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

Posted on 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

Weeknote 13/2015

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Mozilla

  • Finishing off my part of the Hive Toronto Privacy badges project. GitHub repo here.
  • Submitting my final expenses and health & wellness invoices.
  • Writing about Web Literacy Map v1.5 (my last post on the Webmaker blog!)
  • Editing the Learning Pathways whitepaper. I’ll do as much as I can, but it’s up to Karen Smith to shepherd from this point forward!
  • Backing up everything.
  • Catching-up one to one with a few people.
  • Leaving Mozilla. I wrote about that here. Some colleagues gave me a Gif tribute send-off and dressed up an inflatable dinosaur in a party hat. Thanks guys!

Dynamic Skillset

  • Helping out DigitalMe with an event in Leeds around Open Badges. I wrote that up here.
  • Preparing my presentation for a keynote next week.
  • Collaborating on a proposal to scope out Open Badges for UK Scouting.
  • Replying to lots of people/organisations who’d like to work with me! 🙂
  • Finalising things for next week when I start working with City & Guilds for most (OK, nearly all) of my working week.
  • Getting to grips with Xero (which is what I’m using for accounting/invoicing)

Other

Next week I’m spending most of Monday with my family before heading off to London. I’ll be keynoting and running a workshop at the London College of Fashion conference on Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be working from the City & Guilds offices, getting to know people and putting things into motion!

Image CC BY Kenny Louie

Today is my last day at Mozilla

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

TL;DR: I’m leaving Mozilla as a paid contributor because, as of next week, I’ll be a full-time consultant! I’ll write about that in a separate blog post.

Around four years ago, I stumbled across a project that the Mozilla Foundation was running with P2PU. It was called ‘Open Badges’ and it really piqued my interest. I was working in Higher Education at the time and finishing off my doctoral thesis. The prospect of being able to change education by offering a different approach to credentialing really intrigued me.

I started investigating further, blogging about it, and started getting more people interested in the Open Badges project. A few months later, the people behind MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning (DML) programme asked me to be a judge for the badges-focused DML Competition. While I was in San Francisco for the judging process I met Erin Knight, then Director of Learning at Mozilla, in person. She asked if I was interested in working on her team. I jumped at the chance!

During my time at Mozilla I’ve worked on Open Badges, speaking and running keynotes at almost as many events as there are weeks in the year. I’ve helped bring a Web Literacy Map (originally ‘Standard’) into existence, and I’ve worked on various projects and with people who have changed my outlook on life. I’ve never come across a community with such a can-do attitude.

This June would have marked three years as a paid contributor to the Mozilla project. It was time to move on so as not to let the grass grow under my feet. Happily, because Mozilla is a global non-profit with a strong community that works openly, I’ll still be a volunteer contributor. And because of the wonders of the internet, I’ll still have a strong connection to the network I built up over the last few years.

I plan to write more about the things I learned and the things I did at Mozilla over the coming weeks. For now, I just want to thank all of the people I worked with over the past few years, and wish them all the best for the future. As of next week I’ll be a full-time consultant. More about that in an upcoming post!

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