> Do you work closely your potential users (teachers or students, for example) about product development? > Do you offer data portability — not just for administrative data, but for students’ own information? > Is your tool available across platforms? > Are you open source? > Do you offer an API? > Is your educational…

> Our conversations need to move beyond techniques. In the beginning, the what-to-do and how-to-do-it focus is essential, and teachers should always be on the lookout for good techniques. But by mid-career, it’s time to explore why—why are we using that policy, why does that activity work in some courses but not others, why won’t…

> Having people trained in the methods of a wide range of disciplines in the same room talking about the same questions is illuminating. Psychologists worry that the treatment is not precisely defined. Economists worry that the control group and treatment were different before the experiment started. Physicists seem to want to see change across…

> The information ethic in this critique is based upon explicitly acknowledging that information systems are human creations, not natural phenomena. It follows the same argument that the free market is a myth; better said, the so-called “invisible hand” of Adam Smith is subordinate to institutions created by humans [34]. This does not deny the…

> Here’s a radical idea though: it’s what you do with those tools and how you do it that defines whether you’re activist. Are you using those tools to “promot[e] the quality of life in a community, through both political and nonpolitical processes”? Or are you just running student Tumblrs but now they’re on WordPress?…

> Subjecting workers to a national (or even global) reverse auction of wages and work conditions—where they are under constant pressure to perform tasks faster, and for less, than rivals will—is a recipe for exhaustion and poverty for those unlucky enough to be trapped in the platform matrix. Moreover, it is also a prelude to…

> History is barely even a story at all, let alone a painful or discomfiting one. Rather, history is a collection of analogies to the present, offering a comforting reassurance that all human endeavor—even all natural life—has led us to this moment. “Failure”—a popular Silicon Valley buzzword—is only a temporary pause in narratives of eventual triumph…

> From a messaging perspective, I continue to believe that OER advocates should place more emphasis on permissions because this is the aspect of OER to which publishers have no answer. Publishers simply have no response to the 5Rs. When someone starts talking about how small the difference is between free and affordable, just turn…

> Our results suggest that, rather than evaluate all available answers to a question, users rely on simple cognitive heuristics to choose an answer to vote for or accept. These cognitive heuristics are linked to an answer’s salience, such as the order in which it is listed and how much screen space it occupies. While…

> Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached. [source](https://darcynorman.net/2013/02/15/normans-law-of-elearning-tool-convergence/)