Hat-tip to Tim Terry (@tterry) for sharing this one from Phil Hill.

tldr; – Blackboard and its acquisitions continue to shrink (great!), Canvas continues to grow (good), Moodle continues to thrive (very good), partly driven by Blackboard’s hosted version in MoodleRooms (not so good). Of the rest (a tiny fraction of the big three), Desire2Learn is still growing market share and Sakai trundles along as it has for over a decade. Homegrown solutions have dwindled to a neglible fraction of the whole, though it is worth noting that Moodle (especially), Canvas (to an extent), and Sakai are highly customizable as they are open source (or, in Canvas’s case, open core), and that all allow use of plugins of some form or another, so the fact few are running systems built from scratch does not imply that everyone is running baseline systems.

The battle between open and closed source systems looks fairly evenly matched right now, on the surface, but that is largely due to Blackboard’s slowly-decreasing momentum. When you take into account that, up to 10 years ago, it and its acquisitions held a large majority of the market, it looks like open systems are the big winners. However, a note of caution is needed here.  Canvas’s ambivalent approach and an increased move to cloud hosting, usually with proprietary pieces sneaking in through the back door (especially in Blackboard’s MoodleRooms foray), cast a shadow on that. The big commercial players are starting to notice that it only takes a little bit of lock-in to trap people in a system, so they can benefit from the reduced need for development that the use of open source entails for them, while still trapping their users as they have always done with relatively small, closed, euphemistically named ‘value-added’ services that, in the long run, are anything but. Cloud systems only make sense when they can be directly replaced with alternative cloud (or self-hosted) systems, with little or no disruption, lost functionality, or data loss. That largely limits the options to those that use open source and/or exclusively open protocols, or those that are more or less completely ephemeral and that store no significant data. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the direction cloud hosting is taking right now.

I predict that there will be an increasing demand in coming years for migration specialists that are able to negotiate the complex business, legal, social, and technical problems of moving between cloud providers. They will be able to charge through the nose because they will save large fortunes for trapped companies. There are also killings to be made by cloud hosts that can successfully suck everything from other cloud hosts, though buyers should beware that they may just be moving from the frying pan into the fire. Long-time masters of lock-in, like Blackboard and Microsoft, will do everything in their power to prevent migration away from them, shifting formats, obfuscating data, subtly breaking protocols and standards, adding unnecessary but desirable tools, retiring systems that are too easy to back out of, and adjusting their prices to make it just a bit more expensive to leave them than to stay. Such techniques have worked for them for years even before the cloud got to be a big thing, but it is so much easier for them now they have their hands on actual company data. Smart companies will avoid falling prey to them in the first place.

Address of the bookmark: http://mfeldstein.com/state-higher-ed-lms-market-us-canada-spring-2017-edition/

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Oh good grief.

I wonder why students would be taking such risks? Oh, right…

“Modup, a website selling Modafinil, told the Guardian that during exam time the volume of Modafinil shipped to the UK doubles.”

Funny that, in the whole article, there is no mention of the possibility that universities might be doing something outrageously wrong to their students, something that is easily fixable, something that just might just be the cause of the problem in the first place.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/may/10/universities-do-more-tackle-smart-drugs-say-experts-uk-exams

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Researchers analyzing millions of posts across an assortment of popular social media assert that 63% of antisemitic posts were to be found on Twitter. The writers suggest:

“The larger proportion of such hate speech found on Twitter could be because it’s easier to search for comments than other social sites – as many Facebook pages will not be public – and it’s easy for individuals to open and run multiple accounts.”

Maybe so, but that’s not the whole story. There is no information given about the methodology used for this, but the nature of the social software systems being studied means that any pronouncement over relative percentages of antisemitic content in these different systems must be inherently flawed. The only thing that the researchers could really have been looking at here was not the extent of antisemitism on different social media, but the ease with which they could find it. Twitter discourse is predominantly public and set-based (only partly network-based), so finding stuff is not just easy but a design feature, notwithstanding Twitter’s own restrictions on quantity of data returned.  There is no reliable way to query the entire blogosphere, nor even a significant or representative part of it, so the fact that 16% of antisemitic comments were found on blogs is neither here nor there and, even if it were, there would be no way to reliably gauge the numbers of individuals affected.  Similarly, there is no ethical way to find such things in predominantly closed social networks like Facebook: access rights and the uneven nature of the social graph mean that much must remain hidden from researchers’ eyes (unless they are Facebook themselves). There could well be clusters of millions of anti-Semites that are entirely invisible to them, so the figure of 11% is equally spurious.

The study’s sponsors use the results to say, “We hope this serves as a wake-up call to all internet forums to maintain moral standards, rid themselves of offensive content, and make the digital world a safer place for all.” This really doesn’t follow.

It is horrible and shocking that antisemitism still occurs at all. I don’t know the solution to that, but I am pretty certain that it is not crass censorship. You don’t kill hatred by hiding it: quite the opposite. You kill it by confronting it, with education, with compassion, with reason, with opposing sentiment, by example, and so on. To use a flawed study like this as a means to promote censorship seems at best contrived, at worst a means to frame the problem as an ‘us vs them’ war that exacerbates an already horrendous problem.

I came across a wonderful example of how to deal with hatred online the other day, at philosopher Dave Webster’s ‘Dispirited’ book blog. In response to Dave’s sensitive, open, and spiritual discussion of his own atheism, a person calling themselves Sheila Hale shockingly wrote:

“What confused and empty views you have of faith in the One true God. Not surprising you present as a sad and miserable person.“

I was stunned to read this, especially knowing Dave (a thoroughly nice fellow). How unkind, how unchristian, how full of hate. It must be so tempting to mute the response, or to respond angrily, or to highlight the hypocrisy of the comment, or at least to throw in a witty riposte from her One true God to tell her he is angry with her now and will smite her mightily. But Dave didn’t do any of that. He left it as it is, to speak for itself, and it makes a more profound and eloquent point than any other response could hope to achieve. By leaving this hate act visible, raw and jarring in a context of gentle and supportive discourse, Dave lets the comment itself do all the heavy lifting, and rises above it by choosing to both show it and ignore it.

Yes, some things need to be censored: I have removed a ton of junk from my blogs over the years, mostly advertising dubious sex sites, Canadian meds vendors, or fake Rolex sellers. Sure, if it offends you, don’t feel bad about getting rid of it.  If it is illegal, report it. If it breaks your terms and conditions, by all means do what you see fit with it. I don’t have a problem with individuals making their own moral or pragmatic choices in their own literal and figurative domains. And I accept that there are some complex issues involved: Trump’s continuous barrage of blatant lies, for instance, seem to benefit from repeated exposure even when self-evidently false. But censorship is not always the right response, and it is often the wrong response. If we are going to change the world for the better, we need to acknowledge the evil in it and, at least sometimes, to face it directly. And we really have to stop using what Richard Feynman calls cargo-cult-science to back up our choices.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alphr.com/social-media/1005634/study-reveals-scale-of-antisemitism-online

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Wenger, White, & Smith’s excellent “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities” is now available for free, in major ebook formats!

I really like this book: though it is a bit of a patchwork in places, longer than it needs to be, and heavier on practice than theory, it is an absolute goldmine of ideas for those creating, managing, and nurturing online communities, covering technical, managerial, social, and many other issues in an admirably holistic fashion. Very well written by people that really get it. This is going to be high up among the “highly recommended” readings for my Social Computing course (there are and never will be required readings) because the approach – which gives no special priority to tools, processes, social engagement, management, etc – fits it to a T.

Address of the bookmark: http://technologyforcommunities.com/2016/12/happy-holidays-free-download-of-digital-habitats/

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Satirists are mostly flummoxed by Trump, because there’s no absurdity they can dream up that is more absurd than the evil orange turd itself, and that is not out-trumped by some yet more appalling and improbable excrescence oozing from its tiny bitter orifices. Armando Iannucci does, however, make a pretty good stab at the problem in this letter to Trump. He accurately captures the essence of Trump’s underlying modus operandi thus:

“They used to tease you about your attitude to the truth, didn’t they? All your post-reality fictoid-facts, like how global warming was a myth invented by the Chinese, how you respected all women without exception, except the greedy, grasping, ugly ones who were trying to suck you dry, how Obama wasn’t born in America, and also how you put everyone right when you said he was.

And that rigged election: you had evidence the election was rigged against you and you were going to lose, and then, when you won it fair and square, you had proof you would have won it even more fairly and squarely had it not been rigged against you so you couldn’t win so bigly. And now they say the Russians rigged the election, and you say the election wasn’t rigged, it was never rigged, and you’ve been saying for months: it was never rigged.”

Logic fails in the face of contradiction, and fails badly. If both A and not-A are true, the moon is (logically) made of green cheese. If you can persuade people to believe both the thing and its contradiction, then the consequences are dire. As Iannucci puts it:

“You’ve taught people to believe not what is empirically true but what is emotionally true, which is a better truth. You’ve set free the credulity of the people.”

This is how most religions work too, as it happens. 

Address of the bookmark: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/21/letter-to-donald-trump-president-armando-iannucci

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Sad news for the world of bridge, about which I know almost nothing apart from what Sandra Landy, several-times world and European bridge champion, occasionally shared with me, and sad news for me. I learned today that she died last week, at the age of 78.

Though she never persuaded me to take up bridge, Sandra was a great influence on both my computing and my teaching careers. Firstly, she created (though was at the time no longer leading) the innovative and well-respected MScIS from which I graduated in the early 90s at the University of Brighton. On the course, she taught me Cobol, and supervised my project. At the end of the course, it was because of her recommendation and support that I became a principal software technician and, later, academic support manager for the university’s IT department and, some years later (again with her enthusiastic support and encouragement) became a lecturer, leading me fairly directly to my current career. She used to live down the road from me in a huge house in Hove (which was convenient when she wanted me to fix her computers!).

Sandra was an incredibly intelligent woman, a force of nature to be reckoned with whose influence on the teaching of computing at the University of Brighton, and beyond, was vast. Her subject knowledge was immense, her curiosity intense. She had conducted the first ever lecture on the first ever computing degree in the UK (at Brighton) in 1964 when I was just a toddler, and had played a major role in getting it off the ground in the first place. She was an intellectual powerhouse with a strong will, a clarity of vision, and a total lack of fear in critiquing anything and anyone, including herself. In fairness, as a result, she intimidated a lot of staff and students at the university, but she and I always got on famously. We amused and entertained each other. She had a marvellously dry sense of humour and a wonderfully rich, cigarette-sanded voice that could charm the birds off a tree as easily as it could leave strong people quivering like jelly. Suffice to say, she usually got her way, and her way was usually a very good one, but she was as compassionate as she was passionate. She listened as intently as she spoke and, if the idea made sense to her (after she had challenged it, of course!), she would lend it her full and considerable support. Quite a lot of the more disruptive innovations I was able to bring in during my time in a support role at Brighton were only possible because Sandra stood behind me and barged through any objections.  Her indelible stamp on the computing courses at the University of Brighton gave them a very distinctive character, an enviable mix of rigour and humanity, that persisted long after she retired. The world is a poorer place without her. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/15015130.Bridge_champion_who_played_her_cards_right/

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‘Like Spotify for academic articles’, the slogan says. It gives access to a claimed 10,000 paywalled academic journals for $40USD/month ($30/month for a year). The site correctly claims that you can therefore get a whole year’s access to all these journals for the cost of about 10 individual articles in an average paywalled journal, so it seems like a pretty good deal for any researcher outside academia needing to access more than a handful of papers in closed journals a year.

I had a quick browse, and here are my initial observations:

• There’s a fairly decent selection of many of the more significant profiteering journals, albeit some that I read regularly are not there (including, interestingly, some paywalled but not-for-profit publications). It’s worth noting that, unlike Spotify for music or Netflix for movies, it can be a serious problem if a required paper is not available to a researcher. Some is better than none, but I don’t think 10,000 journals is anything like enough to make this truly compelling or disruptive.
• The access is a bit variable – not all is full-text, and it looks like there are some notable limitations on what you can do with at least some of the papers (limits on pages you can print per month is a warning sign – this is at best a rental model, the equivalent of streaming).
• The site seems a bit flaky – the search doesn’t work very well, and sometimes fails altogether, and it seems to lose session state very easily – but it’s mostly a modern, easy-to-use system.
• There are some useful browser add-ins etc that make it easy to hook in things like Scholar.

It’s not up there with a good university library. Not even close. Athabasca University Library, for instance, gives access to and indexes about 65,000 journals, albeit including a number that are open-access already. But AU library also gives access to a host of physical books and journals, and a very large number of online books, loads of conference proceedings, an excellent group of skilled information professionals to provide help with finding what you need, and plenty more.  Our undergraduate students get all of that for 6 months, as well as any textbooks needed for their courses, and their course materials, for a grand total of $180CAD ($30/month), paid as a standard resources fee. We do run this at a substantial loss (costs to us were, according to the last set of figures I saw, over $250/student, mainly thanks to immoral textbook pricing) but, even so, $40USD a month for a fraction of the services seems extremely steep to me. 

It would be unfair, though, to call this pricing predatory: I expect the company has been fleeced by the publishers just like everyone else. DeepDyve is just filling a market niche left by the truly predatory publishers that steal publicly funded research, then hold it to ransom in closed, legislatively locked containers to sell back to those that produced it (and others), lining their filthy pockets with obscenely huge profits all the way down the line. DeepDyve reduces the costs for some people, and that’s OK, but it’s hardly a solution to the bigger problem, and may actually bolster a status quo that is fundamentally corrupt down to its core, because it provides an ongoing revenue stream to publishers that might otherwise be bypassed by ‘grey’ sources (if you want papers from paywalled journals and books, mail the author!) or ‘pirate’ sites like Sci Hub or Academic Torrents. The correct answer to the problem is for all of us to stop publishing in closed, profiteering, exploitative journals, to stop letting them steal from us in the first place. 

Address of the bookmark: https://www.deepdyve.com/howitworks

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Another sad piece of news in a year of much sad news.

To be fair, it does not come as a great surprise. He had been preparing for this for a long time, approaching death with the same style, creativity, and elegance as he approached his life. Cohen said in a recent interview that he was ready to die and, following much the same theme, in his final letter to Marianne Ihlen as she lay dying earlier this year –  ‘We are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon’. It pleases me greatly that, on his 80th birthday, he followed through on his long-held intention to take up smoking once more.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-dead-at-82-w449792

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My creeping horror at what happened south of the border yesterday is hard to express. For some reason, though, these words from Yeats keep repeating in my head.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43290

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