Month: October 2018

The elephant in the Internet privacy room

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently made the news for all by calling out other technology companies over data privacy. My immediate reaction to Apple talking about privacy is that this is an easy issue for them because they make their money selling hardware at inflated prices. However, concerns over privacy are very real and have created dangerous personal challenges and challenges to industries and national security.

The multifaceted nature of digital privacy makes the topic challenging to discuss. At one extreme, you have issues of espionage that involve stealing corporate secrets and attempts to manipulate elections. Somewhere in the middle, you have personal vulnerabilities involving issues such as stolen information because of negligence exemplified by things like users using common passwords across multiple services. Perhaps at the end of the continuum you might position issues such as services that rely on ads using personal information gleaned from cookies to use the record of your behavior to target you with ads and perhaps in the most negative case to share this information for profit with other companies. It is really this final category that Apple sees as an advantage as the rest of the continuum is hardware neutral.

Here is what I describe as the “elephant in the privacy room” problem. What I mean by this is that we are all complicit in this problem and ignore our involvement. We want what we want for free and refuse to have the empathy to recognize that companies that provide these services must pay their people, pay for their infrastructure, and provide a return to their stock holders. I would also argue that efforts to ignore the elephant by active tactics such as blocking ads (and data collection) are unethical. We somehow justify finding a way to make a service free by refusing to participate in the business model supporting those who create content and “free” online services. While it is true that ad supported services have become greedy (I see a difference between using information to target ads these companies provide and selling the information used to do so to other parties), using the greed of these companies as an explanation for flawed personal behavior is just a way to sooth personal guilt. I would suggest that there are open source alternatives to Facebook and Twitter that contain no ads and collect no personal data  (Diaspora and Mastodon), but I am guessing that if you block ads and are aware of these alternatives, you will still not use the more popular services.

Before I offer alternatives, let me make one more point. Collection and sale of personal data does not end with Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Your ISP as a function of the FCC removal of net neutrality protections can sell the record of your online behavior. The ISP knows the sites you visit whether you use an Apple product or a Chromebook. You are far more vulnerable in this way because the record of all of your online activity rather than just your activity through separate services would be known. 

I believe in controlled capitalism (unlike some Republicans). From this perspective, I see that something has to change if we expect quality online experiences and assume these experiences will be available without a viable revenue model for content and service providers. I believe the government may legislate privacy protections, but I don’t see these controls will be sufficient to solve the long-term issue of a reasonable return on the investment of providers. I

Suggestions and my own present activity:

  1. View services and content allowing adds. I use Chrome when I browse and view adds. I do use an extension that blocks 3rd party cookies. These cookies move information from site to site. I feel no obligation to provide information to service X based on what I do when using service Y.

2. Use a service that blocks ads, but provides micropayments to subsidize the cost of providing these services and content. This may be a new concept for you and I admit that the process has yet to achieve much attention. I first tried Brave in 2016 and am now using it again in 2018. I explain Brave in another post. I have invested $50 and plan to spend about $5 a month. This is an experiment for me and my reasoning is that if everyone did this the income provided would be reasonable. Some of my reasoning is based on my experiences with ads on my own sites. I am guessing I earn $15-$20 a year for the thousands of pages I provide. The activity on the sites that support infrastructure and employees if far higher. My revenue per view may be much smaller than you expected. I use Google ads which generate revenue only when actually clicked and the vast majority of ad presentations even when viewed are not clicked. I position is that this click through rate presently supports the Internet and my responsibility for an alternative should be consistent.

Brave takes the money you commit and returns it to providers in proportion to the time you spend on various sites. What follows is the time distribution I generated for my first month of use. My largest investment of time is in writing my own blogs so I would be returning some of my investment to myself.

Brave is somewhat limited at this point because my account is tied only to my desktop computer and cannot synch my activity from my phone, tablets, or laptops. I mostly write on my desktop and this is the reason my blog site is active for the most time in my payment commitments. Brave runs on all platforms, but has yet to implement a way to synch your activity to a single payment plan. I use Chrome and view ads on my other devices.

One more thing, I run a tool on one of my blogs just to gain some insight into how commonly my readers block the ads on this blog. The service would allow me to prevent those with an ad blocker from viewing the content I generate, but I do this more to investigate this user decision.

3. Use open source services (see above) should you not want to see ads or provide micropayments.

My guess is that in the long term things will work differently. If the micropayment model gains some traction, at some point it will morph into the type of subscription model that now supports online music. This might be a different way to understand how Brave works with the exception that you commit what you want to Brave. With a traditional subscription model, all will pay a fee for access and will be allowed to access the content and services that the subscription supports. Ad supported sites will continue to exist and if the ads are used as a business model by the provider, the provider will block browsers running ad blockers. Perhaps the subscription model and the ad model will operate in tandem with the subscription service allowed to block the ads. Google uses a system something like this blocking ads on YouTube for those paying for Google Music. Finally, the government will begin to set standards for user privacy and will eliminate the collection of certain categories of information. Third party cookies and the sale of data from one company to another will not be allowed.

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Modern textbook learning

I have been reading about paper vs. screen reading attempting to understand the research and related concerns about learning from on-screen content. Part of my reluctance to be concerned about the potential downside of reading/learning from content on a screen comes from my own experience. I know personal experiences can lead to biases and this is one of the important reasons to follow quality research. However, I am coming to think about the way I learn as perhaps a way to think about how students will learn if they can get past old habits and learn some skills that they traditionally have not learned for some obvious practical reasons.

I think a large portion of what was my job when I was still working was a knowledge worker. If you ignore the research expectation, the work of a college professor might be described as knowledge worker. We consume large amounts of content, mostly by reading, reflect on what we have encountered from multiple sources, and use the result to inform our teaching and guide our research. The input to this process are the books and the journal articles written by other scholars. These documents are not the only inputs, but even when we interact with others to work through ideas, the origins for these conversations are in documents of some type. To some extent, this is the case for all learners. Even through formal learning settings include presentations and discovery experiences, written information is typically present to offer extended information, different perspectives, and explanations for what has been experienced.

For a decade or more, I worked with documents on a screen. This was a matter of convenience. For example, there was no way I could personally afford all of the journals containing the articles I wanted to read, and it was far easier to use services available through my library to download pdfs of these articles than to walk to the library to see if I could make a copy of these articles. In many cases, my library did not even own journals containing articles I wanted and would have to contact another institution to have a copy of a desired article sent if I demanded a “hard copy”. The digital resources were a large step forward.

Convenience and cost aside, I think there is a far more important issue to be considered here. Work based on the review of documents requires far more than reading. A major portion of my researcher involved study behavior and I always liked to make a distinction between reading and studying. I liked to think of studying as what happens after initial exposure to content (reading). We learn from thinking about what we read to a far greater extent than would occur with a single exposure. We stop and think. We come back later to review. We take notes. We answer questions. We discuss. I believe I now study nearly everything I read from a screen because technology allows far greater efficiency and sometimes capabilities that have not been available with paper resources.

For example, consider that I highlight and annotate heavily as a read. This is a way for me to process the content, but these external strategies also allow me to access information more efficiently in the future. When I write or when I want to review a resource I first read a couple of years ago, highlights and annotations offer a very efficient way to review. It is true that one can do this with paper resources, but working from my computer at this moment, I can perform these processes with hundreds of documents and I can search for things I thought or highlighted when I can not remember the names of authors or the journal containing an idea I now want to use.

I tend to think of what I do as a combination of distilling and exploring. I bring together ideas from multiple sources, combine or at least cross-reference these ideas, and add my own thoughts. This is also an external representation of learning.

I think this would be a useful way to think about what students should be doing. Working with concepts externally to help develop internal representations or models has also been a useful way to think about what activities adds to information exposure. We can do some internal processing without these external tactics in some cases, but this is often only true for some learners and for most learners studying some content areas.

What always intrigued me as a researcher interested in study behavior was what students thought studying/learning was and how it happened. For example, so many students I encountered in lower level courses seemed satisfied if they were able to read the assigned material. Some might even make the effort to read the assignments twice. The core notion that you must find a way to think about this content was not appreciated. Even the notion that reading something multiple times rather than trying to focus second/third readings on sections that were important, but not understood had seemingly not occurred to many. The metacognitive capability of identifying priority ideas and important ideas that were not fully understood was either not considered or not possible. Evaluating and developing study skills became a personal interest.

Back to the role of technology. Consider my work flow. Would some of the tactics I described even be allowed of a high school student reading their biology or history text? I am guessing they would not be allowed to highlight or write their personal insights in the margins. It is not surprising that when they find themselves in a setting (college) when this is possible, they have little idea how to do these things in a productive way. Even more, access to digital resources offers additional opportunities beyond those that techniques that transfer from paper and these capabilities (e.g., the inclusion of self-generated questions) are often unknown or poorly developed when available.

Where do we expect students to learn these skills?

My present interest in layering as an instructional design process and as providing external study tactics for learners relates to these possibilities. I write about layering as something educators and learners can add “on top” of online resources, but many of these same ideas also apply to digital resources such as digital books (pdfs).

The capabilities of layering include the opportunity for educators to demonstrate and evaluate student study skills and for shared studying among students.

I tire a bit of the call for innovation when educators seem to mean add new areas to the curriculum (coding) or abandon materials designed to meet learning needs (abandon the textbook). First, these ideas are seldom new and, in addition, offer little to address the core cognitive demands for learning. I believe effective innovation will come from finding better ways to support the cognitive demands of learning and thinking.

I think it is time to consider teaching students how to “read/study” on digital devices recognizing that there are options not available when teaching students to “read/study” a traditional textbook. How do modern information workers (learners) actually work?

For a similar perspective, you might want to read (probably on a screen as the journal is not carried by most libraries) the following:

Gu, X., Wu, B., & Xu, X. (2015). Design, development, and learning in e-Textbooks: What we learned and where we are going. Journal of Computers in Education, 2(1), 25-41.

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Wakelet

The world of computer services is cutthroat. There are only so many users and with some categories of online service it becomes very difficult to compete with an existing service even if your app is better. Everyone wants to be where everyone already. It is great that some are willing to keep trying new approaches.

Wakelet thought it found an opportunity when Storify decided to close up shop. Finding that services you think are useful are shutting down is also a reality. Just getting folks to use your service is only part of the challenge. At some point, you also must find a way to make money so you can pay for programmers, servers, and bandwidth. Anyway, Wakelet, not yet at that point where paying the bills was the primary problem, made an effort to attract Storify users by offering an easy way to transfer user content.

I wonder how Wakelet will monetize what seems like a powerful and intuitive service. Classifying many online services is sometimes challenging because others based on personal needs may see the service in a very different way.

I would describe Wakelet as a tool for curation. Some might use a curation tool to meet a personal need (Evernote, OneNote). As I write for other educators, my typical process is to review multiple online sources I might want to cite/link and I need a way to accumulate these sources before the writing process beings.

I see most educators using Wakelet more as a tool to organize resources for others. For example, an educator might come up with an interesting task, locate some great online resources appropriate to this task, and then share the task description and resources with the students. One educator might do something similar to share resources with colleagues – an introduction explaining the goal and then the collection.

Wakelet would describe these curated resources as collections. What might differ from situation to situation is whether the curator wanted the collection to be private, shared with specific individuals, or available to the public. This is pretty much what Wakelet allows.

Wakelet can be used from various devices. The most general application I have in mind involves the collection and organizations of online resources. For this purpose, it is most convenient when Wakelet can be added to a web browser as a plugin/extension. I use it from the chrome browser. Find a useful resource, click the Wakelet icon that appears in the browser to bring up a dialog box to select the desired category from among those you have established. Or, just save the resource and worry about categorizing it later.

Wakelet icon allowing access to Wakelet extension in Chrome browser.

 

Wakelet security options – private, unlisted, public.

A Wakelet collection – description followed by multiple resources.

Sharing a Wakelet collection with others. My example is public, but this collection could also be shared with only individuals you designate.

My example of a Wakelet collection

Some ideas for classroom use from Ditch the Textbook.

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MeWe – another new social service

I admit to being a sucker for new social media services. I explore them to see what they offer so that I can inform others and I also keep looking for useful implementations of services I think have unique value. I am also just opposed to “natural monopolies” described by some as a result of the network effect. I would summarize a network effect as – people go where people are and once there accept the actual services as provided with all existing faults because coordinating a move to something better service does not seem practical. I should probably work on that description, but I assume you get the idea. So, Facebook is a natural monopoly. I liked Google+ and Diaspora better and thought the opportunity to control who you shared what with (circles in Google+ and instances in Diaspora) was a superior way of doing things. Google+ is shutting down soon and Diaspora has never attracted the critical mass I think is needed. I do encourage you to take a look at Diaspora.  

My new fascination is MeWe. MeWe is a collection of services – chat, groups, a personal timeline (like Facebook), and online storage (for files, images, etc.). It is free for basic services with a business model based on selling users extras – space for storage, pages, emojis, etc. If you won’t make money on ads and selling user information, you must have access to other revenue sources. I do not attempt to predict the success of online business models, but I do believe there must be an income stream of some sort to maintain infrastructure and support innovation. I wish MeWe success.

A feature I think should be of great interest to educators is the mechanism for control of access. In some ways, MeWe shares this perspective with Google+ and Diaspora. You make this decision for individual user experiences. For example, you can offer a public group or invite specific participants to a group. You can maintain multiple groups and set access opportunities for each depending on the audience you want to be involved. 

I have decided to create a public group focused on one of my personal interests. I describe this interest as “layering for learning”. This description is my way of identifying online services that allow educators to embellish existing online content to improve the potential of the original content sources as instructional resources. I argue that these services are consistent with the goals of those who want to use open access content rather than textbooks and with approaches that emphasize the role of “educator as instructional designer”. I have written a Kindle Primer on this topic, but I have also written many blog posts and created YouTube tutorials that are freely available. My hope is to seed the group with some this existing free content and invite insights and suggestions from educators who see something of interest in these ideas. I am uncertain how else to get a group started from scratch.

Getting a group started is a challenge. When I am teaching, I can show such resources to students. Now that I am retired, getting educators to take a look is much more of a challenge. This is bucking the network effect in action. I hope you will take a look.

Layering for learning group

 

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Understanding through ownership

Open source software

I have become a fan of the power of what I have decided to call “understanding through ownership”. I believe embracing this concept provides anyone both a sense of autonomy and a better understanding of how digital technologies works within our lives. I am not a supporter of the universal value of “coding for all” as I regard programming as a vocational skill unique to specific professions. I do believe that digital literacy is a far more important life skill and coding alone does not provide the necessary skills and understanding to deal with the changes technology is bringing to all of our lives.

I have written previously about what might be described as the benefit those of us who participated in the emergence of personal computing have enjoyed. Those who have entered this revolution at some point along the way lack the understanding that comes from having experienced more primitive versions of things and having to do more for yourself. I miss the days I enjoyed being able to quickly convert any Mac I was working on into a working server. It is true that I enjoyed the advantage of working at a university which allowed me the advantage of a dedicated IP, but even a computer that assigns the IP as you connect would work as a server until you disconnected again. I understand the security issues in those with limited technical knowledge operating a server, but this understanding also illustrates the point. I understand security concerns because I personally had to deal with them. I am not advocating going back to this level of control, but having had such experiences has strongly influenced my thinking.

What I think makes sense for the educational setting is the purchase of shared server space. This is relatively inexpensive – I would budget the cost at about $10 a month. When you own a server, you can take risks and exercise control at multiple levels. Most hosting plans allow me to install tools by running host provided scripts. Anyone can do this. Push a button and follow instructions and you can set up a wiki, a WordPress blog, or a Weebly web site. You own the service and the content and the headaches. One of the realities of services is that flaws continually emerge and some flaws allow vulnerabilities. If you want, most services have mechanisms that will automatically update your installs. Middle school on, I think some students could manage such a site for their peers.

Just to be clear. You do this type of thing not because it provides you access to the most powerful version of services, but because it offers you greater control of versions of a particular service. I suggest that you use open source software when possible. Unless you install the open source software from a source external to the hosting site, you have some satisfaction in knowing that most groups providing this software are receiving some support through the stipend you pay to the hosting site. Dealing with how online experiences are funded is an important lesson for all to learn and learners are more likely to think about such issues when they are putting a little money into their experiences.

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Screentime and neuroscience

I have spend my life attempting to understand and improve human learning through the lens of a cognitive psychologist. Originally trained in biology, I understood that the hypothetical constructs used by those with a cognitive perspective had to somehow translate into the biological perspective of the neuroscientist, but when I investigated what the biological field offered I have found little of practical value. The findings of neuroscience were interesting, but offered me little beyond my existing cognitive perspective when it came to practical matters.

The concept of plasticity offered a difference of some potential. It posits that experience can result in fundamental changes in the human brain at the biological level and as I understand this proposal these changes are relatively permanent. By permanent, I mean it takes some time to modify such changes. I do think this concept has been abused. For example, the proposal in the popular “mindset” book suggests that students be encouraged to move from a fixed to a growth mindset because you can change your brain through continued effort. While my “intro to psych” understanding of plasticity would argue this is theoretically true, the actual investment of effort would be beyond the likely level of commitment of any believer. However, there are situations in which this level of commitment exists. The exposure of most of us including children to technology would meet this level of exposure.

A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study showed that elementary aged children use on average 7.5 hours per day of entertainment technology, 75 percent of these children have TV’s in their bedrooms, and 50 percent of North American homes have the TV on all day.

This is a tremendous amount of time and few of us would change an existing routine at this level.

So, if there is something about this exposure to technology that provides a unique brain experience, it would be an issue of interest and possibly concern.
What might this unique brain experience be? I have heard it described as continuous partial attention. The idea that while engaged in a primary task, we continually divert our attention to a different task. If the brain adjusts to make this attentional flexibility more powerful, as a consequence, the capability for focused attention would be diminished. We would find ourselves more distractable. Tasks requiring sustained attention would become more difficult to perform well.

My description here has been simplified and focuses specifically on attention because I believe this would be the cognitive variable most impacted by extended periods of time encouraging attentional switching. I am trying to setup an  introduction of the proposal in two books by Maryann Wolf – Proust and the Squid and Reader come home: The reading brain in a digital age. Neuroscience and brain plasticity are at the core of the author’s focus on learning to read, the long-term benefits of reading, and the impact of large amounts of screen time on reading.

Among the claims of her books:

Reading is not a cognitive skill our brains are preprogrammed to do. We reprogram our brains in order to read. Learning to read takes advantage of brain plasticity to change the way the brain works at multiple levels. A consequence of this change is not only that we learn to read, but we also become capable of more powerful thinking skills as a consequence of this reprogramming. Reading would be one of those tasks to which we devote a considerable amount of time.

Wolf proposes that heavy use of technology devices may work counter to some forms of brain development encouraged and sustained by reading. This different brain organization encourages a “skimming” approach to reading, difficulty in sustained attention, and possibly a decline in other thinking capabilities that come from and require deep and prolonged focus. Among the skills listed is empathy – the capacity to reflect on how others me see a situation from a perspective that differs from our own.

Concern for activities that compete with focused reading have been noted for as long as I can remember. This concern did not depend on a biological perspective. Don’t have the television on while you study was an admonishment I heard in my day as a student. Certainly, cognitive psychologists have long known the issues of limited capacity short term memory and attention and have understood the impact on the performance of a primary task. The altered brain position of the neuroscientist suggests it is more than that. The limited capacity perspective would suggest the remedy is to remove the secondary task; e.g., don’t talk on the phone while driving. This is not the same as proposing your driving skill has been changed whether or not you have happen to be on the phone. A relativity permanent change in function is what is suggested if the brain does alter the way it functions.

Is reading from paper and reading from the screen of an iPad different? I see this question at two levels – the immediate impact and the brain alteration argument. In both cases, I also try to understand why there would be a difference. I don’t see how the surface on which words appear could matter. I understand that what one can do with the paper and the iPad while reading are different. I have a similar reaction to the question of whether students should be allowed to take notes on a laptop during a lecture or should be required to write in their notebooks. While some may argue the surface on which one works matters, the option of using one surface in multiple ways and not the other seems far more obvious. If you get bored during a lecture, you can use your laptop to check Facebook. You can’t do this with your notebook. Similar options exist while reading on the iPad, but not a book. Just for the record, this would not be the same with a Kindle which pretty much limits you to reading and marking up the content (notes, highlighting) as optional activities.

Wolf suggests we have a different set while reading on a device and I think she is correct. She contends we are used to using devices to switch between tasks. We look something up. We check our email. We see if anyone has posted something to our Facebook timeline. The device whether it has to be or not is associated with frequently changing among tasks. I suppose this is true. The issue I have might be described as does this result in bad habits we carry over into new settings or does this result in an altered brain that nearly forces us into a different way of behaving. Are different habits of acting the same as different capabilities?

I don’t think the research at this point can answer the questions I have. I am willing to acknowledge that bad habits have been introduced. I admit that I do other things when reading on my iPad than when reading a book. Ironically, I read both of Dr. Wolf’s books on my devices (a Kindle and an iPad). I admit I looked up some things while reading. I also took notes and highlighted in a way I can now search from my devices or a different device than I used originally. I am not convinced my supplemental activities were destructive in the short or long term. I suppose my device-based reading activities are different than most, but I would suggest this is a professional habit rather than a difference in how my brain works.

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Collecting geolocation data with the iPhone camera

I have wanted to do this video for a while. The present version of iOS changed how the collection of location data by the iPhone camera is turned on and off. I think that there are many educational uses for being able to position information in space and taking photos is one way to collect the data necessary to do this. Some are concerned about sharing their location along with photos so it is important to know how to turn this capability on and off. I have the process figured again so I thought I would share the process.

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