This post may have a limited audience, but it explains a capability I thought added a great deal to my travel blog. My travel blog has the focus you might expect – I write posts based on the trips my wife and I take.
A travel blog by definition describes experiences at many specific places. The location is part of the context for each post. I use Blogger for this particular blog and after several years of writing posts about traveling, I finally noticed that Google allows the author to associate a location with each post. I am guessing few Blogger bloggers use this feature, but I thought it might be worth exploring.
The text box to enter the desired location appears when you select the “Location” icon appearing in the right-hand column of the Blogger authoring page. What you enter here can be general (the name of a town) or more specific (a complete address). Because I try to include photos in most of my posts, if I use a photo captured with my phone, I use the location data stored by the phone in the EXIF data included in the photo file.
The location you enter will appear at the bottom of the post. This location is also a link that offers access to the location you specify as it appears on Google maps.
I enjoy exploring new services and products that have the courage to challenge well established existing companies. Brave is a new cross-platform browser available as an alternative to whatever you are using now. A classic tech business model seems to be doing what your competitors don’t and for alternatives to Google Chrome (Apple Safari, Firefox) this seems to be blocking ads and protecting against the collection of personal information. Brave is in this camp. This makes Brave very fast and it offers convenient controls for avoiding ads and cookies.
The image above shows the security controls and yes there are ads (I always use the Free Tech for Teachers site when I want to check for banner ads, but these are not the type of ad that is based on your browsing history).
I have mixed feelings about ads as a content producer. Users seldom click on the Google ads that accompany my posts so I make very little money from my offerings. This is not a concern to me, but I am interest in what this could mean to others committed to generating reasonable compensation for producing their content.
Brave has a plan for this situation. Brave intends to allow users to offer micropayment to the sites they visit. I have encountered this one time before. The idea is that as a user you commit a certain amount per month and this money is then offered to those you visit (and designate). I am interested in doing this as a consumer, but I am waiting to I am home and have access to my desktop machine because it appears that the synchronization of multiple platforms is yet quite primitive and the cross-platform payment option is not yet available. Payment and collection requires bit currency systems and I assume this will be an impediment until things are easier.
Reports I have read on the Brave business model have me confused. This ComputerWorld description seems to imply that Brave will partly fund itself by substituting its own vetted ads for existing ads. I read the Brave material as offering this as an option and not a requirement.
I promise a followup to this post as I have time to explore the funding model. For the time being, I think that Brave is worth exploring just for the speed advantage it offers. Note that many of the plugins you count on when using Chrome will not be available, but these enhancements will likely be coming if the company takes off.
Most educators interested in technology are too young to have been influenced by the era of innovation that made possible both the positive and negative uses of technology we experience today. Unless you were involved in the middle 1980s to the mid-1990s you missed out. This was a time of idealism and personal involvement that is mostly lacking today. Most folks are now willing to rely on existing platforms or the simplicity of coding without actual making. If you haven’t run your own server, you don’t understand. If you haven’t experienced the excitement of connecting your computer to a bulletin board for the excitement of connecting with individuals very different from yourself, you wouldn’t understand.
As an educational investment, coding without making misses the point. There are far more efficient and existing ways to practice problem-solving and a thoughtful methodological approach. Becoming part of a participatory technological enabled culture offers the opportunities of computational thinking and other opportunities that are far more important. Learn enough to install a service on a server that sits on your own desk and you have acquired more than the supposed benefits of computational thinking. You have created the opportunity to offer your ideas to the world and to engage with others. You have become a contributing part of a complex culture and made an investment in this culture.
I have had the opportunity to benefit from these experiences because at the time the investment in learning to code and learning the basics of operating a server were the price of admission. This is no longer the case. You need to know very little about technology itself to use Facebook or Twitter. I really don’t know if the problems now associated with how these services are used have anything to do with missing out on the original culture of the personal computer and the Internet. I blame the loss of that culture and the present problems on the take over of technology by commercial interests and what these interests have resorted to in order to make the money they make. In so many ways, it has become a race to the bottom. We want free, but we are unwilling to understand who free allows the investment and profit margin of the tech companies that dominate public technology use today.
Anyway, there are still ways to experience the educational benefits of the original PC and Internet culture. You and your students can still rent your own server space and install services that allow you to explore, communicate, and contribute. What I have in mind others have called the indieweb and there are some attempting to show the relevance of the indieweb for education.
My own efforts – I had the advantage of working at a university when I started my exploration in this area. This meant that I had access to a static IP for running a server. A static IP means that that the Interest address associated with your connection to the Internet The dotted quad or numerical representation of your web address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx does not change each time you connect. A consistent online location is necessary for others to find you. I do admit that as the importance of the Internet became obvious the security types at the university regarded my activity with increasing skepticism. I had the advantage at the time of having accumulated a lot of experience and building a research program on software I wrote that could not be easily installed on university servers. All that aside, renting server space is now easy and fairly inexpensive. This is what I do now and this is the host for the content you are reading here.
Some examples of services I run on this server.
Blogs that make use of WordPress. This software can be installed using a script and embellished for different types of application (e.g., a blog versus an online book).
A wiki using the MediaWiki software (pretty much the same software as you would be accessing when you make use of Wikipedia). I used the software in a grad class I taught to have ed tech students create tutorials that were offered to educators.
A Drupal install that I used for a while with my students, but that I decided to deactivate when I taught less frequently in retirement and got tired of migrating to updated and more secure versions of Drupal.
HTML web content created with commercial web development software (DreamWeaver)
Are these services/content as sophisticated as one might find using services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Of course not, but I understand how they work and I operate them myself. They offer the content I have created. This is a very different experience than adding my creative work to Facebook, Diigo, Instagram, or Twitter. I think it has been worth the effort in deepening my understanding and in being part of a different culture than most technology users experience. Just to be clear, I have never taken a computer science course. I taught myself to program and the other tech skills I needed. I am a psychologist, not a computer scientist or trained programmer. Doing it yourself offers a diversity of experiences that go far beyond writing code. How does the Internet work? What is a DNS? How do bad actors mess with your site? What does it take to attract others to your work? I believe that at least some of the experiences I have had are there at a low cost and offer students the opportunity to develop a depth of understanding that few now experience. If you want to be an innovator, consider indieweb experiences for your students. Encourage them to create something that is truly theirs.
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