Tag: Technology

The potential of Chirp.io to send Open Badges between people and devices

Posted on June 3, 2015June 3, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

Back in 2012 I remember coming across an ingenious service for sending data between mobile devices using sound. I promptly forgot about it until recently when I re-discovered Chirp.io.

There’s existing apps for Android and iOS, along with a Google Chrome extension. It’s great for things like:

quickly sharing a photo with a friend
sharing contact details
sending a link to a class set of 1:1 devices.

Chirp is kind of a like a super-simple version of an overly-engineered protocol such as Bluetooth.

During my lunch break today, after a brief exchange on Twitter, I went along and met Patrick (the founder) and Richard (CEO) to pitch Open Badges to them. It seems like such a great fit: issuing badges using a chirp!

They were excited about the idea and want to explore it further so I’m using this post as a reference to point people towards. There’s an SDK for Chirp, they’re about to launch a web-native version, and if you join their crowdfunding campaign (as I’ve done) you get an equity stake in the company!

I’m closing comments here to discuss the potential of Chirp and badges in the Open Badges Google Group. Join in the conversation!

Image CC BY-ND Bryan Mathers

Web Literacy: what happens beyond peak centralisation and software with shareholders?

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

There’s no TIDE podcast this week, so I thought I’d record a blog post today. Here’s the abstract:

We’re at peak centralisation of our data in online services, with data as the new oil. It’s a time of ‘frictionless sharing’, but also a time when we’re increasingly having decisions made on our behalf by algorithms. Education is now subject to a land grab by ‘software with shareholders’ looking to profit from collecting, mining, packaging, and selling learner data. This article explores some of the issues at stake, as well as pointing towards the seeds of a potential solution.

The Code Acts in Education blog I mention in the introduction to this piece can be found here and Ben Williamson is @BenPatrickWill on Twitter.

Comments (once you’ve listened!) much appreciated. I’ve still got time to re-work this… 🙂

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(no audio? click here!)

References

Belshaw, D.A.J. (2014a). Software with shareholders (or, the menace of private public spaces). Doug Belshaw’s blog. 23 April 2014. http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2014/04/23/software-with-shareholders.

Belshaw, D.A.J. (2014b). Curate or Be Curated: Why Our Information Environment is Crucial to a Flourishing Democracy, Civil Society. DMLcentral. 23 October 2014. http://dmlcentral.net/blog/doug-belshaw/curate-or-be-curated-why-our-information-environment-crucial-flourishing-democracy.

Dixon-Thayer, D. (2015). Mozilla View on Zero-Rating. Open Policy & Advocacy Blog. Mozilla. 5 May 2015. https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2015/05/05/mozilla-view-on-zero-rating.

Flew, T. (2008). New Media: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Gillula, J. & Malcolm, J. (2015). Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet. Deeplinks Blog. Electronic Frontier Foundation. 18 May 2015. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/internetorg-not-neutral-not-secure-and-not-internet.

Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E., Hancock, J.T. (2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Sates of America. 111(24).

McNeal, G.S. (2014). Facebook Manipulated User News Feeds To Create Emotional Responses. Forbes. 28 June 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion

Mozilla. (2015). Web Literacy Map v1.1. https://teach.mozilla.org/teach-like-mozilla/web-literacy

Thorp, J. (2012). Big Data Is Not the New Oil. Harvard Business Review. 30 November 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/11/data-humans-and-the-new-oil.

Image CC BY-NC Graham Chastney

Why you should create canonical URLs

Posted on April 21, 2015April 22, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

Last night, while I was accompanying my son on the course for one of his weekly golf lessons, Ian O’Byrne asked:

@dajbelshaw in one of our earlier discussions you mentioned the need for educators to have one “canonical” url or place to house everything

— William Ian O’Byrne (@wiobyrne) April 20, 2015

@dajbelshaw do you have a post on that, or a resource you cited/used? — William Ian O’Byrne (@wiobyrne) April 20, 2015

I suppose the closest I’ve got to that is Working openly on the web: a manifesto, which was based on Jon Udell’s Seven ways to think like the web. There’s three points on the manifesto, with part of the second point reading:

Unless it contains sensitive information, publish your work to a public URL that can be referenced by others. This allows ideas to build upon one another in a ‘slow hunch’ fashion. Likewise, with documents and other digital artefacts, publish and then share rather than deal with version control issues by sending the document itself.

My point about having a ‘canonical’ URL is that you need somewhere that people can use a starting point for a breadcrumb trail.

We live (largely) in a post-social bookmarking world. That means people are unlikely to have carefully curated links to which they return. They’re probably going to have to use the auto-complete function of their browser’s address bar or their favourite search engine to rediscover what they’re looking for. If this fails, they need a trusted place that they can use a starting point to find that nugget of value.

The easiest way to create a canonical URLs as an individual is to have a profile page – mine is at dougbelshaw.com. But equally, you should have one for each project you run, each product you sell, each class you teach, and so on. It will make your life easier. Trust me.