Header Socials

Welcome to The Internet of Compromised Things

Posted

Jeff Atwood clearly and coherently explains why connecting to the Internet is scary. It’s especially scary when all of our devices – cars, lights, heating, gas pumps, locks, surveillance cameras, TVs, etc – are connected. Most of us have learned to be at least a bit careful with our computers but we tend to be more careless and trusting of those simple plugin devices. Unfortunately, among the weakest links are our routers and, once owned, it is really hard to escape the malware that controls them. Worse, like many of our devices, their updates and configuration tend to be ignored or forgotten. As more and more devices embed powerful and dangerous net-connected computers, this problem is going to get a lot worse over the coming years. Some good advice in this article on protecting yourself as best you can.

Address of the bookmark: http://blog.codinghorror.com/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/

We're heading Straight for AOL 2.0 · Jacques Mattheij

Posted

Interesting commentary on the hijacking and usurpation of open protocols by web companies intent on making a profit by closing their ecosystems via non-standard apps layered over HTTP. As Mattheij notes, this is very similar to the way AOL, CompuServe and other commercial providers used to lock in their users. Now, instead of running proprietary systems over layer 2-4 protocols (as AOL et al used to do), vendors are running them over layer 5 (or, for OSI purists, layer 7) protocols, with proprietary APIs designed to hook others into their closed systems (think Facebook or Google logins). The end result is the same, and it’s a very bad result.

Mattheij writes

Please open up your protocols, commit to keeping them open and publish a specification. And please never do what twitter did (start open, then close as soon as you gain traction).

I completely concur.

Address of the bookmark: http://jacquesmattheij.com/aol-20

elearnspace › White House: Innovation in Higher Education

Posted

Brilliant piece by our own George Siemens on his thoughts on visiting the White House for a special meeting on higher education. There’s a strong US-centric focus to George’s report, understandably enough, but many of the issues he speaks of resonate internationally. Things are changing, and the change is coming soon, and George is very good at pinning down the implications of that. A worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/08/03/white-house-innovation-in-higher-education/

Education software company Blackboard is looking to sell for $3 billion

Posted

Blackboard logoUnwanted gift: a few careless owners, many botched repair jobs, not firing on all cylinders, tarnished reputation, some wheels missing, but only slightly used.

A bargain for anyone with a 19th Century attitude to education, seeking thousands of locked-in, resentful customers who will continue to complainingly pay through the nose for any old rubbish because it is too difficult and expensive to move to a different platform. Get it before they all go!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.businessinsider.com/education-software-company-blackboard-is-looking-to-sell-for-3-billion-2015-7

After Internet.org Backlash, Facebook Opens Portal To Court More Operators

Posted

Techcrunch article by Jon Russell on how Facebook is pretending (very badly, like one unpracticed in the art) to be nice by opening up its Internet.org branch to a few more developers.

In case you are not familiar with this bit of exploitation of the poor, the claimed ‘public service’ aspect of Internet.org is that it gets people online who would otherwise be unable to afford it, specifically in the third world, by making access to (some) online services free of data charges. I’d have to agree, that sounds nice enough, and that’s certainly the spin Zuckerberg puts on it. The evil side of it is that it is essentially a portal to Facebook and a few hand-filtered other sites, not the Internet as we know it, it is immensely destructive to net neutrality, and is nothing more than a bare-faced attempt to make money out of people that have too little of it, and to hook them into Facebook’s all-consuming centralized people farm. Zuckerberg is allegedly proud of the fact that around half of the millions that have signed up thus far have moved on to paid plans that actually do allow access to the Internet – likely the reason for the (otherwise odd) inclusion of Google Search in the original small lineup of options, inasmuch as non-approved sites come with a warning that users need to buy the real thing now. Of course, by that time, they are already Facebook sign-ups too, which is what this is really about. This is much the same tactic used by drug dealers seeking new customers by giving out samples and it similarly immoral. It is absurd to suggest, as Zuckerberg apparently does, that allowing a few more people to develop for the platform and suggesting that they in turn allow access to further sites (as long as they conform to Facebook’s conditions)  makes it in any way more open. It is coercing companies into using the app using much the same techniques it applies to building people’s social networks. A filtered internet via a Facebook-controlled app is not the free (as in speech) and open Internet and, ultimately, the most notable beneficiary is Facebook, though it is certainly doing the partner operators no harm either. The choice of domain name is cynical in the extreme – I’d admire the chutzpah if it were not so ugly. My respect goes to the many Indian companies that are pulling out in protest at its shameless destruction of net neutrality and greedy marketing under the false banner of philanthropy.

Address of the bookmark: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/27/facebook-internet-org-one/

Interview with Kinshuk (part II) in AUSU's Voice Magazine

Posted

The second part of AUSU’s Voice Magazine’s interview with Kinshuk (first part here) in which he talks about some of his rich ideas around smart learning, the interplay between digital technologies and pedagogies, fine-grained accreditation, and the value of social interaction in learning. Excellent insights into the thinking of one of AU’s finest profs, who also happens to be one of the smartest (and most prolific) edtech researchers on the planet. His bubbly personality and deeply humanistic, caring perspective on such things comes across very well in this interview.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/featuredisplay.php?ART=10648

Expertise and the Illusion of Knowledge

Posted

A post about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically claims (and, in a series of studies) demonstrates that ignorance is often typified not the absence of knowledge but by the illusion of it. People think they know more than they do and, at least in many cases, the less they know, the more they think they know. People as in us.

For teachers, this is one of the trickiest things to overcome when we want to give learners control: how do learners distinguish between ignorance and knowledge? If you do not know that you need to know more, you do not have the power nor motivation to take the steps to change that. The role of a teacher (whether an appointed individual or not) to challenge misconceptions and highlight ignorance is a crucial one.  But it should not be about proving or, worse still, telling someone less able than yourself that they are wrong: that’s just a power trip. Ideally, learners should develop ways to uncover their own ignorance – to be surprised or confounded, to see their own mistakes – rather than have someone do it for them.  I think that this means that teachers, amongst other things, should create conditions for surprise to occur, opportunities to safely fail (without judgement), opportunities to reflect, and support for those seeking to uncover the cause of their new-found ignorance.

Address of the bookmark: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/expertise-and-the-illusion-of-knowledge/

History of the LMS | LearnDash

Posted

Justin Ferriman provides commentary on a Synotive infographic on the history of the LMS, noting a couple of omissions. I think there are dozens if not hundreds of omissions, though nice to see a couple of shout-outs to Athabasca University and our own Rory McGreal. Did Rory really design a DOS-based LMS? You learn something new every day, even about old friends! Not to mention about operating systems: I know that it was possible to network DOS computers – I did it quite a lot – but I’m not sure it would be fair to describe anything built on the back of that as an LMS.

For me, the big missing chunks are mostly in the 1990s, which was an extremely prolific time for things like VLEs, MLEs and LMSs, with most of the major commercial players like Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus LearningSpace, Desire2Learn creating products back then, not to mention a huge range of concurrent and prior things like (say) FirstClass, Bodington, WOLF, CECIL, Web-Course-in-a-Box, and many many more. Even I helped to write an LMS in the 90s – everyone was doing it back then. Then there are all those interesting open source projects like ILIAS and DOKEOS, and somehow the infographic manages to include Sakai but not OKI (that Sakai’s component LMSs all used and that made it easy to bring them together). And where did all those MOOs go? Hard to miss what was then a big movement. And of course the wealth of standards that go unmentioned (where is IMS in this?), things like PLEs, beyond-LMS systems like Elgg, etc. etc. And there’s a chunk between 2007 and 2013 that includes the odd ‘minor’ event like Instructure Canvas or EdX. I could go on. Looks to me like they have no idea about the real history of it at all. Infographics are seductive things, making poorly researched weakly linked randomly chosen events culled from Wikipedia look like a believable story.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.learndash.com/history-of-the-lms/