By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Finding ‘Personalized Learning’ and Other Edtech Buzzwords on the Gartner Hype Cycle
Michael B. Horn, EdSurge, 2017/01/04
This is an odd list. It's useful to debunk the buzzwords, but this item seems to endorse some questionable ones. Let's go through the list:

• personalized learning - is nearing Gartner’s peak of inflated expectations - yes, that seems right. But not simply among the "chattering classes" (whatever that means; I think it's a dog whistle saying "hey, I'm a Tory, listen to me"). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Reports Every Enrollment Manager Should Read
Daniel Fusch, Sarah Seigle, Academic Impressions, 2017/01/04
I found this list useful as these reports offer a bit of a snapshot of the industry. They are:

• Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates - Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) - 160 page PDF
• Jon Boeckenstedt - Interactive Dashboard - web page, with the dashboard about half way down, in the blue box. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Star launches free e-learning for all
Press Release, Star Pubs, Bars, 2017/01/04

Star is a pub and bar company in Britain. You lease pubs from them then eke out a living. It's in their interest to promote successful pub lessees, and so they've released this e-learning training package of curses. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Real Name Fallacy
J.Nathan Matias, The Coral Project, 2017/01/04
Good article that challenges the idea that anonymity is the cause of poor behaviour on social networks (and that things would improve if we required people to use their real names). " the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.What Philosophical Term or Concept Should Be More Widely Known?
Maggie Hos-McGrane, Tech Transformation, 2017/01/04

http://www.maggiehosmcgrane.com/2017/01/using-technology-to-personalize.html
Two part article (part one, part two) on personalization (there may be more parts in the future) based on a review of  Personalized Learning: A Guide for Engaging Students with Technology by Peggy Grant and Dale Basye. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Decoupled Drupal with Ember: Introducing Ember and JSON API
Preston So, Acquia, 2017/01/05

Content management systems are making the transformation from being website hosts to being data services. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Medium's pivot catches publishing partners by surprise
Peter Sterne, Kelsey Sutton, PoliticoMedia, 2017/01/05
Medium is one of the better content sources out there; I follow a number of their publications. It has had a variety of business models over the years, most recently being a traditional ad-revenue system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pearson Releases Rights to its Learning Design Principles
Leo Doran, EdWeek Market Brief, 2017/01/05

The meat of this short report is found in the link to the release of the research and rubrics (102 page PDF) Pearson uses in its learning design projects, all under a CC-by license. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist
Tristan Harris, Medium, 2017/01/05
This title of this post should be "How to use technology to hijack people's minds." There's nothing inherently technological in these methods; they've flourished for thousands of years (as the reference to magicians should tell us). Here are the tricks (paraphrased with some quotation and links added):

• disempowering by design - if you control the menu, you control the choices
• intermittent variable rewards - you immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing
• fear of missing out -  it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important
• manipulation of social approval - I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me but I don’t see how Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place
• manipulation of social reciprocity - creating social obligations for each other (by accepting a connection, responding to a message, or endorsing someone back for a skill)
• bottomless bowls - to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore
• maximizing interruptions - to heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity
• bundling your needs with theirs - make the thing customers want (milk, pharmacy) inseparable from what the business wants
• nudging - make choice inconvenient to focus on one outcome or another
• foot in the door - asking for a small innocuous request to begin with and escalate from there. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Baby’s First Virtual Assistant
Felix Gillette, Bloomberg, 2017/01/05

After all the talk of digital natives and the live, what will we make of children who grow up with having had the services of a virtual assistant since birth? That's the scenario we face according to this article. More...