By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Oath Agrees to $5 Million Settlement Over Children’s Privacy Online
Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, 2018/12/06
While we shouldn't stop criticizing Facebook, let's also take a moment to note that Verizon, through it's subsidiary Oath (Yahoo and AOL) just "agreed to pay about $5 million to settle charges from the New York attorney general that the media company’s online advertising business was violating a federal children’s privacy law." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Developers, start your engines
Amazon.Com, 2018/11/29
This is one of the more interesting of Amazon's announcements thisd week. 'Deep Racer' is a scale model racing car. Inside, it has a reinforcement learning engine. You train your car to race, and then submit your trained engine to Amazon to compete in actual road races with your self-driving car. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LinkedIn Becomes a Serious Open Learning Platform
Josh Bersin, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/11/15
It's true that LinkedIn has been a learning platform for some time now, but open? It depends on how you define it - "it’s now announcing it has completely opened up its learning platform to external content partners." That is, it is open in the sense that "customers who have purchased multiple content sources can offer their employees a single place to discover and access all of their organization’s learning content." That puts LinkedIn (and by extension, Microsoft) squarely in the LMS and Learning platform marketplace. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Join Coursera’s New Community
Laura Portalupi, Coursera Blog, 2018/12/31
Coursera has launched a new 'Community' service for people to use alongside their online courses. Announced in this post two weeks ago, the community has attracted almost 2,000 members (that doesn't sound like a lot but I actually think it's pretty good). More...