Thought Shrapnel

I feel like I could have written this post. I agree entirely:

Some of the phenomena governing people's schedules are natural. It does get dark at night and people do need light. It gets cold in the winter and people need heating. But the Earth does not care whether it's the weekday or the weekend, a Wednesday or a Saturday. And yet somehow the society has decreed that Wednesday is a serious business day and any adult roaming the streets during daytime on that day might get weird stares.

As the author points out, knowledge work doesn't depend on people doing it at the same time. In fact, the title of his post is 'Against the synchronous society':

Perhaps there's no need for people in the workplace to expect others to be able to instantly respond to them. In fact, slower, asynchronous communication can lead to more robust institutional memory inside of an organisation. Instead of the easy fix of tapping a colleague on the shoulder to get an answer, the worker might instead devise a solution for an issue themselves or figure it out while typing up an email, adding to the documentation and making sure fewer people have that question in the future.

Great stuff. I, for one, am looking forward to a time when we're collectively spend a bit more time reflecting, and a bit less time (knee-jerk) responding.

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As an aside, the software running the blog, Kimonote, looks interesting:

Kimonote is a fancy plain text organizer, a macroblogging platform and an antisocial network. It supports Markdown, which allows for a consistent look-and-feel no matter whether you're looking at your own private notes or someone else's public posts. Additional niceties are available, such as a table of contents.

Source: mildbyte

I visit Product Hunt on a regular basis. While there’s plenty of examples of hyped apps and services that don’t last six months, there’s also some gems in there, especially in the Open Source section!

There’s a Q&A part of the site where this week I unearthed a great thread about privacy-based browser extensions. The top ones were:

• Ghostery
• uBlock Origin
• Adblock Plus
• Search Encrypt
• Disconnect

The comments and shared experiences are particularly useful. Remember, the argument that you don’t need privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need free speech because you’ve got nothing to say…

Source: Product Hunt

Twitter have confirmed what everyone knew all along: they’re not going to ban Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. It’s too good for business.

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

It’s a weak, cowardly argument to infer that if Twitter doesn’t provide a platform for Trump, then someone else will. This is absolutely about their growth, absolutely about the fact they make software with shareholders.

Source: Twitter blog

Image via CNN

An interesting interview with Fred Turner, former journalist, Stanford professor, and someone who spends a lot of time studying the technology and culture of Silicon Valley.

Turner likens tech companies who try to do away with hierarchy to 1960s communes:

When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.

It's an interesting viewpoint, and one which chimes with works such as The Tyranny of Structurelessness. I still think less hierarchy is a good thing. But then I would say that, because I'm a white, privileged western man getting ever-closer to middle-age...

Source: Logic magazine

I’m a big fan of Cathy Davidson, and look forward to reading her new book. In this article, she explains that we’ve unleashed an ‘educational monster’ by forcing students to be memorisers rather than content creators:

Increasingly, we are shrinking educational opportunities for our youth worldwide, robbing them of the creativity of the arts, the critical thinking of the humanities and social sciences, and reducing all knowledge to test scores, despite repeated workforce studies stressing the importance of deep learning. The trend is to use standardised tests as the entrance to university and therefore to a middle-class future, even though we have ample research, extending back to the Hermann Ebbinghaus memory experiments of the 1880s, about the evanescence of knowledge crammed for the purpose of test-taking.

As ever with Cathy's writing, it's a good and well-researched read. I'm not sure about framing it in terms of 'outcomes-based' education, however, as judging people by outcomes in the workplace is generally seen as a good thing. Perhaps emphasise that the journey is more important than the destination? That's why granular badges within a portfolio are a great alternative to letter grades and high-stakes testing.

Source: The Guardian

The Mozilla Foundation may have shut down pretty much all of its learning programmes, but it’s still doing interesting stuff around Open Leadership. Chad Sansing writes:

We think of Open Leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. For example, Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox, was developed with an open code base with community contribution and support.

They're using the Web Literacy Map (work I led during my time with Mozilla) as a reference point. It's early days, but here's what they've got so far:

There’s also a white paper which they say will be updated in February 2018. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. Along with great work being done at opensource.com’s community around The Open Organization it’s a great time to be a open leader!

Source: Read, Write, Participate

England’s Children’s Commissioner has released a report entitled ‘Life in Likes’ which has gathered lots of attention in my networks. This, despite the fact that during the research they only talked to only 32 children. I used to teach over 250 kids a week! 32 is a class size, not a representative sample.

This article includes quotations from parents, such as this one:

Parent Trevor said his 12-year-old twin daughters had moved schools as a result of the pressure from social media, but admits they "can't walk away" from it.

He told BBC Radio 5 live: “I can’t say to them, ‘You can’t use that,’ when I use it."

Yes you can. My kids see me drink alcohol but it doesn’t mean I let them have it. My son has a smartphone with an app lock on the Google Play store so he can’t install apps without my permission.

The solution to this stuff does involve basic digital skills, but mainly what’s lacking here are parenting skills, I think.

Source: BBC News

I missed this at the end of last year, perhaps because I live in a small town in the north of England rather than a bustling metropolis:

Welcome to the world of ‘dark kitchens’ – fully-equipped commercial kitchens like you’d find attached to a restaurant, except with no restaurant or even a takeaway counter. Also known as virtual kitchens, they are dedicated solely to meeting the ever-growing hunger for online delivery services, facilitated by the likes of third party delivery apps.

These kitchens are anything but dark at peak times such as Friday or Saturday night, as noodles, pizza, curries and much more exotic—and increasingly, healthy—fare is sizzled up on a made-to-order basis while drivers for food delivery platforms such as Just Eat, Deliveroo, Seamless, and Uber Eats wait outside.

Incredible and obvious at the same time.

Source: The Times

From a shocking photojournalism story:

With imported soft drinks costing the same or less than bottled water, in a country where tap water is not safe to drink, the poorest people are most likely to develop diabetes. Mexico’s health ministry said in 2016 that 72% of adults were overweight or obese. But the same people are prone to malnutrition thanks to a diet high in sugar and saturated fats and low in fibre

Source: The Guardian

The rest of this month’s WIRED magazine is full of its usual hubris, but the section on ‘fixing the internet’ is actually pretty good. I particularly like Jaron Lanier’s framing of the problem we’ve got with advertising supporting the online economy:

Something has gone very wrong: it's the business model. And specifically, it's what is called advertising. We call it advertising, but that name in itself is misleading. It is really statistical behaviour-modification of the population in a stealthy way. Unlike [traditional] advertising, which works via persuasion, this business model depends on manipulating people's attention and their perceptions of choice. Every single penny Facebook makes is from doing that and 90 per cent of what Google makes is from doing that. (Only a small minority of the money that Apple, Microsoft and Amazon makes is from doing that, so this should not be taken as a complete indictment of big tech.)

Source: WIRED

The Opera web browser has joined Brave in allowing users to turn on ‘cryptojacking’ protection:

Bitcoins are really hot right now, but did you know that they might actually be making your computer hotter? Your CPU suddenly working at 100 percent capacity, the fan is going crazy for seemingly no reason and your battery quickly depleting might all be signs that someone is using your computer to mine for cryptocurrency.

For a very short period of time around five years ago I 'cryptojacked' visitors to my blog using JavaScript. Back then, Bitcoin was worth so little, and the slowdown for visitors was so great, that I soon turned it off.

Given the recent explosive rise in Bitcoin’s value, however, it would seem that cryptojacking is yet another thing to guard against online…

Source: Opera blog

Fred Wilson is author of the incredibly popular blog AVC. He prefaces his first post of the year in the following way:

This is a post that I am struggling to write. I really have no idea what is going to happen in 2018.

He does, however, go on to answer ten questions, the most interesting of which are those he answers in the affirmative:

• Will the tech backlash that I wrote about yesterday continue to escalate? Yes.
• Will we see more gender and racial diversity in tech? Yes.
• Will Trump be President at the end of 2018. Yes.

I picked up a copy of WIRED magazine at the airport yesterday for the flight home. (I used to subscribe, but it annoyed me too much.) It is useful, though, for taking the temperature of the tech sector. Given there were sections on re-distributing the Internet, the backlash against the big four tech companies, and diversity in tech, I think they're likely to be amongst the big trends for the (ever-widening) tech sector 2018.

Source: AVC

Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist and author of World After Capital, invited his (sizeable) blog readership to suggest some books he should read over his Christmas and New Year’s break. The results are interesting, as there’s a mix of technical, business, and more discursive writing.

The ones that stood out for me were:

• Big Gods : how religion transformed cooperation and conflict by Ara Norenzayan
• Prosperity Without Growth : economics for a finite planet by Tim Jackson
• An Everyone Culture : becoming a deliberately developmental organization by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, and Matthew L Miller

Former Mozilla colleague John O'Duinn has just sent out Update #14 of his Leading Distributed Teams ebook, so I'm looking forward to reading that soon, too!

Source: Continuations

Good stuff from (Lord) Jim Knight, who cites part of his speech in the House of Lords about data privacy:

The use of data to fuel our economy is critical. The technology and artificial intelligence it generates has a huge power to enhance us as humans and to do good. That is the utopia we must pursue. Doing nothing heralds a dystopian outcome, but the pace of change is too fast for us legislators, and too complex for most of us to fathom. We therefore need to devise a catch-all for automated or intelligent decisioning by future data systems. Ethical and moral clauses could and should, I argue, be forced into terms of use and privacy policies.

Jim’s a great guy, and went out of his way to help me in 2017. It’s great to have someone with his ethics and clout in a position of influence.

Source: Medium

I think the author’s correct to frame things in terms of addiction:

Because we are all hooked, it can be hard to recognise your social media habits as problematic. The closest I came to an “aha” moment was during a visit to Facebook’s headquarters at One Hacker Way, Palo Alto, in 2014, when I worked in advertising. Hearing its sales executives explain how much data Facebook had on its users, all the ways it could target people and get them to click on ads, was terrifying. I haven’t posted a personal update on Facebook since. The moment you start thinking about Facebook as a surveillance system rather than a social network, it becomes a lot more difficult to hand it your information.

It's easy to think that 'keeping up-to-date' is part of your job, therefore constant use of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is justified. I can tell you after going pretty much cold turkey on the latter in 2017 that's not true.

Reducing my social media habit didn’t make me more productive – I am very talented at finding ways to waste time. However, it did make me see how little value Facebook added to my life. Choosing to opt out of the constant noise, to reclaim my attention, was a massive relief. I stopped comparing myself with others so much and started to feel a lot happier with my life. It also reduced my anxiety levels. In today’s news cycle, the endless stream of breaking news, amplified by social media, can easily break your spirit.

Source: The Guardian

We don’t live in a cosy world where everyone hugs fluffy bunnies who shoot rainbows out of their eyes. Hacks and data breaches affect everyone:

If you aren’t famous enough to be a target, you may still be a victim of a mass data breach. Whereas passwords are usually stored in hashed or encrypted form, answers to security questions are often stored — and therefore stolen — in plain text, as users entered them. This was the case in the 2015 breach of the extramarital encounters site Ashley Madison, which affected 32 million users, and in some of the Yahoo breaches, disclosed over the past year and a half, which affected all of its three billion accounts.

Some of it isn't our fault, however. For example, you can bypass PayPal's two-factor authentication by opting to answer questions about your place of birth and mother's maiden name. This is not difficult information for hackers to obtain:

According to Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert, organizations continue to use security questions because they are easy to set up technically, and easy for users. “If you ask someone their favorite color, that’s not a drama,” Mr. Hunt said. “They’ll be able to give you a straight answer. If you say, ‘Hey, please download this authenticator app and point the camera at a QR code on the screen,’ you’re starting to lose people.” Some organizations have made a risk-based decision to retain this relatively weak security measure, often letting users opt for it over two-factor authentication, in the interest of getting people signed up.

Remaining secure online is a constantly-moving target, and one that we would all do well to spend a bit more time thinking about. These principles by the EFF are a good starting point for conversations we should be having this year.

Source: The New York Times

This is a useful way of framing things:

“Quit” doesn’t have to be the opposite of “grit.” This is where “strategic quitting” comes in. Once you’ve found something you’re passionate about, quitting secondary things can be an advantage, because it frees up time to do that number-one thing.

As someone who burned out in their twenties, I definitely agree with the sentiment that time is more important than money:

When we choose an extra hour at work, we are, in effect, choosing one less hour with our kids. We can’t do it all and do it well. And there will not be more time later. Time does not equal money, because we can get more money.

Although I'll be doing some consultancy in 2018, my main focus is on the work I'm doing for Moodle. I've been careful to establish boundaries to ensure that work is sustainable: I'm working four days per week, and I'm doing that based from home.

By my calculations, that gives me 13 hours more ‘free’ time than if was working in an office in my nearest city. It all adds up!

Source: Fast Company

“And if anything laborious, or pleasant or glorious inglourious be presented to you, remember that now is the contest, now are the Olympic games, and they cannot be deferred; and that it depends on one defeat and one giving way that progress is either lost or maintained. Socrates in this way became perfect, in all things improving himself, attending to nothing except to reason. But you, though you are not yet a Socrates, ought to live as one who wishes to be a Socrates.” (Epictetus)

Although I don’t use elementaryOS on my own laptops, we do use it on the family touchscreen PC in our main living space. It’s a beautifully-designed system, and I very much appreciate way the founders interact with their community in terms of updates, roadmap, and funding:

Every month this year, we’ve published a blog post outlining all of the updates that we’ve released during that month. We’ve made a strong effort to support Loki with regular bug fixes, new features, and other improvements. We’ve also made some big policy and infrastructure changes. It was a busy year at elementary!

This is the kind of thing I'm looking to emulate with Project MoodleNet in 2018. 

With their upcoming ‘Juno’ update based on Ubuntu 18.04, I may just switch to elementaryOS, as ‘Loki’ was good enough for me to voluntarily pay $25 for it, in an age when even proprietary operating systems are ‘free’ 

Source: elementaryOS blog