Media-S
Several people have sent me this item over the last week or so. From the website, "Media-S is an open-source development project that aims to create an open Digital Rights interface for the creation, playback, and management of multimedia files. Because of its open nature, Ogg Vorbis will be the first format to be protected by this initiative." (Ogg Vorbis is an open source audio format.) I haven't reviewed the spec in detail, so I can't comment intelligently at the moment. More...

The Theranos Story and Education Technology
John Warner, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/05/30
John Warner compares the promises made by AI and personalized learning vendors with tne owner of the blood testing 'vaporware' product Theranos. "Through a combination of secrecy, lies, flattery, and intimidation, she maintained a fiction about having developed a truly revolutionary piece of technology." There was no requirement that the product actually work; her customers were venture capitalists, who only need to be sold on the idea. More...

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map
Josh Jones, Open Culture, 2018/05/30
These time-lapse maps are actually a sub-genre of YouTube history videos and I've been watching a lot of them recently. They cover everything from the fall of Bronze Age civilizations in the 1100s BCE to the Syrian War. More...

Blockchain technologies face a maturity problem
Dan Swinhoe, IDG Connect, 2018/05/25
The first problem is scalability, which shows up immediately in the amount of time it takes to verify that a transaction is authentic. Visa performs 40K transactions per second, while Ethereum and Bitcoin are capable of between 7-15 per second. You see the issue. The energy cost is another factor, "currently around 180 million KWh for just 200,000 transactions." More...

First Law of Robotics
Metafilter, 2018/05/25
The problem isn't with automated systems or artificial intelligence. The problem is with companies deploying such systems with the same due care and attention they pay to their customers needs and interests on a day-to-day basis. Case in point: Uber. More...

Will Blockchains Revolutionize Education?
David McArthur, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/05/23
The idea of blockchain has caught the imagination of decision-makers recently not only in finance but also in government and education. This article is a pretty good overview of how blockchain technologies might be applied in education (specifically, to support competencies and credentials, beginning maybe with badges), along with an outline of some of the costs and limitations of the technology. More...

Surveillance Art?
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/05/22
As part of a course section "to get folk to reflect on how easily tracked we are through our computational devices" Tony Hirst introduces us to this art project called Artificial Senses, which “visualizes sensor data of the machines that surround us to develop an understanding how they experience the world”. More...

Switching from subjects to skills: Teaching students born in the age of technology
Kurt Söser, Microsoft Education, 2018/05/29
Here's the argument: "We as educators have to shift from teaching students in subjects, to teaching students in skills." Why? "It is the human brain (and heart) that has to get behind the simple steps of a solution that lead into bigger things and the mathematical concepts behind them. And that’s where an educator steps in, to have a conversation about skills and concepts." Honestly, that's not a very good argument all. More...

My #Netnarr Reflection
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/05/28

This is a wrap-up from Levine's Networked Narratives class at Kean University. More...

HoweyCoin
SEC, 2018/05/17
"HoweyCoin is the newest and only coin offering that captures the magic of coin trading profits AND the excitement and guaranteed returns of the travel industry." It's also completely fake, even though there's a very convincing-looking white paper and everything. More...