By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Centralized Collection and Control of Personal Data
Arvind Narayanan, March 18, 2013
Presentation and paper from Air Mozilla on the subject of distributed authentication. "While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers..." The paper argues that decentralized authentication faces difficult hurdles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?
"Creating metadata for text has gone from tedious to insignificant." If this isn't obvious, it should be. From where I sit, the text is the metadata - it describes itself. So where is metadata useful - photographs? Video? Well it would be, if people filled it out well. What would be better, proposes the author, would be if there were a moratorium on metadata. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What can I do with my educational data? (#lak13)
Sheila MacNeill, Sheila’s work blog, March 6, 2013
I think this topic will be on the top of a lot of minds in the next little while. No, not simple "what can I do with my educational data?" though that will certainly be the topic of conversation. But the other one: who owns my educational data? The question was prompted for Sheila MacNeill by the recent #etmooc webinar featuring Audrey Watters titled 'who owns your education data?'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. BigData in HR: Why it's Here and What it Means
Josh Bersin, Bersin by Deloitte, March 4, 2013
What's interesting about the diagram above is that it presents analytics (properly so-called) as its own discipline, and represents human resources (HR) and (hence) education as the latest thing in the progression of analytics through the years. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning lessons from data controversies
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2018/12/18
This is the transcript of a talk devoted to showing how people have lost faith in the idea that data will solve the problems of 21st century education and technology. "We’re now learning some hard lessons from the rapid expansion of data analytics, algorithms, and AI across society," writes Ben Williamson. More...