A Study of Thousands of Dropbox Projects Reveals How Successful Teams Collaborate
Adam Pah, Brian Uzzi, Rebecca Hinds, Harvard Business Review, 2018/07/30
As this summary stated in its original version, "Dropbox gave us access to project-folder related data, which we aggregated and anonymized." The result was a storm of protest. The story has since been rewritten to say Dropbox anonymized the data before handing it over to researchers. More...

Mandatory keys cut successful phishing attacks on Google to zero
Mariella Moon, Engadget, 2018/07/24
The future of authentication probably involved physical computer keys for everyone (which is not a stretch considering we use car keys and house keys and office keys). More...

YouTube's latest initiative aims to foster educational content
Mark Satter, EdScoop, 2018/07/24
This is maximum praise for what I think is really minimal effort. Referencing last Friday's blog post by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, the article states "YouTube Learning will provide grants and promotion for education-focused content, expert organizations and learners." But this effort pales in comparison to the ways YouTube is helping people make money, for example, through channel memberships, merch, and famebit. More...

An IndieWeb Magazine on Flipboard
Chris Aldrich, 2018/07/24
I don't think much of FlipBoard because, as Chris Aldrich  says, it's just another silo. I nonetheless think it's a good idea to make indieweb more accessible to people, which this initiative does. More...

How Unity Is Building its Future on AR, VR, and AI
Rob Marvin, PC Magazine, 2018/07/20

Unity has been around for a while - I've written about it before. It's "a democratized 3D creation tool for developing immersive content. There are Free, Plus, and Pro versions you can buy for monthly subscription fees, and it's royalty-free. More...

Storytelling And The Technological Nothing

Kin Lane, Kin, 2018/07/18

Kin Lane writes, " 90% of what you are being told about AI, Blockchain, and automation right now isn’t truthful. It is only meant allocate space in your imagination, so that at the right time you can be sold something, and distracted while your data, privacy, and security can be exploited, or straight up swindled out from under you." This is sort of true, but it's also sort of misleading. More...

Google Launches New Feedback Tool ‘Course Kit’ to Eliminate Assignment Uploads
Tina Nazerian, EdSurge, 2018/07/18

The story cites Phil Hill as saying “Positioning collaborative Google Docs and Drive to be easily integrated with the pervasive LMS is a clever judo move—stop fighting the LMS and instead use its momentum to their advantage.” I agree that it's a clever move. More...

The Best Digital Audio Workstations for Windows
Cameron Summerson, Review Geek, 2018/07/18

Music isn't the only use for a digital audio workstation (DAW), of course, as educators producing audio recordings and podcast products know well. My own tool of choice (listed in the 'cheap' section of this article) is Audacity. More...

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
Andrea Zanin, freecodecamp, 2018/07/16

Web security is one of those arcane topics that defies simple understanding. This article tries to bring it down to earth using pigeons. "Bob sends a pigeon to Alice without any message. Alice sends the pigeon back carrying a box with an open lock, but keeping the key. Bob puts the message in the box, closes the locks and sends the box to Alice. Alice receives the box, opens it with the key and reads the message." Now of course there's mathematics involved in the design of the lock. More...