By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chartbeat tries to fight the smoke and mirrors in web measurement by going public with its metrics
Mathew Ingram, GigaOm, 2014/10/21
We need to "stop thinking about pageviews or other traffic-focused metrics, and start thinking about measuring actual attention or engagement," says Chartbeat founder and CEO Tony Haile as his company is set to open access to the company's metrics and procedures. Although these metrics are intended for the web content industry, it's hard not to think that they will be relevant to e-learning as well. They are, after all, a prima facie indicator of engagement, which is a primary indicator for learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
Paul Lewis, Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, 2014/10/20
The Guardian is standing by its story that Whisper, the application that guarantees complete anonymity to users, is tracking and sharing their locations. For its part, although Whisper dismisses the Guardian story as a pack of lies, it has also altered its terms of service to allow such tracking. And according to American Journalism Review, "Whisper in particular is aggressively pushing its content to reporters as potential sources for news stories." It also had a partnership with Buzzfeed and the cable news channel Fusion. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the Question of Validity in Learning Analytics
Adam Cooper, CETIS Blogs, 2014/10/20
So your learning analytics have produced a result. How do you know you should rely on it? As Adam Cooper writes in this post, there are two dimensions of assessment of analytics results: reliability (or, how closely focused the results are on a single value), and validity (or, how closely the results are to the correct result). Note, he writes, that mere predictive accuracy is not enough to establish validity. How does the prediction compare to a random result? How many false positives and false negatives were there? The prediction could be accurate, in other words, but lucky. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RIP “Do Not Track,” the Privacy Standard Everyone Ignored
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2019/02/07
The lesson here is that you can't just depend on companies to do the right thing just because you them to. Even though people option for "do not track" in their browser settings, websites basically ignored this preference. Worse - as the article notes - your selection of "do not track" became another data point that was tracked. That's why "modern browsers that include tracking protection don’t wait for a “common understanding” to develop in the industry. Instead, they proactively block trackers." Note that you don't have such protections on your iPhone apps - as this report suggests, for some apps, "every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded — effectively screenshotted". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Past the Point of No Return: The Not-So-Shadow Education Sector
Sasha Thackaberry, WCET Frontiers, 2019/02/05
This came up on Bryan Alexander's podcast, it came up in a post I wrote yesterday, and it keeps coming up as people talk about the "future of education" and "the future of colleges" as though they're one and the same thing. They're not. That's why Sasha Thackaberry writes, "The point-of-no-return has been reached in higher education; most institutions just don’t know it." What we're seeing is a constant increase in the range and volume of alternatives. "Into this landscape comes the 'Shadow Education Sector,' which is increasingly less shadowy," writes Thackaberry. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Subscribed To Push Notifications From 12 News Outlets For 3 Months — Here’s What I Learned
Cassie Dagostino, Medium, 2019/02/08
Though this article is focused on push notifications about U.S. politics from U.S. mainstream media, the lessons to be drawn are, I think, more widely applicable. Take the time to read the sample notifications. I think that if you study anything - yes, including math and science - you're going to get a similar range of perspectives (this certainly applies in the field of ed tech). Some sources are inherently untrustworthy, some sources focus on specific types of stories, some sources have a certain point of view, and some sources are generally reliable (but with some glaring blind spots). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Connecting Personalized Professional Learning to a Bigger Purpose
George Couros, The Principal of Change, 2019/02/08
I thought this was a good conversation on the pull between personal learning on the one hand and ensuring all learning aligns with the institutional mission on the other hand. The problem I see in the workplace is that employers sometimes equate the latter - 'learning that aligns with vision' - with 'learning what you are told to learn'. But of course the two are not synonymous at all; visions are broad and aspirational, while specific mandates are task-centered and focused - and of limited value. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pipes
It doesn't seem to be working with my Firefox at the moment, but it is certainly worth passing along. "Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment." There's also some discission on Digg. Tony Hirst also comments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unpersons
Anne Galloway links to this video. I don't think you have to be in an institution to be an unperson. You simply have to be thought of as deficient in some way. And if you think of yourself as deficient in some way, you see this as yourself being treated as an unperson. As Neko Case sings, "And if I knew heartbreak was coming, I would've set out running, 'Cause I just can't shake this feeling, That I'm nothing in your eyes." I know, none of that is the point of the video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Changing Face of Workplace Learning
The article begins by talking about corporate podcasting but strives generally to say that the future of corporate learning is mobile. "Imagine that it's 1998 and your company doesn't have a website or an intranet... That's about where we are with mobility right now." Certainly this is a better alternative to the traditional classroom course, which "simply doesn't work for the mobile generation, which places a premium on autonomy." It's not just about the mobility, and not just about the time-shifting. More...