Personal Data: An overview of low and middle-income countries
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
I just mentioned the EDUCAUSE article comparing different student data protection schemas. That article should be compared with this one, and especially the chart on page 11 looking at different mechanisms, including trade agreements, Commonwealth provisions, OECD, APEC and European directives. "There are generally weaker data protections in low and middle-income countries, leaving their citizens at risk." This includes the U.S. (see the chart on page 12). More...

Algorithmic Accountability: Applying the concept to different country contexts
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
I've been thinking recently about how we validate AI algorithms, this in light of over-enthusiastic press reports and questionable outcomes. More...

Artificial Intelligence: The Road Ahead in Low and Middle-Income Countries
World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/08/11
According to this article, "Research by McKinsey has gone as far as describing AI as contributing to a transformation of society 'happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale' of the Industrial Revolution." So how does that impact low and middle income countries? The report looks at employment and growth, the redistribition of wealth, the delivery of public goods and services, and the impact on democracy. More...

xAPI Conformance Research & Future Requirements
Advanced Distributed Learning, 2017/08/11
Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) is gathering community feedback on the xAPI specification and associated Learning Record Stores (LRS) requirements. To this end, they've posted the relevant documents on GitHib. More...

Sony wants to digitize education records using the blockchain
Jon Russell, TechCrunch, 2017/08/11
TechCrunch reports that "Sony said today that it has finished developing a digital system for storing and managing educational records on the blockchain." It's now looking to commercialize the technology. More...

Blackboard Trend Report
Blackboard Blog, 2017/08/11
Starting today, Blackboard is offering a weekly 'Trend Report' to be posted every Friday offering a list "of the recent industry articles that the Blackboard team has been reading and found most interesting.". While I'm delighted to welcome another entry into the field, I think the first pass needs reworking. More...

Knowledge, Education, and the Role of Teachers.
Stephen Downes, Aug 11, 2017.

Responses to questions ahead of my upcoming presentation in Warsaw. More...

Claude Shannon’s “Creative Thinking” Speech: A Genius Reveals How To Be Creative
Jimmy Soni, The Mission, 2017/08/10
The post is at heart an advertisement for a book about Claude Shannon, and you get the speech beginning only at the half-way point. And also, I think a good part of it is wrong, as we would expect when a mathematician attempts to discuss educational theory. But it's also a good example of what we might call 'folk education theory', analogous to folk psychology, containing commonsense ideas not validated by research or science. More...

Why Adopt Microlearning – 15 Questions Answered
Asha Pandey, EI Design, 2017/08/10
This is a pretty basic - but useful - introduction to the concept of microlearning. The 15 questions are a nice gimmick but do not define the structure of the article. More...

JSON-LD
Various authors, 2017/08/10
The Acronym in full is 'Javascript Object Notation - Linked Data', or just 'JSON Linked Data'. This page is a central resource on the specification. The idea of JSON-LD is that yopu can present a body pof information that can be read by machines and interoperate with other information. More...