Is Google an open technology?

Google is not a search company, or a web services company, it is an advertising company.

The “Google Graveyard“.

Is Facebook an open technology?

We have no choice but to accept how Facebook supports (or does not support) linking, searching, archiving, exporting… Features appear and disappear.

Facebook’s revenue is derived from advertising and selling the data of its users.

In the study, a computer could more accurately predict the subject’s personality than a work colleague by analysing just ten Likes; more than a friend or a cohabitant (roommate) with 70, a family member (parent, sibling) with 150, and a spouse with 300 Likes. — “Computers using digital footprints are better judges of personality than friends and family”, University of Cambridge Research

“Filter bubbles”

Facebook: Blue Feed – Red Feed

Google is finally admitting it has a filter-bubble problem

“Fake news”

The city getting rich from fake news

Facebook to End News Feed Experiment in 6 Countries That Magnified Fake News

Mark Zuckerberg: I regret ridiculing fears over Facebook’s effect on election

Surveillance Capitalism

Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones

How companies turn your Facebook activity into a credit score

Google can now track your offline purchases

Your Phone Is Listening—Literally Listening—to Your TV

Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases

Spying

China: Big Data Fuels Crackdown in Minority Region

Spyware’s Odd Targets: Backers of Mexico’s Soda Tax

Spyware in Mexico Targeted Investigators Seeking Students

In education

“…a new tale that’s being told with increasing frequency these days, in which tech industry executives and employees come forward – sometimes quite sheepishly, sometimes quite boldly – and admit that they have regrets, that they’re no longer “believers,” that they now recognize their work has been damaging to individuals and to society at large, that they were wrong.” – “The Tech Regrets Industry” – Audrey Watters

The cases against personalized learning

It’s Time to Make Student Privacy a Priority

University of Edinburgh, Learning Analytics Principles and Purposes (PDF), available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/academic-services/projects/learning-analytics-policy

 

The challenge of decolonization

Towards Indigenizing Higher Education – in particular Foundations videos from Dr. Shelly Johnson, Mukwa Musayett, Canada Research Chair in Indigenizing Higher Education at Thompson Rivers University.

A platform for the Knowledge Makers, an Indigenous student research network. 2018 volume just released!

The question of open sharing and indigenous ways of knowing is not without its complications, see Kimberley Christen, “Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness”. And the Mukurtu CMS: an open source, free, standards-based community archive and content management system aimed at the specific needs of indigenous peoples globally.

But results can be powerful: