This brings back memories when NO multiple choices: only face to face..

- Anonymous

Bad memories. Actually, to be quite honest, I always rather enjoyed exams in a contrary kind of way. But, with some rare exceptions, few if any things in an educational system are more antagonistic to learning, more unfair, more inauthentic, more inefficient, more ugly. They are a stark illustration of all that is wrong in education.

I've written of my feelings about such things many times, perhaps most succinctly if not most penetratingly in this 2009 post at https://landing.athabascau.ca/blog/view/3639/what-exams-have-taught-me 

do not belive in bad memories -- believe in BAD implementation>>

- me

good point, Jon. We need to think more on how to use a technology in a better way for learning, but not just ban it. Here, cellphone is not even a technology, but more a part of life for nowedays youth. I won't be surprised if anyone ever proposed to ban the Internet for students. Would that work? not really.

Great comments, Jon.

You are right - I'm not against standards per se. For instance I'm driven crazy by the lack of standards when trying to integrate apps or tools such as Deezer, Apple TV or Sonos within an existing home entertainment system. How many remote controls do we need? One! We absolutely need various apps and tools to work together as seamlessly as possible in education too.

My concern with the NGDLE approach is, as you suggest, that it doesn't have a strong digital pedagogy around which to build standards. You could of course argue that standards are independent of applications, but I don't agree. Standards should allow you to do what you want with technology, and hence you should have some idea of what you want, or, more importantly, of what you don't want. What I don't want is a complex, technological system that both teachers and learners find increasingly difficult to navigate or apply, which is what I fear the NGDLE approach will result in. But I also accept I could be wrong on this and I welcome the discussion the EDUCAUSE paper is generating.

Lastly, good luck on your discussions of where Athabasca is going or should go. It's such an important institution, but it does need to change.

- Tony Bates

Yes, that monopolization is the worry! The problem is that Facebook's members are not its clients, but its shareholders, and it is ruthless and highly effective in exploiting its deep and powerful knowledge of what drives social networking. Very clever, but very harmful. I am deeply saddened by the way that, as a result of its market share and almost single-handedly, Facebook has squashed open standards (e.g. OpenSocial, OpenID, even RSS). It's not just a result of its own aggressive use of proprietary and closed alternatives, but the fact that, as a result, it has forced other sites of its nature to become equally closed in order to compete: it has become the acceptable norm to lock people in. 

Personal reflection: I used hi5 long ago to keep in touch with friends from back home. I moved to Canada after high school and had to find a better way to keep in touch with my friends who were moving out all over the world. Social sites comes in very handy for that. Hi5 was a great way to stay in touch as it mainly worked as a method of communication across the world just like yahoo and msn messengers. 

social apps have evolved greatly since then. Facebook is a great combination of content and communication and everything in between. While looking thru the wiki posts you shared I found Andrew Odlyzko's 'Content is not king' to be very interesting. I would argue this is a personal view but I know people who solely uses facebook for communication. Others are more in it for the content both from known and unknown sources. 

About the article about how people think facebook is internet is also very true. Just like some people uses computers now a days just for youtube and facebook, nothing else seems to exist in their online world other than funny videos and friend's posts. Telecom companies were also using this to give people access to certain social apps on their smartphone and not all of internet and claiming that as a feature and charging people. I am sure some some people still think when they click on the internet explorer icon on their desktop that it the internet. Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE

Remember the time Skype came up with a phone which was a revolution. Though it didn't sell well but it was a great idea as lot of people were buying into the idea of skype. Just like that facebook has also taken over onternet. We have seen the facebook phone whose main purpose was to keep you online in facebook 24/7. if you go to http://failblog.cheezburger.com/failbook you will find a lot of people asking questions, googling things, reading news, believing fake news and sharing user generated content that are absurd. 

Facebook has done a great job changing the world into this. There data business is the biggest in the world but even the people that knows this can not stop using facebook. No other company has such grasp on userbase that other social apps are incapable of reaching that. The world runs on money and ethics has to room in it. Facebook and any other large internet companies are no different. 

Yes - there's no doubt that they do their job ruthlessly well! But, just because the world needs money does not make money an end (or a justification) in itself. We have laws to prevent its precedence over ethics, albeit unevenly spread, not to mention other powerful drivers like social capital and altruism.

Facebook is a bit different, I think. Though plenty of other companies have found ways to lock people in with foundational technologies (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, IBM) and some have found ways to offer services that can't be beat and that dominate through little more than having desirable products that smaller companies cannot match (e.g. Google, Amazon, Netflix), all of those could relatively easily be replaced with a competitor's products. One might have invested a lot in content, infrastructure, etc so it would not be easy, but it could be done. That's one of the great things about the Internet as a substrate. Facebook was the first to truly get how to create lock-in with social networks on an open Internet, doing what Bell only managed in a bygone era by controlling the wires. On the surface it looks like it has a lot of direct competitors - and there are indeed niches to be carved - but they have no more chance of competing than other US phone companies at the start of the 20th Century could compete with Bell, without government intervention. We don't have the legal checks and balances to figure out how to control such things yet, but it would be interesting to think about what they might look like!