Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives

The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and validations are needed before their adoption

Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure

Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on online technologies such as search engines and social media may limit exposure to diverse points of view and make us vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation. In this paper, we mine a massive dataset of Web traffic to quantify two kinds of bias: (i) homogeneity bias, which is the tendency to consume content from a narrow set of information sources, and (ii) popularity bias, which is the selective exposure to content from top sites. Our analysis reveals different bias levels across several widely used Web platforms. Search exposes users to a diverse set of sources, while social media traffic tends to exhibit high popularity and homogeneity bias. When we focus our analysis on traffic to news sites, we find higher levels of popularity bias, with smaller differences across applications. Overall, our results quantify the extent to which our choices of online systems confine us inside "social bubbles."Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, to appear in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

Data Analytics in Higher Education: Key Concerns and Open Questions

“Big Data” and data analytics affect all of us. Data collection, analysis, and use on a large scale is an important and growing part of commerce, governance, communication, law enforcement, security, finance, medicine, and research. And the theme of this symposium, “Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data,” is expansive; we could have long and fruitful discussions about practices, laws, and concerns in any of these domains. But a big part of the audience for this symposium is students and faculty in higher education institutions (HEIs), and the subject of this paper is data analytics in our own backyards. Higher education learning analytics (LA) is something that most of us involved in this symposium are familiar with. Students have encountered LA in their courses, in their interactions with their law school or with their undergraduate institutions, instructors use systems that collect information about their students, and administrators use information to help understand and steer their institutions. More importantly, though, data analytics in higher education is something that those of us participating in the symposium can actually control. Students can put pressure on administrators, and faculty often participate in university governance. Moreover, the systems in place in HEIs are more easily comprehensible to many of us because we work with them on a day-to-day basis. Students use systems as part of their course work, in their residences, in their libraries, and elsewhere. Faculty deploy course management systems (CMS) such as Desire2Learn, Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas to structure their courses, and administrators use information gleaned from analytics systems to make operational decisions. If we (the participants in the symposium) indeed care about Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data, the topic of this paper is a pretty good place to hone our thinking and put into practice our ideas

Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)