Month: February 2008

More On Google Sites

My introduction to Google Sites confused me for a bit. I received an email from Google providing a link. The content of the email indicated I had inquired about JotSpot some time ago and that I may now be interested in what JotSpot had become. I tried to sign in with my Gmail name and password (a common way to gain access to Google apps) without reading the instructions and I was asked to enter my university or business email address. This did not make a lot of sense at first because my inquiry about JotSpot had nothing to do with my university affiliation.

I did enter the address as requested and then was asked whether I was the administrator (domain owner) or a member of the domain. If I would have been a little more adventuresome, I should have claimed to be the University of North Dakota domain administrator just to see what would happen. I did call to chat with the CIO just to find out if they were aware of the new Google Site and she had the university security person investigate. Evidently, several students were already enrolled. I never did find out who was the administrator. I called my wife and had her inform her boss (the tech administrator for Grand Forks Schools) so that someone from their tech group would claim the administrator role.

Google Sites intends to be web service for educational institutions and businesses. Evidently, there must be student web pages associated with the University of North Dakota. University departments will not be using Google Site here. The university has a “branding” thing going and wants official pages to have the same look and feel. I know because I operated the pages for the psychology department for many years and I had to redo all of our content to use the template required by the university. Actually, I am not a fan of the UND look and feel – it is pretty garish by my taste. I prefer simple and tasteful.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the university reacts to personal pages that will now be affiliated with the university domain name. For example, what will be the reaction to content migrated from MySpace or Facebook?  What expectations will be applied to faculty members? Before, you could obtain an account for acceptable purposes, but you requested the account from the university. I was able to secure my account from Google.

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Google Apps – Google Sites

The big participatory web news of the day (or perhaps year) is Google’s announcement of Google apps for organizations (translate as schools for this audience). The education edition is free. A summary of the concept and products is available for viewing (check out the 12 minute version). Google calendar, docs, gmail, page creator – the collaborative tools – make up the collection. It looks like Google is going to serve as an ISP hosting a branded site for a school (business or individual).

One interesting opportunity within this collection is Google Sites (based on the old JotSpot if I am interpreting the announcement appropriately). Google site offers template-based web development and collaborative. See this linked summary differentiating the Standard, Premier and Education editions.

This looks very impressive. More when I have had time to experiment.

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MacArthur Foundation Grantees Announced

Some time ago, I wrote about the MacArthur Foundation’s intent to investigate the participatory web. After some preparatory work, the Foundation offered a call for grant proposals and now has announced the recipients. Andy Carvin offers a nice summary of some of the awards and includes links to some of the projects.

An item that caught my attention was a course offered by Stanford’s Howard Rheingold on virtual communities ( see course syllabus). Carvin describes the course as an

initiative by online community pioneer Howard Rheingold will develop an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media.

If educational implications of the participatory web interest you, take a look at the reading list contained within the syllabus.

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Taking A Closer Look – Proscope HR


It is amazing how those of us working with educational technology issues get so caught up with online tools and topics. I am no different. However, there are interesting tools and opportunities enabled by these tools that we may be starting to forget. My career began with a biology major and interest in teaching high school biology. I continue to be interested in science education. This is possibly evident in the images you see here from time to time.

Biology is a field with an important visual element. Technology allows this visual element to be captured and “studied”. Sometimes the objects of interest require magnification and inexpensive tools are available to enlarge and capture the images. ProScope HR is suited to this task.

ProScope HR

Here are a couple of samples.

Dime

Dime Magnified

This is one of those mystery images. What is it?

10 PM Beard Magnified

I call this 10 pm shadow.

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Online Predators and Their Victims

The Feb-March issue of the American Psychologist has an article concerning “Online Predators and Their Victims”. The American Psychologist typically offers articles from their “general journal” to the public, but it appears this service runs one issue behind the release of the paper copy to members.

The article is written by researchers I have mentioned before (Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell & Ybarra). A couple of sentences from the abstract offer a perspective on the tone of the article.

“The publicity about online “predators” who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape …””This is a serious problem, but one that requires approaches different from those emphasizing prevention messages emphasizing parental control and the dangers of divulging personal information.”

I would add school based Internet filtering to this list.

The authors go on to to discuss interventions involving “awareness and avoidance” skills and a focus by counselors on “high risk youth”.

The article identifies a long list of resources for mental health professionals. The article also lists issues that have implications for prevention and public policy. No item on this list involves filtering and the list begins with the admonition to “Avoid descriptions of the problem that characterize victims as young children or emphasize violence and deception.”

This article offers what some may find an uncomfortable conclusion – some adolescents are prone to risky online behavior. The authors cite a yet to be published paper indicating that up to 15% of Internet users age 10 to 17 are “high-risk interactors”.

Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K.J. & Ybarra, M.L. (2008). Online predators and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention and treatment. American Psychologist, 63, 111-128.

pdf from APA

I see Andy Carvin has also commented on this article. His summary is more detailed than the one I offer here.

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Net Neutrality – Again

Over the past couple of years, I have written about the issue of net neutrality on multiple occasions (e.g., July 2006, Sept. 2007, Feb. 2008). The issue is now again in the news because of a bill introduced by Senator Markey (Washington Post description).

Here is my interpretation of the issue. Net Neutrality assumes that providers should not be able to block or “shape” the rate at which packet types are forwarded to end users. The ISPs argue that massive amounts of bandwidth are being eaten up by certain types of information – e.g., video (some of which is illegal bit torrent traffic). The opposing perspective argues that internet providers often are involved in multiple businesses and could shape traffic to improve financial gains from other services. For example, companies providing DSL (phone) connections may slow VOIP to benefit the long distance phone side of the business and cable companies may slow video to benefit the movie on demand side of the cable business. (View a short YouTube video explaining core net neutrality issues.)

There are educational issues involved in this controversy. Distance education and expectations regarding home access by all students assumes high speed access at reasonable rates (see recent EDUCAUSE statement in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

The bill would require the FCC to study the various issues associated with ISP claims of the shrinking of free bandwidth.

What would be a fair solution? To me, there are a couple of issues:
a) Companies should not be able to control which legal uses of the Internet will be supported.
b) Volume of downloads/uploads may represent a reasonable basis for setting monthly fees under circumstances in which users have reasonable access to multiple providers. When competition exists, it would seem a reasonable means to set costs.
c) Some provision should exist to offer all access to a resource that is becoming more and more essential.

I am assuming a and b could be solved through some form of regulation. It is c that presents the greatest challenge. Clearly, c would require some form of subsidy. The FCC already concerns itself with this type of issue as it relates to phone service.

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I Agree with MicroSoft on This One

I have written previously arguing that it is the responsibility of educators to model and explain copyright issues. I simply do not agree with the position that easy copying makes the practice OK.

Microsoft has just released the results of a survey contending that teens are less likely to violate copyright when made aware of the law.

About half of those teens, however, said they were not familiar with these laws, and only 11 percent of them clearly understood the current rules for downloading images, literature, music, movies and software. Teens who were familiar with downloading rules credited their parents, TV or stories in magazines and newspapers, and Web sites — more so than their schools — as resources for information about illegal downloading.

Part of Microsoft’s strategy is to assist students in developing their own intellectual property and then make a decision regarding usage rights (mybytes – suggestions for teachers). Personalizing the creative process and thinking about how you want others to treat this content is a great idea.

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