14 février 2018

Workflow Lock-in: A Taxonomy
Roger C. Schonfeld, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/01/02
"Lock in" is a business term that describes the effect of tactics that make it harder for customers to switch to another company offering the same (or even better!) products. "Everything from affinity programs, such as frequent flyer miles, to pernicious tying strategies that elicit antitrust scrutiny are forms of lock-in." This article provides a taxonomy of types of publisher lock-in strategies, though it should be noted that these could apply equally well to education (quoted):

• providing exclusive benefits for mutual customers of a single provider’s many products
• developing discrete services so that they are interdependent, or preferentially functional, with one another
• data in context such that data cannot be reused with the same functionality elsewhere
• institutionalizing services that are today already used by individuals. More...

Whatever Happened to the Coalition of Essential Schools?
Larry Cuban, National Education Policy Center, 2018/01/02
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was an initiative launched in 1987 that "spread rapidly across the nation throughout the 1990s (see here, here, and here)." Based on a set of ten principles (listed in the article) the coalition sought to encourage a matery-based and personally-supportive mode of education based on a generally constructivist pedagogy. More...

An Impressively Detailed Philosophy Paper Grading Rubric
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2018/01/02

This article from lasty May showed up (deservedly) in a year-end wrap-up. As the title suggests, it is an impressively detailed rubric for grading philosophy papers. More...

Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Is Completely Busted
Eric Ravenscraft, ReviewGeek, 2018/01/02
"Facebook has no idea what you want," writes Eric Ravenscraft in this scathing review of the social network site's news feed. It tends to focus on recently added friends andf frequently-posting people as well as controversy (as signified by engagement) and, of course, advertisements (a.k.a. "promoted posts"). More...

Frontend in 2017: The important parts
Kaelan Cooter, LogRocket, 2018/01/02
I'm generally three or four years behind in frontend technology (that's the technology that makes your website do stuff in your browser, like CSS and Javascript, but now much more complex). That's because the lifespan of a lot of them is about equal to the length of an undergraduate computer science education. More...

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Tear down this paywall: Germany’s taz newspaper launches a reader revolution from Berlin
Anna Rohleder, ijnet, 2018/02/02
There's no reason why this model couldn't work for academic or educational content as well. "Berlin-based daily Tageszeitung (taz for short) has more than 10,000 supporters who make recurring donations to fund its operations; 50,000 subscribers to its print and digital editions; and more than 17,000 reader-owners who pay a minimum of EUR500 to join the taz cooperative." Access to the content is free; no paywall. More...