, Platformer, 2021/12/08

Snap is a company that most people are overlooking, argues Casey Newton, but it has slowly been developing a solid foundation for augmented reality (AR) glasses that will eclipse its rivals. He makes a good argument. This, for example, is tantalizing: restaurants have been telling customers to scan QR codes to access the menu, but Snap has a 'lens' that displays what the menu item would look like on the table in front of you. "When I opened it up using Spectacles, I waved my hands to advance through the virtual goods: a burger, a sushi roll, a piece of pie. The donut looked realistic enough that I developed slight hunger pangs." Forget the bits that don't work yet. Focus on the things that are amazing.

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