Antitrust laws only go so far when addressing companies that don’t produce any physical goods. It is time to negotiate a new set of rules. Otherwise, our future economy will be dominated by just a few companies.
There are still people out there who think that Amazon is nothing more than an online version of a department store. But it’s much more than that: It is a rapidly growing, global internet giant that is changing the way we shop, conquering more and more markets, using Alexa to suck up our personal data straight out of our living rooms and currently seeking access to our front door keys so it can deliver packages even when nobody’s home.
It wasn’t that long ago that EU efforts to limit the power of Google and Amazon on the European market were decried in the U.S. as protectionism, as an attempt by the Europeans to protect their own inferior digital economy. Now, though, politicians and economists in the U.S. have even begun discussing the prospect of breaking up the internet giants. The mood has shifted.
The digital economy, by contrast, is based on algorithms and its most powerful companies don’t produce any physical products. Customers receive their services free of charge, paying only with their data. The more customers a service provider attracts, the more attractive it becomes to new customers, who then deliver even more data – which is why Google and Facebook need not fear new competition.
first of all, the power of a company, and the abuse of that power, must be redefined. We cannot allow a situation in which these extremely large companies can swallow up potential rivals before they can even begin to develop. As such, company acquisitions must be monitored much more strictly than they currently are and, if need be, blocked.
Second, it must be determined who owns the data collected – whether, for example, it should also be made available to competitors or whether consumers should receive more in exchange than simply free internet search results.
Third, those disseminating content cannot be allowed to reject responsibility for that content. Demonstrably false claims and expressions of hate should not be tolerated.
And finally, those who earn lots of money must also pay lots of taxes – and not just back home but in all the countries where they do business.
There are only 11 education-focused firms listed on the U.S. stock market with a market cap of over $1 billion. While the market is small and fractured today, GSV Capital estimates that education will grow from 9 percent to 12 percent of America’s GDP over the next decade. This equates to a trillion-dollar opportunity.
Early childhood
FarFaria: FarFaria is a literacy tool that offers families a vast library of books that are perfect for story time. Parents can go through the books with their son or daughter, or children can have the books read to them by the app.
Tinybop: Tinybop creates iOS apps that engage children and promote curiosity in kids. Their apps break down complex subjects (like geology and anatomy) into engaging apps that are filled with stunning illustrations.
Vroom: Vroom is a new app that pushes helpful tips to parents on how to turn everyday moments in life into brain-building opportunities. Vroom sends parents actionable tips and strategies that are age-appropriate for their child.
Tinkergarten: Tinkergarten helps kids develop and grow through outdoor-play-based learning and activities. They have a technology-enabled, distributed workforce that allows them to expand their classes across the United States.
Primary/secondary school
+++++++++++++++++++++
My Note:
“although 95 percent of schools have Internet, only 20 percent have high-speed access. For technology to disrupt our schools, we need to get them connected.”
yet, MN government is right now quarreling about fast-connection networking rural parts of Minnesota, whereas the Republicans insist on $30 Mil only, Democrats on $80Mil and the governor on $100K+.
In 2002, the U.S. created the conditions for monopoly in the Internet services providers market, which accumulates to disastrous results. The fight around net neutrality proves one more time that trend (of monopolizing connectivity and profiteering for big companies, rather then developing the US): http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/272480919/when-it-comes-to-high-speed-internet-u-s-falling-way-behind
++++++++++++++++++++++
Trend: One of the major developments in primary and secondary education is the focus on personalization. Students get pushed material that meets them where they are, when they need it. Classes can now adapt to a learner’s needs and provide them with the skills, the instruction and the resources they need to master concepts.
AltSchool: AltSchool was started in 2013 and is rethinking the way school works. Their technology platform enables teachers to create weekly “learning playlists” for each student. They’ve done away with formal classes and focus on group projects and individualized instruction.
CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation serves tens of thousands of schools and millions of students by providing free customizable learning tools and content. Students can use their interactive simulations and adaptive problem sets and teachers can customize their flexbooks.
DreamBox: DreamBox powers more than 5 million math lessons every week through their adaptive K-8 math platform. The platform continually assesses a student’s strengths and weaknesses to close gaps and meet students with the right material at the right time.
Trinket: Trinket lets teachers and students write, run and share code from any device. Trinkets can be easily adapted to the classroom and shared with students to run real-time coding challenges.
University
College is expensive in America; the average cost is more than $20,000 a year for a four-year degree. At least 65 percent of the 55 million new jobs forecasted for the next decade will require a formal post-secondary credential.
In 2015, only 50 percent of college graduates were working in the field they studied, and more than one-third indicated they would have chosen a different major. Nearly 40 percent of college graduates believed their school did not prepare them well for employment.
Students are going to university because it is “the right thing to do,” often without a thought to the ROI on their education or the work opportunities after school. Only 19 percent of full-time college students graduate in four years, which dramatically increases the cost of their degree.
Trend: Online platforms are being leveraged at universities to help drive down the cost of a degree and increase access to programs. Big data platforms are being used to identify students in danger of failing and provide targeted assistance to help them graduate on time.
Rafter: Rafter is redesigning textbooks at universities by repackaging course materials. They’ve helped almost 3 million students save more than $700 million on textbooks.
2U: 2U offers schools as a service by providing universities with a platform to create online degree programs. They have more than 500 faculty, 1,000 course sections and 1,600 hours of live instruction per week.
Corporate/continuing education
Trends: The two largest sectors for investment are skill training (primarily coding and digital literacy) and English language learning.
Degreed: Degreed provides a personal knowledge portfolio that stays with learners. They’ve cataloged 250,000+ online learning courses and 3 million-plus informal learning activities. They also help large companies understand the talent and skills within their organization.
Duolingo: Duolingo is a gamified language learning app that has more than 100 million users. They offer free instruction and are helping non-native English speakers certify their skills with affordable online testing.
Pathgather: Pathgather is an enterprise LMS that motivates employees to learn and connect around professional development.
iTutorGroup: iTutorGroup is a Chinese-based English language platform that began by offering English language training to corporate executives and has expanded to offer online courses for children and younger learners. They recently raised a Series C valuing them at more than $1 billion.
One Month: One Month offers technical-skills crash courses designed to give learners functional skills in 15 minutes a day for one month. Since starting, they’ve helped more than 25,000 students develop foundational technical skills.
altMBA: altMBA is an intensive, four-week online workshop designed by Seth Godin for high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead. They are rethinking the structure of learning online and have seen a 98 percent completion rate for their program.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and FBI dragnet surveillance, many Americans are concerned that their rights to privacy and intellectual freedom are under threat. But librarians are perfectly positioned to help our communities develop strategies to protect themselves against unwanted surveillance. In this webinar, Alison Macrina and April Glaser of the Library Freedom Project will talk about the landscape of surveillance, the work of the LFP, and some tips and tools librarians can use to resist pervasive surveillance in the digital age.
About the Presenters:
Alison Macrina is a librarian, privacy rights activist, and the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries by teaching librarians and their local communities about surveillance threats, privacy rights and law, and privacy-protecting technology tools to help safeguard digital freedoms. Alison is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and giant multinational corporations. When she’s not doing any of that, she’s reading.
April Glaser is a writer and an activist with the Library Freedom Project. She currently works as a mobilization specialist at Greenpeace USA, where she focuses on ending oil extraction in the Arctic. Prior to Greenpeace, April was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, organizing around the net neutrality campaign and EFF’s grassroots programming. April also previously worked with the Prometheus Radio Project, where her efforts helped propel the passage of the Local Community Radio Act, the largest expansion of community radio in U.S. history. She lives in Oakland, California and continues to work with local organizations on a range of digital rights issues.
Can’t make it to the live show? That’s okay. The session will be recorded and available on the Carterette Series Webinars site for later viewing.
Earlier in 2021, a bipartisan group of senators called on the FCC to redefine broadband as 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up, as that would better reflect how people actually use their internet.
Still, paying $15 a month for 25 Mbps down is a heckuva lot better than paying $50 a month for those same speeds. Better yet, for those living in urban areas such as New York City, where the internet tends to be much faster, the same bill caps the price of broadband up to 200 Mbps at just $20 a month.
Rosenworcel said that Pai’s report obscures “the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big” and that “it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
Thousands of families struggling with home learning are being offered free high-speed broadband following a partnership between internet provider Hyperoptic and dozens of local authorities across the UK.
Comcast charges an extra $30 per month for unlimited data, or $25 for the “xFi Complete” add-on package that includes the Comcast gateway device and unlimited data. Customers who don’t upgrade to unlimited data and exceed the 1.2TB cap must pay $10 for each additional block of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 each month. Comcast is phasing in the charges gradually, so customers in newly capped areas could start getting overage charges for their April 2021 usage.
Algorithmic test proctoring’s settings have discriminatory consequences across multiple identities and serious privacy implications.
While racist technology calibrated for white skin isn’t new (everything from photography to soap dispensers do this), we see it deployed through face detection and facial recognition used by algorithmic proctoring systems.
While some test proctoring companies develop their own facial recognition software, most purchase software developed by other companies, but these technologies generally function similarly and have shown a consistent inability to identify people with darker skin or even tell the difference between Chinese people. Facial recognition literally encodes the invisibility of Black people and the racist stereotype that all Asian people look the same.
As Os Keyes has demonstrated, facial recognition has a terrible history with gender. This means that a software asking students to verify their identity is compromising for students who identify as trans, non-binary, or express their gender in ways counter to cis/heteronormativity.
These features and settings create a system of asymmetric surveillance and lack of accountability, things which have always created a risk for abuse and sexual harassment. Technologies like these have a long history of being abused, largely by heterosexual men at the expense of women’s bodies, privacy, and dignity.
my note: I am repeating this for years
Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s ongoing critique of Turnitin, a plagiarism detection software, outlines exactly how this logic operates in ed-tech and higher education: 1) don’t trust students, 2) surveil them, 3) ignore the complexity of writing and citation, and 4) monetize the data.
Technological Solutionism
Cheating is not a technological problem, but a social and pedagogical problem.
Our habit of believing that technology will solve pedagogical problems is endemic to narratives produced by the ed-tech community and, as Audrey Watters writes, is tied to the Silicon Valley culture that often funds it. Scholars have been dismantling the narrative of technological solutionism and neutrality for some time now. In her book “Algorithms of Oppression,” Safiya Umoja Noble demonstrates how the algorithms that are responsible for Google Search amplify and “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling.”
Anna Lauren Hoffmann, who coined the term “data violence” to describe the impact harmful technological systems have on people and how these systems retain the appearance of objectivity despite the disproportionate harm they inflict on marginalized communities.
This system of measuring bodies and behaviors, associating certain bodies and behaviors with desirability and others with inferiority, engages in what Lennard J. Davis calls the Eugenic Gaze.
Higher education is deeply complicit in the eugenics movement. Nazism borrowed many of its ideas about racial purity from the American school of eugenics, and universities were instrumental in supporting eugenics research by publishing copious literature on it, establishing endowed professorships, institutes, and scholarly societies that spearheaded eugenic research and propaganda.
Media literacy. Differentiated instruction. Media literacy guide.
Fake news as part of media literacy. Visual literacy as part of media literacy. Media literacy as part of digital citizenship.
Web design / web development
the roles of HTML5, CSS, Java Script, PHP, Bootstrap, JQuery, React and other scripting languages and libraries. Heat maps and other usability issues; website content strategy. THE MODEL-VIEW-CONTROLLER (MVC) design pattern
Social media for institutional use. Digital Curation. Social Media algorithms. Etiquette Ethics. Mastodon
I hosted a LITA webinar in the fall of 2016 (four weeks); I can accommodate any information from that webinar for the use of the IM students
OER and instructional designer’s assistance to book creators.
I can cover both the “library part” (“free” OER, copyright issues etc) and the support / creative part of an OER book / textbook
“Big Data.” Data visualization. Large scale visualization. Text encoding. Analytics, Data mining. Unizin. Python, R in academia.
I can introduce the students to the large idea of Big Data and its importance in lieu of the upcoming IoT, but also departmentalize its importance for academia, business, etc. From infographics to heavy duty visualization (Primo X-Services API. JSON, Flask).
NetNeutrality, Digital Darwinism, Internet economy and the role of your professional in such environment
I can introduce students to the issues, if not familiar and / or lead a discussion on a rather controversial topic
Digital assessment. Digital Assessment literacy.
I can introduce students to tools, how to evaluate and select tools and their pedagogical implications
Wikipedia
a hands-on exercise on working with Wikipedia. After the session, students will be able to create Wikipedia entries thus knowing intimately the process of Wikipedia and its information.
Effective presentations. Tools, methods, concepts and theories (cognitive load). Presentations in the era of VR, AR and mixed reality. Unity.
I can facilitate a discussion among experts (your students) on selection of tools and their didactically sound use to convey information. I can supplement the discussion with my own findings and conclusions.
eConferencing. Tools and methods
I can facilitate a discussion among your students on selection of tools and comparison. Discussion about the their future and their place in an increasing online learning environment
Digital Storytelling. Immersive Storytelling. The Moth. Twine. Transmedia Storytelling
I am teaching a LIB 490/590 Digital Storytelling class. I can adapt any information from that class to the use of IM students
VR, AR, Mixed Reality.
besides Mark Gill, I can facilitate a discussion, which goes beyond hardware and brands, but expand on the implications for academia and corporate education / world
Instructional design. ID2ID
I can facilitate a discussion based on the Educause suggestions about the profession’s development
Microcredentialing in academia and corporate world. Blockchain
IT in K12. How to evaluate; prioritize; select. obsolete trends in 21 century schools. K12 mobile learning
Podcasting: past, present, future. Beautiful Audio Editor.
a definition of podcasting and delineation of similar activities; advantages and disadvantages.
Gender, race and age in education. Digital divide. Xennials, Millennials and Gen Z. generational approach to teaching and learning. Young vs old Millennials. Millennial employees.
how data is produced, collected and analyzed. make accessible all kind of data and info
ask good q/s and find good answers, share finding in meaningful ways. this is where digital literacy overshadows information literacy and this the fact that SCSU library does not understand; besides teaching students how to find and evaluate data, I also teach them how to communicate effectively using electronic tools.
connecting people tools and resources and making it easier for everybody. building collaborative, open and interdisciplinary
robust data computational literates. developing workshops, project and events to practice new skills. to position the library as the interdisciplinary nexus
what are data: definition. items of information, facts, traces of content and form. higher level, conception discussion about data in terms of social effects: matadata capturing information about the world, social political and economic changes. move away the mystic conceptions about data. nothing objective about data.
the emergence of IoT – digital meets physical. cyber physical systems. smart objects driven by industry. . proliferation of sensor and device – smart devices.
what does privacy looks like ? what is netneutrality when IoT? library must restructure : collaborate across institutions about collections of data in opien and participatory ways. put IoT in the hands of make and break things (she is maker space aficionado)
make and break things hackathons – use cheap devices such as Arduino and Pi.
data literacy programs with higher level conception exploration; libraries empower the campus in data collection. data science norms, store and share data to existing repositories and even catalogs. commercial services to store and connect data, but very restrictive and this is why libraries must be involved.
linked data and dark data
linked data – draw connections around online data most of the data are locked. linked data uses metadata to link related information in ways computers can understand.
libraries take advantage of link data. link data opportunity for semantics, natural language processing etc. if hidden data is relative to our communities, it is a library responsibility to provide it. community data practitioners
dark data
massive data, which cannot be analyzed by relational processing. data not yield significant findings. might be valuable for researchers: one persons trash is another persons’ treasure. preserving data and providing access to info. collaborate with researchers across disciplines and assist decide what is worth keeping and what discarding and how to study.
rich learning experience working with lined and dark data enable fresh perspective and learning how to work with data architecture. data literacy programming.
in context of data is different from open source and open projects. the social side of data science . advising researchers on navigation data, ethical compilations.
open science movement .https://cos.io/ pushing beyond licences and reframe, position ourselves as collaborators
analysis and publishing ; use tools that can be shared and include data, code and executable files.
reproducibility and contestability https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/events/series/summer-of-open-science
In the age of Big Data, there is an abundance of free or cheap data sources available to libraries about their users’ behavior across the many components that make up their web presence. Data from vendors, data from Google Analytics or other third-party tracking software, and data from user testing are all things libraries have access to at little or no cost. However, just like many students can become overloaded when they do not know how to navigate the many information sources available to them, many libraries can become overloaded by the continuous stream of data pouring in from these sources. This session will aim to help librarians understand 1) what sorts of data their library already has (or easily could have) access to about how their users use their various web tools, 2) what that data can and cannot tell them, and 3) how to use the datasets they are collecting in a holistic manner to help them make design decisions. The presentation will feature examples from the presenters’ own experience of incorporating user data in decisions related to design the Bethel University Libraries’ web presence.
silos, IT barrier, focusing on student success, retention, server space is cheap, if
promotion and tenure for faculty can include incentive to work with the librarian
lack of fear, changing the mindset.
deep collaboration both within and cross-consortia
don’t rely on vendor solutions. changing mindset
development = oppty (versus development as “work”)
private higher education is PALNI
3d virtual picture of disastrous areas. unlock the digital information to be digitally accessible to all people who might be interested.
they opened the maps of Katmandu for the local community and they were coming up with the strategies to recover. democracy in action
i can’t stop thinking that the keynote speaker efforts are mere follow up of what Naomi Klein explains in her Shock Doctrine: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine: a government country seeks reasons to destroy another country or area and then NGOs from the same country go to remedy the disasters
A question from a librarian from the U about the use of drones. My note: why did the SCSU library have to give up its drone?
Douglas County Library model. too resource intensive to continue
Marmot Library Network
ILS integrated library system – shared with other counties, same sever for the entire consortium. they have a programmer, viewfind, open source, discovery player, he customized viewfind community to viewfind plus. instead of using the ILS public access catalogue, they are using the Vufind interface
Caiifa Enki. public library – single access collection. they purchase ebooks from the publisher and they are using also the viewfind interface. but not integrated with the library catalogs. Kansas public library went from OverDrive to Viewfind. CA State library is funding for the time being this effort.
types of content – publisher will not understand issue, which clear for librarians
PDF and epub formats
purchase content –
title by title selection – academia is tired of selections. although it is intended to buy also collections
library – owned ( and shared collections)
host content from libraries – papers in academic lib, genealogy in pub lib.
options in license models .
e resource content. not only ebooks, after it is taken care of, add other types of digital objects.
instead of replicate, replacement of the commercial aggregators,
Amigos Shelf interface is the product of the presenter
instead of having a young reader collection as SCSU has on the third floor, an academic library is outsourcing through AMigos shelf ebooks for young readers
Harper Collins is too cumbersome and the reason to avoid working with them.
security issues. some of the material sent over ftp and immediately moved to sftp
decisions – use of internal resources only, if now – amazon
programmer used for the pilot. contracted programmers. lack of the ability to see the large picture. eventually hired a full time person, instead of outsourcing. RDA compliant MARC.
ONIX, spreadsheet MARC.
Decision about who to start with : public or academic.
attempt to keep pricing down –
own agreement with the customers, separate from the agreement with the Publisher
current development: web-based online reading, shared-consortial collections and SIP2 authentication