I am a passionate cyclist, and I love the streets of London. Most of my travels are daily 25-minute rides to work. Over time my route became boring. I decided to make it a little bit more interesting by taking the parallel streets on my way there. I bought a map of central London and started to colour in the streets to mark the routes that I have taken. And then I got obsessed with it.
Voilà, aujourd’hui, 4 mars 2020, c’est mon dernier jour chez Qwant. Cela fait presque deux ans passés à construire et promouvoir un moteur de recherche Européen et respectueux de la vie privée, ce qui le différencie des géants américains.
Ce n’est pas facile de quitter l’entreprise et les équipes, après plusieurs centaines d’interventions médiatiques, institutionnelles et publiques, au service d’un projet audacieux, d’autant que de nombreuses amitiés se sont nouées avec des collègues à partager la même mission.
Résumons les épisodes précédents : après 16 mois en tant que VP Advocacy, j’ai été nommé Directeur Général par intérim de septembre 2019 à fin décembre 2019, au moment où intervenait un changement de la structure de gouvernance et une évolution de l’actionnariat.
Parmi les choses dont je suis fier, la réussite des audits de l’État qui permettront le déploiement de Qwant dans les administrations, et une réorganisation de l’entreprise visant à mieux se focaliser sur l’essentiel.
Comme prévu, j’ai retrouvé mon poste de VP Advocacy début janvier 2020, mais le cœur n’y était plus. La direction, les actionnaires et moi avons donc décidé ces dernières semaines que je partirai. Nous y voici donc.
(Comme chantait Gilbert Bécaud, mais en plus enjoué)
C’est la vraie question… Où précisément que faire, pour quoi, chez/avec qui ?
Que faire ?
C’est en fait ce qui change le moins : je compte miser sur mes fondamentaux, faire ce que je sais faire, à savoir aider à monter un projet numérique éthique au service de tous, et à le promouvoir.
Pour quoi ?
C’est là que les choses peuvent évoluer un peu. Le numérique, le Web et ses standards, le logiciel Libre, les communs numériques, les communautés, l’impact du numérique sur la société, l’éthique du numérique, la vie privée, les données personnelles, voilà les sujets que je connais bien, qui m’intéressent, et sur lesquels j’ai pu travailler jusqu’à présent, et je compte bien continuer à creuser ce sillon.
Mais il y a un autre sujet sur lequel j’ai commencé à développer une expertise, fruit d’un intérêt personnel : la transition écologique et énergétique. J’ai lu, pensé et écrit là-dessus depuis plusieurs années en amateur, et j’ai commencé ces derniers mois un nouveau projet d’écriture (une fiction futuriste en lien avec la crise climatique) que j’ai du mettre en pause en prenant des responsabilités chez Qwant l’été dernier. J’ignore encore si je vais reprendre ce travail d’écriture, mais le sujet me passionne et je pense que mes compétences peuvent s’y exercer.
Chez/avec qui ?
C’est là la plus grande inconnue : où vais-je pouvoir travailler, et à quelle échéance ? Après 5 ans[1] au service de la startup nation, j’ignore encore si je souhaite y retourner. Restent le monde associatif (après 17 ans de Mozilla) ou la possibilité de rejoindre une entreprise existante non financée par le capital risque, voire enfin de monter ma propre structure. Il est trop tôt pour le dire.
Quoi qu’il en soit, si vous avez un projet autour du numérique et de l’environnement, pensez à moi ! Je suis joignable par mail à l’adresse que je vous laisse deviner (indice : c’est monprenom@monNomDeFamille.com)
Et mon moral ?
Il est possible que vous vous posiez la question, alors je l’anticipe : mon moral est au beau fixe. J’ai plusieurs mois devant moi pour avancer sur ce projet (délai de carence de Pole Emploi oblige). Du coup je vais en profiter pour donner des conférences, réfléchir à ce que je veux faire, prendre des vacances à vélo et à moto. Et peut-être écrire si ma recherche d’emploi m’en laisse le temps ?
En fait, si je regarde dans le rétroviseur, je constate que mes périodes entre employeurs ont été très bénéfiques :
En 2003 après mon départ d’AOL/Netscape, j’ai monté Mozilla Europe et préparé le lancement de Firefox ;
En 2018, en quittant Cozy Cloud, j’ai fait un grand voyage à moto (c’était avant ma redécouverte du vélo
Bref, sans préjuger de l’avenir, c’est enthousiasmant de voir tant d’opportunités s’ouvrir et d’avoir un peu de temps pour moi et mes projets créatifs…
Et si vous avez envie de prendre un café avec moi pour imaginer ce que pourrait être mon prochain job ou simplement pour boire un café, vous savez où me joindre !
Mise à jour du 11 mars 2020
Des centaines de messages de soutien, sur Twitter, LinkedIn, mails et textos génèrent à la fois un travail de réponse et surtout beaucoup de gratitude. Je suis désolé si mes réponses tardent à venir mais mon carnet de bal se remplit vite ! Déjà plusieurs rendez-vous très intéressants avec des gens que j’apprécie, qui me font phosphorer. C’est génial ! Si je ne vous ai pas encore répondu, soyez patients, ça va venir… promis !
If you wanted to teach someone about Scottish tartans, how would you do it? Well, you could give them a bunch of tartans to look at and have them memorize them. That would be the 'content-knowledge' instructivist way. But if you really wanted students to learn about tartans, you'd use something like this page. You could approach the topic at several levels, from several directions. You could understand how tartans are defined, and how to express these principles in code. You could even make your own tartans and design something using it. Of you could explore the history of the tartans already listed. Whatever. Open-ended, where your imagination is the limit - that's how I prefer to learn. Image: the Downes tartan, by Kevin Downs.
More than three decades ago, I started a journey exploring how technologies could contribute to making one’s competencies more visible, especially for those who didn’t have the chance to receive a formal qualification. Started in the world of formal1 education this journey led me to pay increasing attention to the informal world in which we spend most of our life (including during our schooling years!).
After discovering the competency portfolio2 I became actively engaged in the work on ePortfolios (that led to many European projects and conferences) and, more recently, Open Badges. While the “normal” trajectory should have led to my becoming an ardent defender of “competency badges”, it did not go that way. Quite the opposite in fact: from my positive experience with competency-based education and qualifications, I also learned that these are far from flawless, not primarily because of “the human factor”, but from the implicit message they convey: only formal recognition has value, that which is not formally recognised has little or no value.
In focusing our
attention initially on competency badges we were shifting to another level the problem
Open Badges were designed to solve, i.e. making informal learning visible.
Initially, 99.99% of the time Open Badges were being used to formally recognise
informal learning and competency
badges sold like hot cakes. What Open Badges also had to offer, and was
neglected at the time, is their potential to make informal recognition visible: if probably over 90% of our learning
is informal, then, for sure, 99.99% of all recognitions are also informal—cue:
the recognition by an employer of a formal qualification is informal!— and not
visible.
While we are witnessing
the rise of Open Badges worldwide, the rhythm and the way they are being
adopted greatly varies from one country to the next, from one community to the
next. In this context, France undeniably occupies a very special place with the
multiplication of projects and regional initiatives pioneered by Badgeons la Normandie, the recognition of the
importance of Open Badges in public policies such as the PIC (Plan Investissement
dans les Compétences, Competencies Investment
Plan), the wealth of tools developed in cooperation with recognition
practitioners, the proposal for a national framework for the development of
Open Badges developed at the initiative of #Leplusimportant
with the participation of Reconnaître—Open
Recognition Alliance, to name the most visible. Within all this activity we
should not forget the growing adoption of ”open recognition,” the
idea of badges as tokens of mutual recognition and not mere micro-credentials, nano-diplomas or pico-certificates.
Unfortunately success often generates its share of nuisances and opportunists ready to rush on the Open Badges like poverty on the world3. We already sell competencies so it shouldn’t be that complicated to sell competency badges: just add the word “badge” and replace the paper certificate with a digital one. The trick is easy, except that in the badge version of the Three Card Monte hustle, the innovation card is never to be found where one thinks it is.
It is the purpose of this article to
explore why competency badges are
probably the wrong answer to a real problem, larger and more complex than the
one originally formulated. In particular, we suggest a more open approach exploring the potential of
recognising practices in lieu of recognising competencies.
In the space defined between informal and formal, within the framework of this text, practices are rather located in the informal (pre-formal) space while competencies in a space where the formalisation of the practices is more or less advanced4.
Competency frameworks are no longer what they used to be
Speaking at the end of
the first day of the Université d’Hiver de la
Formation Professionnelle (Winter University of
Professional Training), on January 29, 2020, the High Commissioner for
competencies and inclusion by employment, Jean-Marie Marx, declared:
“For a long time we reasoned exclusively on the certification and
diploma frameworks and curricula. Today’s rapid evolution of occupations
requires greater flexibility in the recognition of competencies, both
professional competencies and soft skills. It will undoubtedly be necessary to
further develop the digital badges which are already widely [used] in other
countries, to further develop the validation of acquired experience, which is
unfortunately still very limited and constrained in France, and also to have a
competency passport to classify and integrate all the competencies acquired.”
(Source: AEF).
While the remark
“digital badges […] are already widely [used] in other countries” is
debatable—France is probably not at the bottom of the pack— on the other hand
the observation that the instruments and processes we use to recognise competencies are obsolete is accurate.
And while Open Badges
would be excellent candidates to fill-in the gap, it is at the express
condition of not thinking of badges in
relation to [existing] competency frameworks, but of the competency frameworks
in relation to badges!
And the best way to get
there is probably not the path of “competency badges” which will
remain a dead end as long as we continue to think that a competency only exists
if it is represented through a pre-existing framework: a competency framework
is usually the formalisation
of something informal that
pre-existed its formalisation. The authoring of a
competency in a framework is an attempt
to represent something embodied in a
person and the community in which it operates.
As John Seely Brown
writes:
“Learning is a remarkably social process. In truth, it occurs not as a response to teaching, but rather as a result of a social framework that fosters learning […] Knowledge is inextricably situated in the physical and social context of its acquisition and use.” (Learning in the digital age)
For the recognition of
competencies, we could paraphrase John Seely Brown and write:
“Recognition is a remarkable social process. In truth, it does not occur when a diploma or certificate is issued, but rather as the result of a social framework that promotes recognition […] Recognition is inextricably located in the physical and social context of its delivery and use.”
Recognition is from a
certain point of view hyperlocal, and
it is this hyperlocality that gives it its global
value – not the other way around. The space of recognition is the community in
which the competency is developed and activated. The recognition of a
practitioner in a community is not reduced to those generally considered to
belong to a “community of practice”, but to the intersection of
multiple communities and practices, starting with the clients of these
practices: the community of practice of chefs does not exist independently of
the communities of their suppliers and clients. There is also a very strong
link between individual recognition and that of the community to which the
person is identified: shady notaries and politicians can bring discredit on an
entire community.
The problems with
competency badges
The main problem with the so-called competency badges, is that they walk on their heads: “where is the competency framework” is often the first question that comes up when a person seeks to build a competency badge. There is an expression in English that best describes this situation: the tail wagging the dog. The absence of a framework (the dog’s tail) leads to paralysis. This approach would require starting with the establishment of the framework, a process which could take several months if done seriously, that is to say based on a proper functional analysis5 of an occupational domain and not shallow task analysis as is too often done. And once the framework is published, it might already be obsolete.
This dominance of frameworks makes one lose sight of the fact that a skill is embodied in a person and a community of practice, the framework being only an abstract representation of this practice, an approximation at best. Axel Honneth’s aphorism “recognition precedes knowledge6” literally applies to this situation: if the framework is a representation of knowledge, the recognition of practice necessarily precedes its formalisation which is itself a process of recognition. It is because a practice has been recognised that it can be known and translated into the abstraction of a competency framework.
Scout badges are first and foremost meaningful within the Scout community. What defines a Scout is a practice, scouting, which is based on values. It is not the badges that define the Scout, but the exact opposite. Taking Scout badges out of context, like creating an accessible “fire maker” competency badge that would be “recognised” by Scouts, would be a complete heresy. Besides, Scouts are much smarter than that. If we refer to the site of the British Scouts, most of the badges offered are linked to practices –they use the term activity which is probably more accessible to their audience: Artist Activity Badge, Global Issues Activity Badge, etc. The practice of scouting is connected to other practices in which scouts meet other practitioners.
“How is it that it is not the actual job and its conditions of practice that dictate its operation? Who would dare to dictate to the “Compagnon du Devoir” and craftsmen how they should work, learn or progress in their trade? Do you have a competency framework for [building a] cathedral, please?” (Denis Crisol, Neither God, nor master, nor certification! Always the freedom to learn).
Disconnecting
recognition from practice and from
one’s community runs the risk of
reifying the individual into a series of attributes defining the person who
would have the injunction to comply with a norm. And if the norm does not
exist, then neither does the person.
Another problem with
badges when they are used to “recognise
competencies” is that they are often an additional “thing” that
does not subtract or transform anything from the existing. It’s a bit like the
introduction of the ePortfolio in formal education:
we add an ePortfolio layer
but we don’t change anything to the existing ones so the ePortfolio
becomes one more formal constraint that one has to go through to get good
grades…
Now what would be really useful is to imagine what could be transformed or even replaced. Competency frameworks are probably a good candidate, as well as competency-based education and assessment which, according to a recent study7 can have devastating effects on the poorest populations.
Of course, the idea is not to reject anything that would look like a competency badge, but to place them in relation to practices and communities of practice. A community of practice shares values, knowledge, skills and attitudes that it can wish to make visible8. A person may want to share her knowledge and do so by sharing an Open Badge. This is something that le Dôme in Normandy and Casus Belli understood perfectly well when they led the design of a “badge grammar” whose starting point is “Recognition before the competency framework9“, a statement aligned with Axel Honneth’s iconic statement: “Recognition precedes knowledge.”
Badge templates designed at le Dôme
Rethinking competency
frameworks
Competency frameworks
are a key instrument in human resources management. With the rapid
transformation of the world of work, the obsolescence of occupations and the
emergence of new roles and competencies (data
scientists were not much sought after ten years ago) to remain operational,
competency frameworks should be regularly updated. It rarely happens, and when
it does, it is sometimes too late, with the risk of delivering obsolete
qualifications with low value in the labor market.
“Indeed, between the time [the order for a competency framework is placed] and the time when the first graduates leave the training institutions, there is a minimum of four years10…”
One of the main reasons
for the difficulty in keeping competency frameworks up to date are the technologies
and processes involved in their production. If we consider competency
frameworks as competencymaps describing a professionalterritory,
the process and technologies used to establish these maps have not changed much
since the 1960s. It is a top-down process which sometimes takes months, even
years, involving a small number of experts and leads to an abstract
representation incapable of accounting for variations between companies
operating in the same sector. As Alfred Korzybski said: “the map is not the territory”.
“acquiring various competencies does not necessarily make a manager competent.” Contrary to the assumption of most leadership competency frameworks, there is neither a linear, nor even causal, relationship between competencies and job performance.11”
What types of technologies and processes could contribute to the creation and updating of competency frameworks in real time and would make them relevant?
If we turn our attention to another mapping exercise such as road maps, the maps provided by Google Maps and Open Street Maps have very little in common with the paper maps of the past. The difference is not that one is digital, the other is paper, but they are two entirely different objects13. “I honestly think we’re seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance,” said University of London cartographer historian Jerry Brotton to the Sydney Morning Herald. “That was huge. But this is bigger.”
What kind of comparison
could we make in relation to competency frameworks development? Not only does
the construction process remain archaic, but the digital technology is
generally limited to digitising content to be
delivered in a pdf file… In the best of cases, the filing cabinets have been
replaced by a database.
What has changed in the
world of cartography which could be a source of inspiration? Digital maps are
established by collecting (digital) data provided directly by users, either
consciously (adding information) or unconsciously, using navigation systems and
other sensors. It is about harnessing collective intelligence and crowd
performance through feedback loops: the map is created / updated using the map
itself. The old process of building maps from aerial photographs and drawing
boards has been superseded by capturing information in real time. The digital
map is both the result of a process (its use) and the tool enabling the process
itself.
How could we translate the lessons learned from terrestrial mapping to competency mapping? How could we harness collective intelligence to create and update this map in real time and make both “competencies” and badges more discoverable and scalable. And artificial intelligence could be included in the process, something currently under exploration at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (CRI Paris) and was presented at ePIC 201914.
Being able to visualise, in real time, the evolution of competencies,
elicit those that are emerging and in demand (or in decline) could be a
powerful instrument for transparency in the labor market, something beneficial
to all, students, employees, professionals, human resources managers, policy
makers, etc.
This is precisely what
we could start considering with badges by making each one of them the curators
of the competency frameworks. But to create the conditions for mobilising this collective intelligence, developing the
tools which would allow this collection of data in a non-intrusive way, it
would undoubtedly be necessary to begin by adjusting our vocabulary, by putting
aside for a moment the concept of “competence” to replace it with
“practice” and therefore start building practices maps—from which
competencies could be inferred, if necessary…
And through this work
of mappingpractices, current or expected (for example agro-ecology,
sustainable development, chef) the curators,
beyond a simple inventory, would have a tool to no longer be simply the toy of
transformations decided by others, but the co-designers, the co-builders of a
world to be invented. A future chosen and not simply endured.
To the words of the
geographer Yves Lacoste who, in 1976, wrote ““La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre“
(geography is first of all used to make war) we could propose “the mapping
of practices, it is first of all used to build together tomorrow’s world”.
An enabling and empowering technology.
Recognising practices and
practitioners
While recognising competencies
is a complex process that requires expertise and can take months and even
years, whether in the construction of competency frameworks or prior learning
and achievements recognition (PLAR), on the other hand, recognising
practices and practitioners is an activity that everyone practices. First of all by recognising one’s own practices and those of the people and
communities with which we are in contact. No need for a competency framework to
recognise a good baker, as a client or as another
baker. There is also no need for a competency framework to recognise
the evolution of the practices of Master Chef candidates.
By recognising practices and practitioners, we recognise implicitly the competencies implemented. The written formalisation of these competencies might be useful, but that comes afterwards, for example by contributing to a competency Wiki, an idea already already discussed several years ago in the 10 ePortfolio Challenges (2010).
Recognition precedes
their formalisation in a framework. And this is
particularly important to understand in order to be able to account for
emerging practices: “30% of current professions did not exist 20 years
ago” declared Marianne Thyssen, the European Employment Commissioner
during the recognition festival organised in Brussels
in 2018. And according to a study by the Institute for the Future “85% of
the jobs that today’s learners will do in 2030 have not yet been invented”
(source: the Next Era of Human | Machine PARTNERSHIPS,
report sponsored by Dell).
It does not matter whether the predictions of the Institute for the Future are exact or not, what is certain is that the world is changing fast and the question is not so much how much will it change, but to what extent we educate and equip citizens so that they have the capacity to be the agents of this change, its co-designers, engineers and architects. Otherwise we will remain under the injunction to adapt to a world we have not chosen: who, in all conscience would choose to live in a society where zero hour contracts and Uber are the new norm for employment practices? The skills to be developed are not so much those needed to adapt to such a world, but those required to make “zero hour” and Uber contracts illegal.
No need to wait until
the competency framework exists to set up a recognition system. As simple
vehicles (images) used to transport information relating to a recognition in a
standard way (the Open Badge specification), badges can carry all kinds of recognition,
whether formal or informal and even a mixture of the two.
Take ACOUSTICE, a recognition environment that emerged in agricultural initial education. It is a community, the teachers in charge of ICT, developing its own badges to recognise each other and be recognised as a community by the institution. The badges describe practices, which are owned by practitioners. Recognition by the institution can take the shape of endorsement of the badges designed by the community, while recognition by peers can take the form of endorsement of the badges received by the practitioners’. And if new tools and practices emerge tomorrow, new badges will be created by the community, in real time.
There are many
advantages to thinking of recognition in terms of practice rather than competency.
First of all, avoiding futile and endless wars over the definition of
competency/competence or who has the right to recognise,
which is no small advantage. Then, the mental
frame through which recognition is understood. With Open Badges thought of
as micro-credits (micro-credentials)
we commit three mistakes: the first is to ignore that a badge is merely a
vehicle used to carry a piece of information which can be just as much a
“macro-credit” like academic diplomas and professional certificates.
The second error is to imagine Open Badges as a “shrunk” version of credits,
like children in Honey, I shrunk the kids,
the Joe Johnston’s comedy. The third, which is the combination of the previous
ones, is recognition understood only
as something happening at the end of a process: we learn, and if we pass the
final test, (based on a framework which might be already obsolete) then we
qualify to receive a token of recognition.
However, the
recognition process which first made it possible to establish the framework…
precedes the framework itself: the recognition of the practice of data scientist began long before these
competencies were described in any competency framework or were the subject of
a professional diploma or certificate. Similarly, the informal social
recognition of specialisations in medicine evolved
before the formal legal system and is not uniform from one country to another. So midwives existed, and were recognised
as such, long before the midwifery diploma came into being — a “recognition”
that resulted in midwifes being burnt alive after being formally “recognised” as “witches” by Pope Innocent VIII!
What ACOUSTICE teaches
us is that if Open Badges can obviously be used to carry diplomas and
certificates (duh!!), they can do much more than that, namely making visible
informal recognitions, especially those produced within communities of
practice.
Is there still the same
need for competency frameworks when we have the mapping of competent
individuals?
Uncoupling recognition
and certification
While a person’s
experience is often multidimensional or multidisciplinary, unfortunately, most
of the current processes linked to the recognition of prior learning and
experience (Recognition of Prior Learning
and Achievements ( RPLA, VAE in France) are
aligned with existing diplomas which, for most of them, are mono-disciplinary.
The consequences of this normative alignment are:
It
is not possible to recognise 100% of a person’s
experience because only part of it can be recognised
by a specific diploma.
It
is not possible to recognise 100% of people because
the process is often expensive and rigid.
It
is not possible to recognise emerging knowledge and
competencies, because there is no curriculum, diploma or formal framework to
which they can be aligned.
To overcome the current
limitations of most RPLA systems, we propose the concept of RE/VE (Recognition
of Experience / Validation of Experience), whose object is to play on the
dialectic (dialogic) recognition-validation, weakly coupled, or even decoupled,
from any competency or diploma framework, and thus be able to:
take into account the multi /
interdisciplinary dimension of one’s current experience, something that current
disciplinary diplomas are unable to address
validate a level in relation to the European qualifications
framework (which has eight).
The idea would be to establish the RE/VE process in the manner of the blank diplomas suggested by François Taddei15, that is multi-disciplinary diplomas built by the students from various learnings and experiences then validated by the academic institution.
The course of RE/VE
would proceed as follows:
Recognition: a person collects informal (but also formal) recognitions in her social and professional environment, her communities of practice which are at the center of the processes of informal recognition. The person is 100% in control of her recognition pathway.
Validation: these informal recognitions are then recognised formally by an organisation empowered to validate a RE/VE pathway at level 1 to 8 of the European Qualification Framework16.
We thus clearly
separate the notion of recognition
(with a focus on informal recognition)
from validation (formal recognition)
that we want to be as open as possible by leaving aside competency frameworks
(where they exist) so as to provide a validation at a level in relation to the European Qualification Framework. Of
course, if occupational frameworks exist and are up to date, they could prove
to be a great help, especially if this validation process was used to
contribute to their own updating.
RE/VE would be one of
the possible responses to creating the conditions for 100% of people to be able
to have their competencies recognised by freeing themselves from the often limiting and
sometimes obsolete standards… And if some wish to go further with a
“full” academic diploma or certificate, RE/VE would certainly have
contributed to facilitating the process.
Open
Badges an opportunity to rethink the architecture of our recognition systems
What makes Open Badges strong is their simplicity. It is this simplicity that makes them accessible to everyone and which gives some the impression that “making badges” does not look very complicated. That’s right, issuing a badge is very simple (even if it could be simplified even more). The problem is that once a badge has been issued, if nothing has changed in the environment in which it was issued, it may remain ineffective, which is well reflected in the expression « spray and pray » used to describe the impact of lecturing: the lecturer sprinkles the audience with good words and prays that they will have an effect. Carpet badging, an expression coined by Dan Hickey17, expresses even better the situation, adding the nuance that Open Badges are not that harmless…
For Open Badges to have
a positive effect requires several conditions that, somehow were implicit in
the speech of Jean-Marie Marx quoted at the beginning of this post: we need to
rethink the relationship between recognition and competency frameworks and not
slavishly try to align badges to competency frameworks. It is a problem that
goes far beyond the question of their inevitable obsolescence or non-existence,
it is about the place of people and communities in their construction and
implementation.
The current formal
recognition system has a financial cost, but also a social one
(non-recognition). It is becoming critical to rethink the architecture of our
recognition systems to make them more open (e.g. François Taddei’s
white diplomas) and ensure that they are able to take into account and generate
value from the informal recognition generated within communities of practice.
One possible avenue: redesigning the architecture of our recognition systems based on the recognition of communities of practice and their practitioners. Starting with the recognition of practices instead of the recognition of competencies which is implicitly contained in that of practices. If practices imply the mobilisation of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values, the constituents of what is called “competency”, practices also generate new knowledge, new skills and new behaviours which, by definition, cannot be found in pre-existing, static competency frameworks, As for the question of “values”, too often ignored by competency frameworks, this is undoubtedly the most important and perhaps the most stable element structuring a community of practice.
Finally, thinking about
recognition from communities of practice is the opportunity to movefrom
ego-recognition to eco-recognition,
from recognition that affects the individual and the individual alone, to the
recognition within a community where individual recognition certainly affects
the person, but simultaneously the recognition of the community as a whole,
thinking of recognition as flows in motion within and across levels (micro,
meso, macro) and not mere static states.
Moving from ego-recognition to eco-recognition is also the way to give back nobility to the
informal: informal learning and recognition are not inferior to formal learning
and recognition, they are at their origin and a source
for their potential transformation.
It is time to put the informal and interdisciplinary back at the centre of our learning and recognition ecosystems for so long sterilised by the disciplinary and normative approaches to learning and recognition 18.
I would like to thank for their comments and suggestions Christophe Delamare, Bert Jehoul, Pierre Landry, Esther Linley, François Millet, Patrice Petitqueux, Philippe Petitqueux, Gerard Pruim and Don Presant.
A team cheats. Both leading up to and then actually during the biggest contest of the year, they cheat.
They deny that they’re cheating, of course, and mock their accusers. Dozens of people who work for the team know about the cheating, but they’ve all got their own little vested interest in making sure that it goes on, their own little slice of the pie. And so it does go on. And on and on. Right up through the very end.
They “win.”
And — slowly, painfully, through leaks and official channels — it comes to light that they did, in fact, cheat. They broke the rules. Blatantly! Obviously! It wasn’t even clever. Mostly, they got away with it because they did it out in the open and nobody thought they could possibly be that dumb.
And now they’re defiant. They claim that their cheating was inconsequential, that it wasn’t even really cheating, and the fact that people keep bringing it up means that they’re the victims, that they’re the injured party. Poor them; everybody has always had it out for them; the people hurling accusations are the real cheaters.
Investigations are ordered and conducted. But the system that was designed to protect the integrity of the institution rolls over, just wishing it would all go away. Hundreds of thousands — millions! — of fans, decked out in team colors and chanting team slogans, turn surly, defensive, nasty. They’ll ignore any fact that doesn’t fit their narrative, that might cause them to question the result. Who cares how they won? All that matters is that they won, that they have the prize. Suck it, losers!
The investigation concludes, and… nothing happens. Maybe one or two people somewhere in the organization are punished, maybe not. The great mass of cheats and sneaks and liars slip away, unscathed and unpunished. The fans and even the members of team start mocking again, this time emboldened by a sense of invincibility. The lies become worse — both more egregious and stupider. You are told not to trust your own eyes, your own common sense.
And everybody who could have done anything about it — the team, the rule makers and officiants who ostensibly protect the system, the vast number of people who knew exactly what was going on, the slavering fans — gives not one good goddamn. Because it’s all about winning, and flying the flag. Lost amid the cheers, plowed under by the relentless march to victory, is the right thing, the important thing, the good of the game. What does it mean for the past and for the future and for the system that they all claim to love, hands over hearts?
Today Twitter announced a test, limited to Brazil, of a major new feature for the social service: Fleets, which take their inspiration from the Stories feature found on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.
Fleets, short for “fleeting tweets,” live at the top of your timeline just like stories do in other social media apps, and they disappear after 24 hours. Multiple fleets can be written in a day and include text, images, GIFs, and videos, but the way they are interacted with is different than a standard tweet. There’s no way to retweet or reply to someone’s tweet in a public sense; instead, followers can react to a fleet via DM, or a reaction which is sent via DM. Presumably this means that if someone’s DMs are closed, only people they follow can respond to their fleets.
This new test was announced by Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour in a series of tweets where you can see both images and video of fleets being demoed.
Fleets are a way to share fleeting thoughts. Unlike Tweets, Fleets disappear after 24 hours and don’t get Retweets, Likes, or public replies– people can only react to your Fleets with DMs. Instead of showing up in people’s timelines, Fleets are viewed by tapping on your avatar. pic.twitter.com/sWwsExRLcJ
Normally tests of new features, especially ones as limited as this, wouldn’t necessarily merit reporting on because there’s a good chance they may not come to fruition in full release. Fleets, however, are a major new functionality for Twitter and they have clearly had a lot of work poured into them. They’re also a reflection of where other social media services have already moved, making it highly likely that they’ll eventually get a wide release on Twitter, in some form or another.
Although I’m not a big user of ephemeral sharing on other services, and that’s unlikely to change here, I’m nevertheless happy to see Twitter continue pouring work into evolving its product. If fleets do get a worldwide release in the future, I’ll be interested to see if they cause the quality of timelines to improve as tweets are reserved for more important statements while fleets house everything else.
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Google is bringing another Cloud platform region to Toronto, Ontario, to compliment the only existing location in Montreal, Quebec.
Google Cloud Regions are basically data centres where web developers can host their websites plus do a few other behind the scenes tasks that relate to hosting a website on the internet.
This Toronto Cloud Region should help more Canadians access Canadian-specific websites with less latency since the data won’t have to travel as far to reach them.
Google Canada says that businesses ranging from “financial services, media and entertainment, retail” and more can use the new region “to help them build applications better and faster,” as well as store data.
Overall, this isn’t something regular people will knowingly interact with, but it does gove Canadian web developers a local option for hosting their sites. If you are a developer, you can head over to Google Canada’s blog to learn more about the new Cloud Region
Mozilla’s mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. Mozilla is a global community of technologists, thinkers, and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. As an organization, we believe this act of human collaboration across an… Read the rest
I've had the same general strategy since about 2014. That's when I split from my last (lovely) job, and struck out on my own. Since I made the Flickr Commons back in 2007-8, I'd realised I've found my people... people who work in and around heritage and culture. Those indefatigably interested collectors, classifiers, curators and conservators of ourselves and our world. That feeling was enough
David Orban highlights the inverse proportional relationship between efficiency and resilience. When you have a fully efficient process it won’t be able to cope with even small changes in surrounding conditions. Whereas a system with some redundancy built in to cope with changes in conditions is less efficient (because that redundancy means increased costs for the same output).
Resilience I think can be decoupled from efficiency sometimes, but then it is usually coupled with effectivity. When the input/output ratio isn’t impacted, but the quality and utility of the output temporarily diminishes. Resilience is a component in how I think about networked agency.
Processes and systems that have been slimmed down to high efficiency as a result are often very brittle. In current affairs Brexit and the Corona virus are colliding with that brittleness, the first is a slow speed collission hard to look away from and the second one a more high speed collision. Whether it is disruption of (JIT) production or transport processes, or whether it is overwhelming healthcare systems, or both. The biggest impact on you of e.g. Covid-19 is likely not that you individually might fall ill and die, but the brittleness of systems that are impacted by it (production, delivery, mobility, healthcare availability also for other things than Covid-19) and how it impacts your personal life (running out of your meds, opportunity loss, slowing down of business, goods not arriving). Cascading system failures because of all the interdependencies.
I for instance have 3 products to be delivered from China, and the factories involved have been closed for well over a month now. One factory is now allowed to re-open and will take 6 weeks to get back on track. For me that is a trivial issue, but if you run a company that sells these products, or produce things that depend on a specific part that comes from a now closed factory, it isn’t trivial but a real and present issue.
More directly a healthcare system overwhelmed or even just starting to get impacted by Covid can lead to higher fatality rates amongst Covid patients (visible in Wuhan at the moment) as well as others. Currently there are 20 Covid patients in the Netherlands, and already three different ICU’s are closed for new patients. Not because they can’t handle the numbers, but because they had a Covid patient without realising and are now closed until they are certain there is no more risk of infection. This directly impacts e.g. where other types critical patients can go and be treated.
In that light the following articles are worth reading, about numbers, the likelihood of a pandemic, and brittleness of systems.
And then think about what you can do to increase your personal resilience. E.g. by ensuring you have a month worth of your regular meds, or by having larger stocks than usual. At worst you’ve done your shopping a few weeks early, at best you are all set should you be required to isolate yourself at home for two weeks or more. Tthere’s not much of a down-side to taking such measures, while it prevents a large potential down-side.
This article profiles a recent Microsoft-sponsored IDC report (47 page PDF) on the role of AI in education. IDC surveyed 509 U.S. institutions; 78% public, 22% private, talking to 215 management and 294 staff. It might be better to take the time to read the actual report, as the summary is full of stuff like "Microsoft believes this..." and "Microsoft is doing that..." which have nothing to do with the research. The report itself is based on an AI-readiness model to match the (reported) "goal of increasing
competitiveness, funding and innovation." Because those are what matters in universities these days.
P.S. New policy announcement - from now on I will assume that reports with no authors, or bogus author names like 'Microsoft Education Team', were written by a robot. Want readers to take you seriously? Have a real person write, and take credit for, your content.
It looks like Google is the latest company to cancel a major upcoming event.
According to an email posted on Twitter by user ‘@ankuma777,’ Google has cancelled its upcoming I/O Developer conference due to “concerns around the coronavirus.” Instead, Google will host an online event. You can read the statement in full below:
Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre.
All guests who have purchased tickets to I/O 2020 will receive a full refund by March 13, 2020. If you don’t see the credit on your statement by then, please reach out to io@google.com. Guests who have registered for I/O 2020 will not need to enter next year’s drawing and will be automatically granted the option of purchasing an I/O 2021 ticket.
Over the coming weeks, we will explore other ways to evolve Google I/O to best connect with our developer community. We will keep the Google 1/O website updated with additional information.
The CRTC has decided that it won’t force carriers to offer some or all of their customers paper bills at no charge, at least not yet.
It is going to gather more information about carriers’ billing practices to investigate the situation further, as reported by The Canadian Press.
The commission decided that although saving money by not offering paper bills is a competitive choice, but that it doesn’t think there is a need for it to step in.
This ruling follows complaints from the Public Internet Advocacy Centre and the National Pensioners Federation. The advocacy groups wanted the CRTC to force Koodo to turn back its decision to shift to electronic billing for all customers except for a select few.
Koodo has argued that it is not required to provide paper bills to its customers. The Telus-owned carrier made the shift to paperless bills in May 2018. Telus followed suit shortly after in the same year.
Last year in October, Bell announced that it was going to shift to paperless billing in 2020. Similarly, Rogers said that its bills would exclusively be available to customers online starting March 26th.
Chinese technology company Oppo has started teasing its upcoming Oppo Watch and it reminds me of something, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
The watch has a rectangular watch face and even some of the software we’ve seen so far looks like icons and colours that Apple uses on the Apple Watch.
Where the watch differs is that instead of featuring a digital crown to navigate the OS it has two buttons like some other Wear OS devices. These ads also show off the watch in an almost midnight/navy blue colour that looks pretty attractive.
Overall, it’s just another Android-based smartwatch that isn’t going to come to Canada.
Apple has announced the winners of its Shot on iPhone Night mode challenge.
The challenge saw photographers from around the world snapping all sorts of stunning nighttime pictures with their iPhone 11, 11 Pro or 11 Pro Max, with the following six people ultimately coming out on top:
Konstantin Chalabov (Moscow, Russia) — iPhone 11 Pro
Andrei Manuilov (Moscow, Russia) — iPhone 11 Pro Max
Mitsun Soni (Mumbai, Maharashtra, India) — iPhone 11 Pro
Rubén P. Bescós (Pamplona, Navarra, Spain) — iPhone 11 Pro Max
Rustam Shagimordanov (Moscow, Russia) — iPhone 11
Yu “Eric” Zhang (Beijing, China) — iPhone 11 Pro Max
To name the winners, Apple gathered a judging panel that consisted of its own employees — such as senior vice president Phil Schiller and marketing vice president Kaiann Drance — and professional photographers like Tyler Mitchell and Sarah Lee.
The winners will all have their photos featured on the web, Instagram and in Apple promotional material.
Microsoft announced that it is supporting a digital campaign to teach young people in Canada about algorithms.
The Algorithm Literacy Project aims to educate the public on what algorithms are, how they work, and how they influence the way we experience the world online and offline. It hopes to equip children to think critically about the impact of their behaviour.
As part of the campaign, users can download two guides. The first guide offers activity ideas for educators and parents to help children understand algorithm literacy. The second guide is related to a video on algorithms that can be found on the campaign’s website.
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to solve several of society’s most difficult challenges, but these opportunities will only be possible if we equip our future leaders with the digital skills to unlock them responsibly,” said Kevin Peesker, the president of Microsoft Canada in a press release.
The campaign is being launched by Kids Code Jeunesse and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, with support from Microsoft Canada, RBC Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.
I am tempted to add to @rolandmcs "simplism" as a driving force of Brexit, "scientism", a belief that there are magic scientific answers to all the problems of Brexit. See Andrew Neil´s reference to 3D printing as the solution to shredded supply chains. twitter.com/POLITICOEurope…
UK officials now say they don’t want any institutional connection to EU foreign or defense policy politi.co/2VBC22B
Last night I put my iPhone 11 Pro Max on my nightstand charging pad only take wake up this morning to find that the device didn’t charge.
It turned out that I accidentally placed the smartphone to one side of the stand, instead of directly in the centre of the pad. I’ve encountered this problem several times with various Android devices as well over the past few years.
If you’re a Pixel 4 owner, this could soon be an issue of the past. First reported by Android Police, with Android 11, the Pixel 4 and 4 XL now display a message when the smartphone is misaligned on a Qi charging pad.
‘Jotafett,’ the Reddit user that first uncovered the feature, found that it only works with Google’s Pixel 4. Android Police wasn’t able to replicate the notification with a Pixel 3, backing up this claim.
As it stands right now, it’s unclear how the smartphone detects that it’s misaligned. The phone is likely able to detect that it’s receiving some amount of power, but that it’s low and not enough to charge the device.
The notification shows up at the bottom of the phone’s ambient display where the battery percentage is typically located. It’s unclear if this feature will be available to third-party Android device manufacturers or if it’s exclusive to the Pixel 4.
Whereas Apple events are a way to send messages into applications, AppleScript is a particular language designed to send Apple events. In keeping with the objective of ease-of-use for beginners, the AppleScript language is designed on the natural language metaphor, just as the graphical user interface is designed on the desktop metaphor.
If you wanted to write an AppleScript to open my app Acorn, it would look like this:
tell application "Acorn" to open
If you then wanted to tell Acorn to quit, it would look like this:
tell application "Acorn" to quit
If you invoke Siri and say "tell application Acorn to open" then Acorn will open up which is pretty awesome. If you use the latter command, Siri will respond:
To close an app, press Command - Q on your keyboard. If that doesn't work, open the menu and chose Force Quit.
The very first AppleScript command I baked into Acorn goes as follows:
tell application "Acorn" to taunt
The command is still there today, and if I ask the same to Siri literally nothing happens. Siri just goes away and pretends I didn't ask it anything. But should it?
It seems to me that as an interface to Siri commands, something along the lines of AppleScript would be a pretty good fit. What if developers could mark commands in our AppleScript interfaces to be exposed to Siri?
I realize Apple is doing its best to make sure AppleScript just fades away, but this seems to be a pretty big missed opportunity on their part.
Editor’s Note: Since I’ve turned Facebook comments off, I’m experimenting with turning them on directly in the blog. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about this subject at the bottom of the page. No log-in required.
I’ve given this advice several times recently, so I figured I’d turn it into a quick blog post. If you know someone who is struggling with decisions on how to store or backup media files, please share.
For most people, reliable storage and backup has gotten really cheap and easy to implement, even for people with lots of photos and video.
The trick is to make use of the newer high-capacity drives and affordable cloud backup services. So here’s what I end up telling most people who ask. Note that this advice is designed for people with a data set smaller than about 10TB who don’t need multi-user access. And, this advice assumes that you have a media collection you want to store and protect, and that it exceeds the capacity of your computer’s internal drive.
General Advice This holds true for most photographers and (since everyone is now a photographer) also for “regular people”.
Use modern big drives – 10-14 TB drives are newer, better designed, more reliable and much faster than older ones. They are also very affordable. If you are using multiple smaller drives, it’s time to replace with a single larger one. Even if your archive is only a few terabytes, go for one of the large drives.
Currently, I recommend G Technology drives. 10TBis the current sweet spot for prices ($300). You can bump up to 14TB for a total of $450. (I’ve linked to the USB3.1 version of the drive. You can also get these drives in Thunderbolt, but it won’t be any faster with conventional spinning disks.)
Use as few drives as possible – If you can easily get all your stuff on one single drive, do it. It’s much easier to backup and restore than an array of older drives. You don’t need to remember what is where.
Get a drive to make a “twin” onsite backup – Again, simpler is better, and big drives are your friend. This is what protects you against drive failure. Much easier to make, keep current, and restore from a local backup than a remote one.
You also need an offsite backup to protect against fire or theft – There are two main method to do this. You can get a second backup drive and keep it offsite. You can also use a cloud service to make a 3-2-1 compliant backup. I do both, but let’s handle them independently.
Backblaze cloud backup – Backblaze is a great cloud service that I depend on for my own work. The personal version of the service offers unlimited file backup for $60 a year. Uploaded files are encrypted for privacy. You can add external drives to the backup, and it happens automatically in the background. If you are a Photoshelter Pro customer, you can also use their service as your cloud backup. Unlimited storage is included with the Pro accounts.
Additional drive for offsite backup – An offsite backup drive provides excellent protection, and quick restoration in the event of a problem. Store it offsite – in general, someplace easy is better than someplace really secure. If you are worried about the data falling into the wrong hands, you can format the drive with encryption. Keeping an offsite drive updated can be difficult, and there are almost always gaps between what’s currently on your primary storage and what’s on the backup. This is why I currently favor Backblaze, especially for working files.
You really need them for a particular reason. Most people don’t really need single storage volumes larger than 14TB.
You understand how to maintain them or have a good tech service to use. These are little computers running Linux, and in general require maintenance, monitoring and updates. I know many people who have experienced total failure of spanned disk devices.
If you outgrow the single-drive units, get an additional set – This is getting outside the scope of this post, but worth mentioning. If you can’t fit everything on one drive (say you have 20TB data), then I suggest getting an additional set of drives, rather than going to a RAID device. In most cases, it’s easier, cheaper and safer.
This advice is drawn from content published in The DAM Book 3.0. If you’ve got a larger or more complicated storage and backup job in front of you, you’ll find a lot more discussion over there.
It's hard to imagine the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy not having an article on Rudolf Carnap until now, but this is a new article, so there it is. Carnap is my favourite of the logical positivists. The Logical Syntax of Language totally appealed to me, as a person who likes all of their sentences to make sense. His treatment of probability, a nice contrast to the usual frequency interpretation (which is not wrong, just different) also appealed to me. To me, Carnap lays the groundwork for important developments in later years, such as information theory. The Semantic Web is in many ways Carnap's vision realized in code. And of course it is Carnap to whom Quine is (mostly) responding when he criticizes the dogmas of empiricism.
If you’ve been waiting for a decent sale on Apple’s 2nd-gen AirPods, this could be the offer for you.
Apple’s most recent standard AirPods are on sale for $189 CAD at Costco. Apple’s AirPods with the Wireless Charging Case are typically priced at $269 at most retailers.
The 2nd-gen AirPods are listed at $194.99 on Costco’s website.
Apple’s refreshed AirPods feature a Qi-compatible wireless charging case, “Hey Siri” support and Apple’s H1 chip.
Martin Weller has released his book 25 Years of Ed Tech. It's a nice read; you are encouraged to check it out. But I have to confess, on having looked at the table of contents,I realized he was also describing my career. Of course, that was not Weller's objective. But this is my lived history. So I thought I'd quickly summarize those 25 years from my perspective. Because it's hard to reconcile his criticism that the ed tech sector suffers from historical amnesia with the treatment of ed tech in this book. There's just so much of the rich history of ed tech that doesn't show up in these pages. And he says the field hasn't really been successful in changing things - yet the practitioners on the ground have been engaged in the same enterprise from year one, working the same themes and the same ideas, developing the ideas and infrastructure that really are rewriting how we learn.
This article, which has just been revised, is an important article for anyone working in the field of education and development. Too often people write about learning without thinking through whether their understanding of the mind. We see this most often when people start using computer terms - the short term 'memory buffer', visual 'encoding', etc. - to talk about the mind. This article sets out a lot of that thinking, but importantly, the revision assigns a lot of these old views (for example, the representational theory of mind) to the 'classical' category. That is, no longer current. Now there's still a lot of the legacy of these old theories lingering - for example, externalism about mental content, and information processing - but the more current 'new' approaches are looking at things like embodiment. If you wanbt to read more, there's a semantic scholar list of resources.
How would the EU sell anything? It’s not a country. I am not even sure it can issue export licenses edit weapons. That’s still a nation state prerogative.
A Facebook post falsely claims that the EU sold arms to Argentina during the Falklands War.
The EC, as it was then, put an arms embargo and an import ban on Argentina, which Margaret Thatcher called 'an effective demonstration of Community solidarity'.
Incidentally, next time some paid Tufton Street thinktank hack is on a panel, telling us how letting US healthcare and pharma companies into the NHS is really no big deal, someone point out that Americans HAVE TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN FECKIN QUARANTINE.
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