332 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2020
    1. Allowing an app to send you push notifications is like allowing a store clerk to grab you by the ear and drag you into their store.
    1. Many changes in Android 10 highlight the tension between creating a platform to be as flexible and open as possible, while still upholding some security and privacy requirements.
  2. Feb 2020
    1. I suspect that Wacom doesn’t really think that it’s acceptable to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop. I suspect that this is why their privacy policy doesn’t really admit that this is what that they do.
  3. Jan 2020
    1. Similar to the technical architecture of classic colonialism, digital colonialism is rooted in the design of the tech ecosystem for the purposes of profit and plunder. If the railways and maritime trade routes were the "open veins" of the Global South back then, today, digital infrastructure takes on the same role: Big Tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralised Internet services to spy on users, process their data, and spit back manufactured services to subjects of their data fiefdoms.

      Yikes

    1. The underlying guiding idea of a “trustworthy AI” is, first and foremost, conceptual nonsense. Machines are not trustworthy; only humans can be trustworthy (or untrustworthy). If, in the future, an untrustworthy corporation or government behaves unethically and possesses good, robust AI technology, this will enable more effective unethical behaviour.

      yikes

  4. Dec 2019
    1. (there’s an argument to be made that social media has exacerbated these tendencies, as partisan complaint is often the most “engaged” and therefore most “valuable” content on social networks).

      Technology as "phases," not end-points.

      Regarding discussing technology. Very interesting that this sort of behavior might leak back into daily life from social media. Will we end up speaking in "sound bites"?

  5. Nov 2019
    1. There used to be an imperfect but useful pathway for research to move from the academy to the corporate world through tech transfer.

      Used to be? It feels to me like it didn't really exist as a codified pathway until the early 2000's at best. Universities only seem to be mastering the entire flow in the past several years. Prior to that most professors took the intellectual property and did almost what they wanted with it and didn't provide any ancillary financial streams to the university out of which the work grew.

  6. Oct 2019
  7. Sep 2019
    1. There is already a lot of information Facebook can assume from that simple notification: that you are probably a woman, probably menstruating, possibly trying to have (or trying to avoid having) a baby. Moreover, even though you are asked to agree to their privacy policy, Maya starts sharing data with Facebook before you get to agree to anything. This raises some serious transparency concerns.

      Privacy International are highlighting how period-tracking apps are violating users' privacy.

  8. Jul 2019
    1. However using the proposed syntax it's easy to see how big components could have logic broken up into smaller reusable pieces, moved into separate files if necessary, leaving you with small, easy-to-understand functions and components.

      Benefits are evident and good, imho. A big improvement in code organization and separation of concerns.

      Just, I think the new syntax suffers from the loss of, as you said, that easy-to-understand-separation-by-type, that is appealing and clearer to newcomers and people that deal with pretty simple components. The component code is divided in three different sections (State, Computed, Methods) that are easy to scroll and to keep conceptually segregated.

      That's one appealing aspect for beginners, helping them to grab the main concepts and organization of Vue. Also helps giving some simpler view to who not too confident with JS and its patterns. With this "separation by function" the beginner is more disoriented since has to import state & computed as functions to place in specific points. Places that they need to know/remember, rather than just filling up the three object provided in module.exports (and I suppose there are packages that build a basic .vue template for you; maybe vue-cli itself too, that people get used to blindly use).

      So in the end the new syntax gives in my opinion a lot more power in modelling, but requires to accept some compromises with the somehow more verbose syntax (const everywhere; return & export providing private/public but necessarily longer to write) and with the slightly higher shadiness of its main concepts.

      Still, a good & efficient & clear documentation, as it was on Vuejs.org until today, will for sure easily compensate to these drawbacks and bring the most out of this new -more OOP- approach. For me also class could be use here, but I like trying to stay compatible using the prototypical approach (maybe also less overhead? Dunno, I'm not so deeply in the JS world).

      I am actually pretty curious to see how it is gonna evolve. And I am glad I didn't engage with Vue too much yet... 😜

  9. May 2019
    1. La idea es que Vincent, gracias a los algoritmos de inteligencia artificial, “entiende” el documento que se le proporciona y su contexto, de esa forma es capaz de sugerir los documentos, sentencias y otra información jurídica relevante para el caso concreto.
    2. minimizar el tiempo y el esfuerzo necesario
    3. cuando el usuario sube un documento a Vicent, vLex no se queda el documento. Únicamente lo procesa el algoritmo, pero la búsqueda que se construye sí queda en el historial del usuario. El objetivo es que el usuario puede recuperar los resultados de una búsqueda Vicent, aunque no tenga a mano el documento que lo originó
  10. Apr 2019
    1. I’m using this solution now

      I'm probably stupid, and I've looked on that page, but I guess one has to be code-savvy to find out how to wrangle that stuff... Any idea on how to implement that solution in Brave?

      edit: Jon Udell has commented on how to use this on GitHub.

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    1. One reason is that products are often designed in ways that make us act impulsively and against our better judgment. For example, suppose you have a big meeting at work tomorrow. Ideally, you want to spend some time preparing for it in the evening and then get a good night’s rest. But before you can do either, a notification pops up on your phone indicating that a friend tagged you on Facebook. “This will take a minute,” you tell yourself as you click on it. But after logging in, you discover a long feed of posts by friends. A few clicks later, you find yourself watching a YouTube video that one of them shared. As soon as the video ends, YouTube suggests other related and interesting videos. Before you know it, it’s 1:00 a.m., and it’s clear that you will need an all-nighter to get ready for the following morning’s meeting. This has happened to most of us.

      This makes me think about the question of social and moral responsibility- I understand that YouTube and Facebook didn't develop these algorithms with nefarious intent, but it is a very drug-like experience, and I know I'm not the only one who can relate to this experience

    1. This article discusses adult learners who connected with industry professionals in a career exploration course that focused around technology and coding. The program is hoping to show other places that focus on adult learning a model that would work for adult learners to gain access to industry.

      Rating: 6/10. Interesting article, but not really a focus on how they effectively engaged the adult learns in the program or their approach to actually developing the course and curriculum.

  11. Mar 2019
    1. New Media Consortium Horizon Report This page provides a link to the annual Horizon Report. The report becomes available late in the year. The report identifies emerging technologies that are likely to be influential and describes the timeline and prospective impact for each. Unlike the link to top learning tools that anyone can use, the technologies listed here may be beyond the ability of the average trainer to implement. While it is informative and perhaps a good idea to stay abreast of these listings, it is not necessarily something that the average instructional designer can apply. Rating: 3/5

  12. Feb 2019
    1. prolonged interaction between the instructor and the students

      I'm always a little proud when I say that Hypothesis will not make things easier/more efficient for teachers. If anything, it helps widen and deepen this "prolonged interaction between the instructor and students," which takes even more time!

    1. Furthermore, teachers have often been provided with inadequate training for this task. Many approaches to teachers’ professional development offer a one-size-fits-all approach to technology integration when, in fact, teachers operate in diverse contexts of teaching and learning

      Technology is always changing, how will we keep up with the changes and how will we incorporate tools that we are unsure about? It is understandable that in college, we learn about the current technology of that time, but it is our responsibility to understand that technology will always change and that we should try to keep up-to-date on what tools we can use to teach our lessons.

    1. 1) develop more educators, advocates, and community leaders who can leverage and advance the web as an open and public resource,

      It is very important, given the technology we have today, that teachers embrace and use all technology resources and advocate for safe and effective web literacy use.

  13. Jan 2019
  14. www.at-the-intersection.com www.at-the-intersection.com
    1. Um, so, but the other way is, you know, when, when they do make these transactions, they're all recorded on the exchanges that you, I moved those, that data to a spreadsheet and that's where I do the tax tracking.
    2. Mostly with the shitty little Exce
    3. Oh, go into my own trading journal, document it to make sure I have a system of record to hold myself accountable and for being able to look in the future to see over time how I perform on a weekly and monthly basis.
    1. But these tools require we think about their purpose, method, and audience just as carefully as when we design an essay prompt, a problem set, or any other assessment exercise.

      This is an example of when meta-teaching is helpful.

    1. Freedom to organizeAragon lets you freely organize and collaborate without borders or intermediaries. Create global, bureaucracy-free organizations, companies, and communities.
    2. The world’s first digital jurisdictionAragon organizations are not only great because they are decentralized, global and unstoppable. They will also benefit from the Aragon Network, the world’s first digital jurisdiction.

      "digital jurisdiction"

    1. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.

      i would like to see arguments around this as i further read.

  15. Dec 2018
    1. not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.

      Pretty incredible, especially given the era!

  16. Nov 2018
    1. He and other SHM officials have pushed hospitalists for the past few years to formalize their HIT duties by seeing if they would qualify to take the exam for board certification in medical informatics, which was created in 2013 by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). Between certification of that skill set and working more with technology vendors and others to improve HIT, Dr. Rogers sees HM being able to help reform much of the current technology woes in just a few years.
    2. “To me, this is the new frontier,” Dr. Wachter says. “If our defining mantra as a field is, ‘How do we make care better for patients, and how do we create a better system?’ … well, I don’t see how you say that without really owning the issue of informatics.”
    3. SHM’s Information Technology Committee, believes that hospitalists have to take ownership of health information technology (HIT) in their own buildings.
      • Kendall Rogers = Chair of SHM Information Technology Committee
      • Future role of hospitalist = QI initiatives, health information technology
      • Training needs, fellowship curricular components
    4. Dr. Bessler of Sound Physicians notes that advances in technology have come with their hurdles as well. Take the oft-maligned world of electronic medical records (EMRs). “EMRs are great for data, but they’re not workflow solutions,” Dr. Bessler says. “They don’t tell you what do next.” So Sound Physicians created its own technology platform, dubbed Sound Connect, that interacts with in-place EMRs at hospitals across the country. The in-house system takes the functional documentation of EMRs and overlays productivity protocols, Dr. Bessler says. “It allows us to run a standard workflow and drive reproducible results and put meaningful data in the hands of the docs on a daily basis in the way that an EMR is just not set up to do,” he adds. Technology will continue “to be instrumental, of course, but I think the key thing is interoperability, which plenty has been written on, so we’re not unique in that. The more the public demands and the clinicians demand … the better patient care will be. I think the concept of EMR companies not being easy to work with has to end.”

      Biggest challenge will be integration of different technological solutions and sources of data - workflows for delivering care and for research purposes (e.g., person-level QI initiatives, passive baseline data)

    5. “It doesn’t just help make hospitalists work better. It makes nursing better. It makes surgeons better. It makes pharmacy better.”
    6. In the last 20 years, HM and technology have drastically changed the hospital landscape. But was HM pushed along by generational advances in computing power, smart devices in the shape of phones and tablets, and the software that powered those machines? Or was technology spurred on by having people it could serve directly in the hospital, as opposed to the traditionally fragmented system that preceded HM? “Bob [Wachter] and others used to joke that the only people that actually understand the computer system are the hospitalists,” Dr. Goldman notes. “Chicken or the egg, right?” adds Dr. Merlino of Press Ganey. “Technology is an enabler that helps providers deliver better care. I think healthcare quality in general has been helped by both.

      Chicken or the egg? Technological advances were tailored for specific needs in accordance with growth of hospitalist model

    1. code-smell1: In OO, the use of instanceof ( typeof) is a code smell, use double dispatch.

      The use of double dispatch is a code smell; goto code-smell1

    1. The website, EdSurge.com, is where this article was found. This article talks about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The three principles behind UDL are engagement, representation, and action and expression. This website has an entire section on technology in school.

      9/10

  17. Oct 2018
    1. Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
  18. Sep 2018
    1. Despite the most celebrated tech companies' aversion to explicit hierarchy, their widespread use of stock options as compensation, and other corporate techniques to convince workers that every member of "the team" is on the same side, it's clear that the people at the top are know that wages come at the expense of profits. Thus, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar have not yet disentangled themselves from antitrust and class action lawsuits resulting from an agreement--initiated by Google and Apple, and eventually involving dozens more companies, with more than a million employees in total--to cap wages by refusing to compete for each others' employees. This cartel resulted in several billion dollars in lost wages, which went straight to corporate profits. But this transfer, which the law might recognize as theft, is in fact only the tip of the iceberg. It represents a deviation from the ideal of a competitive market, which itself offers no guarantee to workers that they'll receive value equivalent to what they provide. Across the whole U.S. economy, hourly productivity grew by 80 percent in the last 40 years, while hourly income for the median worker grew only 10 percent. In the software industry, measured productivity has grown 12 percent a year for the last 25 years--meaning that it doubles about every six years. Wages have increased in tech, but not that fast. Software developers often buy into the idea of advancement by individual merit--either through a liberal lens in which meritocracy is an ideal we still need to work toward, or a libertarian one in which everyone is already where they deserve to be, top or bottom. This is partly a trickle-down illusion, based on an aspiration to have more in common with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg than a bank teller or barista. But it also has a basis in the following reality: Most programmers personally know a lot more colleagues who became unhappy at some workplace and quit for a better job than who achieved something through any kind of collective organizing. In this context, it's easy for those who believe they are being mistreated to feel isolated and even personally inadequate, rather than seeking solidarity from co-workers. The cultural barriers aren't insurmountable. It's hard to explain this year's union drive at Gawker as the product of some sclerotic old-economy work structure, for example. And collective organizing could very obviously bring benefits that are hard to negotiate individually: transparency around salary and promotions, with equal pay for equal work; reasonable scheduling and accommodations like child care for people with families; the right to contribute to open source projects or veto the release of insecure, privacy-violating or otherwise unprofessional code.
    1. Political and technological dislocation have fed off each other since the nation’s founding. Now they are dangerously out of whack.

      The underlying premise is that there used to be a balance between tech innovation and political response in the USA, but since Reagan, there has not.

  19. Jun 2018
  20. May 2018
  21. Dec 2017
  22. Nov 2017
  23. Oct 2017
    1. Why is all the focus on teaching lay people how to code, and not teaching computer scientists and people who work in tech companies to center empathy and humanity in their work?

      . . .

      I think there should be an element of infusing discussions of ethics, humanity and social consequences into computer science curricula, and I believe that even human-centered design does not go far enough; I suggest that designers of tech consider more “empathetic and participatory design” where there is some degree of involving people who are not in the tech company as autonomous persons in product design decisions, and not just using them as research/testing subjects.

    1. Move away from simply asking whether EdTech is helpful or unhelpful.It’s here to stay, so focus on what pedagogical strategies it can support and how to use it better to improve student learning and other outcomes.

      Refreshing!

    1. Vendors serve as an invaluable source of knowledge on edtech products and trends for higher education decision-makers, cited as an information source in 80 percent of our interviews. That ranks second only to learning by word-of-mouth from colleagues (96 percent)

      These are pretty opposite sources of knowledge, one bottom up, the other top down.

    2. quality of partner relationships.

      Meaning the "service"? Nothing in here about privacy policies, terms of service, etc.

    3. rather than develop their own tools.

      Why not? Is it not scaleable? sustainable?

  24. Sep 2017
    1. I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

      Emphasis on “still”. Direction of change?

    1. Now that many of the biggest tech companies operate like media businesses, trafficking in information, they’re in a race to create new products to charm and track consumers.

      I want to explore this whole tech companies acting like media companies thing...

  25. May 2017
  26. Apr 2017
    1. Marketers would prefer to have their own predictive marketing platforms, helping them collect and activate their own proprietary data. Enterprise technology companies want that future as well. They want to be the ones to sell and provision those tech platforms, integrating and packaging them with all of the other systems they sell into the enterprise, from CRM to call center management to finance and sales force automation. Quite naturally, they worry that it will be easier for Google and Facebook to add their own CRM and related systems than it will be for them to replicate Google and Facebook’s digital marketing system.Agencies? They just want to keep themselves in the middle. Whether as consultants, media brokers, system integrators or owners of syndicated data, agencies just want to stay relevant and find ways to reverse their declining margins.

      That is most certainly their wishlist. But it overlooks the reason why Google and Facebook get all the ad dollars in the first place: they have all the users & their data. That's why most advertisers will have to play by their rules as the chances to succeed with their own offerings aren't great.

      Telcos/ISPs meanwhile, particularly Verizon, are to watch indeed (The new FCC rules play right into their hands as well). Since they own many users & their data, they are a force to be reckoned with. But: ISPs aren't global players and regulated differently in each country.

  27. Mar 2017
    1. It is our failure to internalize the idea that people who work for edtech companies are our colleagues and our partners which is at the root of much of disconnect that I see across the school / vendor divide.

      I came to this article through an Audrey Watters Tweet critique, but actually think this is a reasonable argument. It does not necessarily mean turning off the critical lens when evalutating ed-tech. It does mean turning criticism into conversation.

    2. This is not to say that those of us in higher ed are immune from market forces,

      Right?! Or neo-liberalism.

    3. We should not conflate the logic of short-term profit maximization with the values of the people who go to work at for-profit edtech companies.

      Though it is all connected and those connections need to be interogated by academics and by those who choose to work in industry.

    1. authentic relationships between the the people who work at your company and your customers.  
    2. Your customer-retention strategy should be as robust and intense as your customer-acquisition strategy.
    3. higher ed, as a whole, is a largely relationship-based industry.
    4. The best way to scale your platform, service or product is to get a few schools to sign up, and then spend lots of energy and money making sure the followers know. This means having a sales strategy that is narrow, deep and focused.  

      '#influencers'

    5. That's why very few of us are likely to sign up with an unproven vendor or adopt a new platform or service unless our peers have already done so.

      This similarly assumes things are moving one-way and is not truly in the spirit of collaboration/conversation.

    6. it requires robust and sustained conversations. 

      Yes.

    7. they talk about their solutions rather than our challenges.  
    1. In many ways, it’s precisely this union of science and magic that needs to be bottled and tirelessly cultivated if VR is to win the favor of mass audiences.
    1. As the first woman in American car design, she paired natural creativity with the hustle that would define her career.

      Never heard about her before!

  28. Jan 2017
    1. Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are the future politicians, activists, educators, writers,entrepreneurs, and media makers.

      It is insane to see such success out of young kids with the use of technology

  29. Sep 2016
  30. Aug 2016
    1. Top 10 Tech News Of 2016 Technology is growing rapidly, daily new products, smartphones, updates, application are introducing in the market so it is very important for you to be updated with all the news and updates related technology. So read what is going on in the tech's world.

  31. Jul 2016
    1. If tech isn’t connected to life it is an inert idea

      But it is up to us to make sure that doesn't happen ... developers often don't know the way something will be used (they have an idea ... often, it is wrong ...)

  32. Jun 2016
    1. The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable.
    1. According to Badu, phones can enhance our ability to communicate deep desires across oceans, but they can also jumble our meaning with static or frustrate with busy signals and voicemail. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.
    1. Should faculty (and even students) have a greater say in which tools the university chooses instead of constantly finding themselves as consumers of those forced upon them by the institution?

      The answer here is clearly yes. But what forums exist or might be imagined to enable this dialogue. I know at h we are lucky (if I might say so myself) to have an educator on staff and we work closely with faculty on our product. What more could we do though? And how could an indie ed tech community more broadly nurture these conversations?...

    1. In considering considerations, I think it’s important to begin with a thinking (or erasing?) exercise that asks you to forget everything you know or think you know about ed tech and start over.  
  33. May 2016
    1. “curriculets,” the company’s eponymous term for embedded quizzes, videos and other multimedia elements designed to offer students a richer reading experience and to give teachers data into how their pupils were progressing.

      As a teacher, I don't know that I want this prefabricated, though....

    2. articles and take quizzes,

      And annotate, I believe.

  34. Apr 2016
    1. urchasing often involves department heads, CIOs, and provosts, since the choices made can affect the entire school.
    2. To succeed, they will need to fundamentally rethink their value propositions to take full advantage of the digital medium and consider the entire educational experience.

      And specifically the utility of various tools shipped with content.

    3. customization tools to “build your own textbook” from a variety of preexisting and newly created content

      Seems like a great fit for h...

    4. texts embedded in the online course
    5. practical tools that supplement core instruction

      Like, for example, hypothes.is?

  35. Mar 2016
    1. if someone is willing to commit to talking through hip hop

      I got this...

    2. like the personal API

      I need to learn more about this movement...

    1. They are tools like SPLOT, Wikity, Reclaim Hosting, Known, Github, and Hypothes.is to name a few.

      Word!

    1. At least on dating apps everyone can agree that everyone on the app has the same desired goal: a relationship.

      Interesting distinction. So we don't have the same goals in the algorithm of, say, an adaptive learning program?...

    1. You can listen to the “I Love My Label” playlist on Spotify, but you should support artists by buying their music. Unless it's Metallica. Then share freely.

      Badass.

    2. counterintuitively perhaps less “personalized.”

      But isn't the point that is is more (or more actually) "personalized"?

    3. “Personalization” might sound like it’s designed especially for us; but “personalization” is an algorithm based on a profile, on a category, on a label.

      This is a powerful argument. But could a proliferation of labels, enabled by computational power, better approach personalization?

      I've been thinking about a similar idea in relation to the music industry/algorithm while reading the above: are Spotify/Netflix recommendations looking for the hit? Or are they looking for musical/filmic suggestions that will keep me individually as a customer? I'm much more compelled by that model than what's offered on top 40 radio or the megaplex.

    4. Algorithms and analytics will “personalize” our world, we’re told. The problem, of course, is that the algorithms and the analytics also make everything sound the same.

      I'd love to just accept this argument, but want there to be more evidence. No doubt there are more radical forms of self-education, but isn't it true to some degree that there is personalization in, say, adaptive learning programs?

    5. What happens in the face of an algorithmic education to intellectual curiosity?

      Fair enough, but is it either/or or both/and. I'm happy to be recommended a new band by Spotify, but ultimately will make the call if I like it or not, perhaps even clicking a reaction so that the algorithm gets better? Or is that a fantasy?...I'm also not going to be deaf to my friends recommendations, etc. that might also direct my musical curiosity.

    6. I call myself a “serial dropout,”

    7. Little by little the subversive features of the computer were eroded away: Instead of cutting across and so challenging the very idea of subject boundaries, the computer now defined a new subject; instead of changing the emphasis from impersonal curriculum to excited live exploration by students, the computer was now used to reinforce School’s ways. What had started as a subversive instrument of change was neutralized by the system and converted into an instrument of consolidation.

      Wow, This is a great quote, and so apt in this new context of the rise of the LMS.

    8. Once something sells, than we hear it and echoes of it again and again and again and again.

      Love this sequence of slides:

    9. No one – well, except my parents, I guess – knew how many times I played that 45 of Autograph’s “Turn Up the Radio,” how many times I rewound the cassette to replay Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” But now the software knows

      This seems empowering to me (or potentially so)...

    10. predict hit songs

      Different from predicting what songs I might like.

  36. Feb 2016
    1. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

      Are we sure the technology that mediates conversations actually impedes it or at least diminishes them? After all, tech has always mediated conversation (ie. telephone, pencils, language...).

      For example, when the telephone was introduced, some people actually feared it would take intimacy out of the conversation. Did it happen?

      Cannot it be simply that the very idea of conversation changes with time and the technologies which mediate it?

    1. We are on the threshold of sweeping change that will make it easier for teachers to teach and students to learn faster and more effectively

      I see this as evidence of technology determinism, which this article is shot through with. This kind of sentiment comes off as if technologies make things better, faster, more efficient for all involved parties, without consequence. It also assumes a consensus around what improved teaching and learning looks like and means. IMO, "efficiency" recalls turn of 20th century industrialist philosophy and rhetoric. In the work of education, I think that we need to ask if efficiency really is always better, and better for who. I am suggesting that in many cases efficiency is better for administrators from a business perspective, but not so for learners.

  37. Jan 2016
    1. Today, she encourages the women she works with to NEVER say they know nothing about technology.

      Gender differences in self-assessments of technological skills are a well-known phenomenon, but it remains tricky. Brenda’s approach works really well, in no small part because of her own skills and personality.

    1. So, my fellow Americans, whatever you may believe, whether you prefer one party or no party, our collective future depends on your willingness to uphold your obligations as a citizen.  To vote.  To speak out.

      Absolutely, but it's government's job at all levels--from our hometowns to Washington, DC--to make it easier for citizens to do that. Far too many Americans simply can't fulfill many of these "obligations as a citizen," due to work, or kids or fear or lack of information, or school, basically, life. Government has to lower those barriers, make it way more possible for citizens to do their civic duties. There's a tremendous opportunity to deploy free, open source tools--heck, even proprietary ones--here.

    2. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic.  Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us. 

      C'mon, civic technologists, government innovators, open data advocates: this can be a call to arms. Isn't the point of "open government" to bring people together to engage with their leaders, provide the facts, and allow more informed, engaged debate?

    3. That’s how we forged a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open markets, protect workers and the environment, and advance American leadership in Asia.  It cuts 18,000 taxes on products Made in America, and supports more good jobs.  With TPP, China doesn’t set the rules in that region, we do.  You want to show our strength in this century?  Approve this agreement.  Give us the tools to enforce it. 

      An opportunity to employ online, open co-creation tools. Such as, say, Hypothes.is. Or what the D.C.'s Mayor Bowser and city council are doing with the Madison online policymaking software.

      Back when this was still being negotiated in secret, a leaked chapter of TPP was opened on the very first version of Madison. What could've been as far as harnessing open online annotation for transparent, smarter policy outcomes.

    4. how do we make technology work for us, and not against us

      This is a critical question for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and for every presidential candidate. But at least the President and Congressional leaders are talking about it--we've heard next to nothing from all the candidates for the White House, and next to nothing at all the debates.

      I wonder: what happens to 18F, USDS, each agency's online engagement staff, etc. the day after a GOP candidate wins? What happens if the White House stays with Democrats? Beats me, and that's incredibly problematic.

      Either way, Congress can and should also play a role in supporting--at least maintaining--the progress made on open source, adopting/creating better tech, outfits like 18F/USDS. Building out a Congressional-and-civil-society "tech transition survival" plan would be a great, bipartisan, bicameral project. I think it's also fully within the realm of possibility.

  38. Dec 2015
    1. Likewise, the era of "open data", "big data" and "open source mapping" has made previously inaccessible spatial datasets (or perhaps only accessible to those within certain, largely governmental, institutions) more widely available, allowing a range of people to come to grips with the geographies (aka map) any number of phenomena.
  39. Nov 2015
    1. "You will have a pair of sunglasses, and you can switch it from glasses mode, to VR mode as you wish. The VR will expand to fill your field of vision, or you can watch it in a little window.” This device of the future will not only bring virtual reality into our everyday lives, according to Urbach, but also destroy the primary way we use many other electronics. “You’ll be done with any other screen,” he says. “You won’t need it. It will be generated on a surface in the air. Put your finger over your palm, it’s a phone. Your desk becomes a laptop. "The resolution two generations from now will give you a 4K experience, so you probably won’t go to a movie theater. Why would you buy a wall-sized TV?”

      Interview with OTOY founder and CEO Jules Urbach. https://twitter.com/julesurbach

  40. Oct 2015
    1. Mr. Dorsey, who is 38, will remain chief executive and chairman of Square, a mobile payments company that is preparing for an initial public offering of stock later this year. He will not take a salary for his new role at Twitter, according to a company securities filing.
  41. Sep 2015
    1. what Owen Thomas calls ‘high tech racism’. Certain bodies are more ‘unreadable’ than others
  42. Oct 2014
    1. Microsoft has launched a new smartwatch

      I do believe it is a smart fitness band, not a smartwatch. At least not in the way the world sees smartwatches anymore. Just a thought.

    1. “We should be building platforms to amplify the voices of women in tech, not to cater to the egos of men,” she said. “Men who want to help need to get the hell out of our way, basically. Because we're coming. And we don't need their support.”

      I think this is an immature stance that I cannot support. When you want to be treated with respect by most of the people around you it helps to demand mutual aid and cooperation from 50% of that population rather than telling them to fuck off.

  43. Mar 2014
    1. In March 2009, Golan Levin, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s interdisciplinary STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, invited an enigmatic and famed computer programmer