By Elizabeth Redden. Applications from international students to U.S. business schools declined by 13.7 percent in 2019, even as both Canadian and European programs saw application increases, according to a new report from the Graduate Management Admission Council. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard V Desire2Learn - Claim Construction Briefs Filed
The next step in the Blackboard Patent lawsuit has been taken, with Blackboard filing a document describing what it is they think the patent covers and Desire2Learn filing a response to that document. The thrust of D2L's response is that "Blackboard has acknowledged that the small innovation it contends the 138 Patent added to the field relates solely to the concept of using 'multiple predetermined user roles' to provide security to the systems" and cites statements from Blackboard to that effect. Blackboard, meanwhile, focuses on the 'roles' aspect of the LMS, but attempts to construe that as widely as possible. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Cancer of DRM Infects iTunes PLUS
Mike Seyfang asks what he did wrong. The answer, of course, was to use iTunes plus. I may really like my MacBook, and really like my iPod (even though it died when I dropped in on the plane from Japan). But I will never use iTunes, not u8ntil I can download some five cent MP3s from it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed
Nathaniel Popper, Mike Isaac, New York Times, 2019/03/15
This meshes with the idea that Facebook wants to follow the path set out by WeChat in China, which is widely used for financial transactions (people just pull out their phone and pay  I saw it a lot when I was in Beijing). Combining payments with a digital currency (Facebook acquired Chainspace in February) would address the pervasive problem (and cost) of currency conversion in the west. But it would have to be a 'proof of authority' currency because alternative models are too slow. Such an approach would also require what Facebook provides - a unique and knowable identity. We'll know we've passed the threshold from technology company to nation state when we are required to provide our Facebook ID for driver's licenses, credit card applications, passports, school records, etc. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Introducing the Coursera Global Skills Index
Coursera Blog, 2019/03/14
Coursera has introduced something called the Coursera Global Skills Index (GSI), "an in-depth look at skill trends and performance around the world, made possible by the millions of learners who come to Coursera to learn and grow." Not surprisingly, it says people are falling behind in critical skills. Overall, people in developing countries are lagging most, while Europe is the skills leader. The most surprising result is that Argentina ranks first in technology (Europe takes the next fourteen positions). Canada ranks as 'cutting edge' in business and data science, but only 'competitive' in technology. The United States ranks as 'competitive' in all three categories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IBM didn’t inform people when it used their Flickr photos for facial recognition training
Shannon Liao, The Verge, 2019/03/14
In a story that broke a couple of days ago it was revealed that IBM used about a million open-access photos on Flickr to train their facial recognition software. The first response was in the form of complaints that they didn't inform anybody. Of course, this sort of use occurs all the time, and it's not just faces, and it's not just IBM. Here's a report from IEEE Spectrum about a database of a million video clips of hundreds of common actions called Moments in Time. Facebook is using datasets that include billions of images. And as the Verge notes, the photos IBM usedwere part of "a larger collection of 99.2 million photos, known as the YFCC100M, which former Flickr owner Yahoo originally put together to conduct research." In a statement yesterday, Creative Commons points out that "copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online." Right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Should Universities and Colleges be in the Web Hosting Business?
Mark Bradley, Show Me the Data - A Blog About Higher Education Websites, 2019/03/12
If you've been wondering why I'm studying cloud hosting, this is why. The answer this article suggests to the question in its title is "no" as it offers up statistics on which major cloud hosting services are supporting how many institutional websites across six nations. Amazon Web Services is the clear leader with Google and Rackspace coming second and third (I', wondering which Canadian institution has GoDaddy's only contract). Note that this entire article is 'below the fold' on this website; you have to scroll past the self-promotion in order to actually find the article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Facebook says the future is private messaging, not public posts
Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019/03/11
If you want to understand Facebook's pivot to a private messaging system, think of it as being like email, except that it's all on one centralized platform, and where the platform owners can mine the contents of the email more marketing purposes or whatever. Nothing would happen in public, of course, and targeted FaceMail(tm) advertising campaigns would take place completely under the radar. More...