I really wish I could have heard your talk. I look forward to the book. I found your images and accompanying text really neat (actually I felt that the images really helped to anchor the text - cool) and I chuckled at your words on your second slide describing Athabasca U "in the middle of nowhere" as well as a nod to audiences from different temperature referencing points. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Stuart!

It's all thanks to my recent discovery of http://flickr.com/commons. I've long been a fan of http://commons.wikimedia.org and have used many of its images in former slideshows (and this one) but the Flickr site has many more tags and all the images are in the public domain - much quicker to search and find relevant reusable images.

Because the license for any given Flickr photo can be changed by the owner at her or his discretion - e.g. from one kind of CC license to another, or from CC to full copyright - it's advisable to save a screenshot of the photo source page when you download a given image. A good papertrail is always a good resource (and defence, if it comes to it).

That said, I would hope that a Flickr space designated for CC and public domain pics might provide more reliable and consistent licensing.

Thanks for the link Jon. I've already posted it (and the landing link) on the COMP601 news forum.

- huntrods

I have taught this as one of the best introductions to McLuhan; it covers the major concepts - and the interviewer pushes him to be clear about them. (And, personally, I always enjoy his joke about how the LLD is like LSD.)

In a recent blog post I was trying to figure out how we can interact on the internet, yet still maintain privacy…and your post got me thinking.  Maybe we don’t need contact information to create identity.

The first question that came to mind is: what is it, about who a student is, that is important in the context of the MOOC? Where does the value of that node lay? In a name and some contact info? If the answer to that is yes, then…why? How does that information improve the course? Do we use it to connect to more meaningful data about the student, data that might allow us to customize their learning and provide examples based on what we know about them?

I would argue that the value to the network of a new node joining that network lies in the experiences of the new node, and where they already are on the internet. Those are the connections that need to be made. What kind of interests do they have? Which blogs do they follow? Where have they travelled? What schooling have they already had? That way, if we have masses of people signed up for a course (the people in the “long tail” of the internet), we can start to group them based on commonalities that are more relevant than names or locations. Anderson (2007) writes that “we are moving towards a culture and economy where the huge number of people participating in the niches in the tail really matters” (24). This may be a bit futuristic, but I’m thinking that we could potentially leave out the contact information altogether and focus instead on people’s “personal catalogs…which can be considered manifestations of a person’s persona” (p. 46) and then use that information in some sort of algorithm to create a more customized learning experience, independent of facilitator input.

But that’s probably far away….learning analytics have yet to really find a foothold in higher ed….and the types of services that collate these personal archives most certainly don’t exist (that I know of). It’s an interesting way around having to provide contact data though. Or? Do you think it’s just as much a violation of privacy?

Sandi

Anderson, P. (2007). What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education.

It'd certainly give the student more reason to share information but, given how much can be done to uniquely identify an individual by combining a few seemingly benign details (1, 2, 3), I'm not sure whether it'd be better or worse.

On the one hand, it would require more work to identify a person but, on the other hand, it's not hard to partner with an exploitative party with large databases down the road and users are less aware of how easily they can be uniquely identified by this method.

I'd focus, instead, on designs which push the intelligence which requires personal details to the user's PC in the form of open-source code and mitigate the costs of pushing around the large amounts of data consumed by using a peer-to-peer technology like BitTorrent (native applications) or the PeerConnection API in WebRTC (in-browser). (similar in design to to Firecloud)

That way, the user can have confidence that their private information is made no less safe because, for the purposes of the service in question, it never leaves their computer.

It is indeed almost trivial to map rich interaction data to individuals, especially if we don't worry too much about ethics or legal niceties. I think it's a form of stealing or cheating, though it's not terrible if we go into it knowing what we are giving away, how it will be used and why it is a worthwhile trade.

I'm a fan of finding new ways to customize learning paths and putting individuals in control but I'd hate to lose the role of the human facilitator (not necessarily or even normally a professional teacher) - being in control means being able to delegate control to someone else when you want that. And learning is a fundamentally social activity that, even for the most instrumental learning, means engaging with others. Not sure whether it is possible or desirable to be anonymous in that process but I do think we should have the choice.

P2P is a great idea but fiendishly hard to scale in a way that remains easy to use. Pre-eBay/Microsoft, Skype used to achieve that balance really well but very few other implementations have proved to be robust, secure and invisible. There is a middle way: SMTP email ain't bad at hiding its decentralized nature. If we could agree on a combination of non-proprietary protocols (existing attempts include OpenDD, OpenID, OpenSocial, FOAF) then something along those lines might be a happy medium. But, sadly, it looks like proprietary APIs are currently winning in that space.

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