Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.

Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”

Useful breakdown. Research, predictive models, and recognition are quite distinct from one another and the approaches to data that they imply are quite different. In a way, the “personalized learning” model at the core of the second topic is close to the Big Data attitude (collect all the things and sense will come through eventually) with corresponding ethical problems. Through projects vary greatly, research has a much more solid base in both ethics and epistemology than the kind of Big Data approach used by technocentric outlets. The part about recognition, though, opens the most interesting door. Microcredentials and badges are a part of a broader picture. The data shared in those cases need not be so comprehensive and learners have a lot of agency in the matter. In fact, when then-Ashoka Charles Tsai interviewed Mozilla executive director Mark Surman about badges, the message was quite clear: badges are a way to rethink education as a learner-driven “create your own path” adventure. The contrast between the three models reveals a lot. From the abstract world of research, to the top-down models of Minority Report-style predictive educating, all the way to a form of heutagogy. Lots to chew on.

Is paper a realm? Have never thought of it that way. Every medium is a realm? Is it helpful analytically to make this distinction? Similarly, it is helpful to make the same distinction between digital and not digital?

I'm not sure exactly where this would fit in, but some way to reporting total service hours (per week or other time period) would be useful, esp as we start gauging traffic, volume, usage against number of service hours. In our reporting for the Univ of California, we have to report on services hours for all public service points.

Likewise, it may be helpful to have a standard way to report staffing levels re: coverage of public service points? or in department? or who work on public services?

True. But some of us are saying something slightly different. The free software movement shares some of those principles and those go back to a rather specific idea about personal/individual agency.

Nice pun, giving another connotation to the term “learner”.

Sounds both like a relatively large number (given that the service was panned by many people) and a small percentage of Apple’s active userbase.

Play is haptic. It has a feel. And that feel is very idiosyncratic (and not customizable).

something like this http://www.publicrecordcenter.com/canada_courts.htm and other stuff like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parliaments+list&ia=web

A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.

That part never worked. But maybe these annotations will? That’d be neat.

Just got to think about our roles, in view of annotation. Using “curation” as a term for collecting URLs sounds like usurping the title of “curator”. But there’s something to be said about the role involved. From the whole “guide on the side” angle to the issue with finding appropriate resources based on a wealth of expertise.

and hilarity ensued...MySpace is/was/never has been less templated than Wordpress. Just not as well templated as Wordpress or as peopled by good developers who add more choice via plug-ins and the WP API. But make no mistake: plug-ins are templates.

This is partly true, but....every space is a templated space. Coding creates the space. Text boxes and the metaphor of page and post are templated. Just minimally so. Templates are not the boogey man. A haiku is a template, a sonnet is a template, but is anyone reasonably arguing that Basho and Shakespeare would have been better off not using them. We use templates to create buildings. We call them "forms" and use rebar and concrete to send them to the sky.

Access as metaphor. Security metaphor? If you don't have the key, the password, the magic symbols/handshake/medium of exchange, then you don't get in.

Now think of it with a learner in mind.

The metaphor behind "release" is pretty profound. Released into the wild. Like the book is a injured wild thing that has been nursed to health and now returns to the zeitgeist from whence it came? More like a domesticated thing that we allow in and out through the pet flap in the door?

I am thinking more in terms of 'reader response' theory which argues among other things that the book as a stable thing that the authors have control over no longer exists once it is 'released' into the reader wild. As lit-crit David Bleich once noted, "Knowledge is made by people, not found."

Post, comment, annotation… All different, but can all have the same predicate.

Unlike some other approaches to development, this acknowledgment that usage can push innovation could help expand Hypothesis beyond a core base of “annotation geeks”. Document-level annotations can serve to classify or evaluate, like social bookmarking. What’s wrong with that?

Or at least self-directed application of those standards and skills--that is, across the Internet!

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Peoplelokbacktotheirtimeasdualisticthinkers,andto theirfaiththatiftheyjustputenoughefortintoproblem solvingsolutionswouldalwaysapear,asagoldeneraof certainty.Anintelectualapreciationoftheimportanceof contextuality and ambiguity comes to exist alongside an emotional craving for revealed truth.

they report that they experience them as devastatingly final, rather than inconvenient interludes

Simon Ensor and I have been having 'picnic' conversations on this over the last couple of months. I have even had Hangouts of One (yes, I am a lonely dude) that are in part about this. In our picnics the question has taken another form: is it fun?

Yeah, grammar marmism is rampant in our worlds. Some people mistake language for a machine when it is really a joshua tree or a redwood or some kind of fungus. The only disease that would kill language would be the evolution of telepathy and I don't think that would do it. To adapt Johnny Paycheck: take your rules Mr. Heller and shove 'em.

Libraries as publishers. Not a bad idea.