Month: May 2017

What is it that makes for successful learning in teams. For some it is care. Others it is trust. Tim Fergerson suggests that it is commitment.

Commitment to building mutual trust and respect, and having open and honest dialogue won’t necessarily mean the team will encounter fewer issues, or find themselves free from pressure in the future. It will, however, give the team greater capacity to deal with these situations as they arise, and allow the team to resolve them in a more timely and productive way. This in turn leads to improved performance. (Source)

This commitment comes through in a number of ways, whether it be mutual respect, shared understanding and open dialogue.

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There are many how speak about the death of comments. However, something that has risen up recently is the ability to annotate the web. Whether it be Medium, Diigo or Hypothesis, each of these mediums provide the means of layering your voice on top of somebody else's. Audrey Watter's spoke out about this, pointing out that she has the right to choose whether people can annotate. It created quite a bit of discussion. Michael Caulfield adds his perspective.

My take (of course) is that annotation works best through a system of copies. Anyone should be able to annotate a copy of your work. But it's not clear to me that people have the right to piggyback on the popularity of an address that you've worked your butt off to promote.It's not clear to me that they should get to annotate the master file. This has always been the problem with comments as well -- they work best on small sites, and go bad when they give users a much larger platform than they have earned. As with everything online, the phenomenon is gendered as well.  (Source)

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Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters

The Garden and the Stream

Using the example of a parasite, Michael Caulfield wonders if we have a webo-plasmosis that encourages us to mindlessly share personal details online that can then be mined by advertisers.

It might be time to start thinking of corporate social media in this way, as a parasitic virus that gets us to offer our private lives up to advertisers, believing all the time that it is our own idea. Instead of making us tolerate the smell of cat urine, webo-plasmosis encourages us to share intimate details of our lives with marketers and cloud databases. It convinces us that we should never delete any information ever, that we should always post under our real name, that we should spend our time online defining for platform capitalism the things we like and the things we don't so that we can be more effectively manipulated by advertising. (Source)

Caulfield provides a partial list for users to identify if they have the parasite.

Do you retweet headlines you agree with to help Facebook build a profile of you, while not reading the articles? Do you take pictures of your food, helpfully labelling your dietary habits, consumption patterns, and common meal ingredients? Have you become an email hoarder, never bulk deleting old email on fear "you might need it someday", thereby preserving the vast library of documents Google needs to model your affinities, desires, and personal secrets? When something happens to you of note, do you feel compelled to log it on the web? Do you join Facebook groups that best express who you are? Do you use Amazon Alexa's much touted "Shopping List" feature to build a list of things you intend to buy locally, so that Amazon now has a list of things you buy locally? Do you wince at the thought of taking old tweets offline, because of all the "old memories" stored in tweets you haven't looked at for five years? Do you authenticate into third-party services using Twitter, Facebook, and Google identity so that they can better track your online behavior? Do you never use aliases or pseudonyms online, and are you convinced that this "transparency" somehow makes you a "more honest person"? Do you find yourself posting lists of bands you've seen, or asking friends to share "one memory they have about you"?

Games are considered as the solution to many educational issues, such as engagement and interaction. The problem that Marten Koomen points out is that games focus on performance, over notions of truth, beauty and justice.

While game-based learning and simulation environments make it possible to assess students’ interaction with complex systems (Frezzo, Behrens, & Mislevy, 2009), a concern remains that they will drift into performativity. That is, away from truth, justice and beauty, and into a performance maze where what is considered as performance is determined by computer programmers, and what is considered good performance is determined by input/output ratios. Performativity par excellence (Lyotard, 1984; Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985/2008). It evokes the dystopia of the films The Hunger Games and The Matrix (I haven’t seen either though). (Source)