Ads in academic journals?
Recently I had to disable my ad-blocking extensions to troubleshoot a problem I’m having with a service and I forgot to turn them back on. So I was surprised to visit a journal website and see the number of ads displayed down the side. As if journals don’t make enough money already, now they have to advertise to us as well? Do I really need Taylor & Francis asking if I need to “increase my brand exposure”? WTF is this? I promise that you will never see ads on OpenPhysio.
Hypothes.is notebook preview. Hypothes.is.
As of March 2021, the Notebook enables users to: See all annotations in the current group (the group selected in the groups dropdown at the top left of the Hypothesis sidebar) in reverse chronological order; See all annotations created by one user; Page through results; Reply to annotations and edit their own annotations.
I’ve been using Hypothes.is for public, social annotation on and off for a few years, before starting to use it more seriously about a year ago (you can see my annotations here). This new feature enables you to see all of the annotations and responses within a group in the same place. Even though the feature was developed for use in an LMS it’s really simple to use it for classroom groups and is a great way to get an overview of what all students have highlighted and commented on. Hypothesis itself has a few limitations that really bug me (e.g. no integration with Zotero, and no simple way to get annotations out of the system) but it’s open source and is a really elegant solution to adding an annotation layer on top of the open web. It’s not a stretch to say that I love it. If you’re not familiar with social annotation you can read more on the Hypothes.is about page.
Map of the internet (2021). Halcyon maps.
Compared to any previous iteration of the Map of the Internet, this new version is many times more detailed and informative. It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct “countries”, which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of distinct clusters, regions and continents that stretch throughout the map, such as “news sites”, “search engines”, “social networks”, “e-commerce”, “adult entertainment”, “file sharing”, “software companies” and so much more. In the center of it all can be found ISPs and web browsers, which form the core and backbone of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the domain of the mysterious “dark web”.
This is just one of the many maps of the internet that you can explore now. What I like about this one is that it’s more of an artistic expression than a technical visualisation of the actual network. Have a look at this when you have some time to spend on it. Click here for the high-res version.
Heaven, W. D. (2020, June 4). This startup is using AI to give workers a “productivity score.” MIT Technology Review.
…one firm wants to take things even further. It is developing machine-learning software to measure how quickly employees complete different tasks and suggest ways to speed them up. The tool also gives each person a productivity score, which managers can use to identify those employees who are most worth retaining—and those who are not. Critics argue that workplace surveillance undermines trust and damages morale. Workers’ rights groups say that such systems should only be installed after consulting employees. “It can create a massive power imbalance between workers and the management. And the workers have less ability to hold management to account.”
How do you feel about the paragraph above? How does it make you feel as an academic and employee? If you doubt that this is coming, did you know that Microsoft is building this into it’s services? Do you use Microsoft products? Hold onto that thought. Now, read the paragraph again, replacing “employees”/”workers” with “students, and “management” with “lecturers”. The trend in learning analytics seems to be the conflation of “productivity” with “learning” and I worry that this is what we’re doing to our students when we use online tools in certain ways (I’m not even talking about proctoring of online assessment). We’re undermining trust and damaging morale. We can do better.
Granato, E. (2021). Peer reviewer alignment matrix. Shared via Twitter.
I like to think that I’m lawful neutral.