Author: grabe

Remember the Net Neutrality Issue?

Washington Post writer Steven Levy outlines a Time Warner proposal to charge Internet users by the Gig. The monthly cut for basic service is 5 gigs (I assume this would be for less than the current price). The article mentions the capacity eaten up by those involved in illegal file sharing. New and legal online video services – the article mentions iTunes, but I would think NetFlix would possibly be a bigger problem because there is no charge per download – are also a concern.

Of course, if such fees can be applied, it will again be less expensive to rent the DVD at your local store. It will also be less expensive to use “pay per view” through your cable company.

Levy contends this is somehow different than the net neutrality issue.

This is in contrast to behavior that violates the principle of “net neutrality,” which asserts that providers shouldn’t be able tilt the digital playing field to favor their favorite Internet services (i.e. their partners or those who pay them).

I don’t see it that way. If the cable company owns the pipe, digital cable content and Internet content are still coming into your home through the same connection. If the company can restrict one form of digital content in order to increase sale of the other, they certainly are not neutral.  I’ll bet the download tax won’t be applied to pay per view purchases? Perhaps pay per view downloads require no bandwidth.

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Social Networks – Links among People

Google is promoting an API that maps connections among people. Great idea. I would guess the idea is to discover others with similar interests “a few links removed”.

The problem is that the API relies on designated “people” connections – friends lists, blog rolls, etc. There are designated tags for such links, but how many people or applications use them (see Jarvis post).

There must be another way to attempt to do this, but the methods I can think of require that the authors” of elements on the web be known. Links among web pages, blog posts, social networking sites, etc. are not just links among information sources, but also links among people. If “author” was a tag, it should be possible to create maps of linkages among authors. This would be a little different than acknowledged people links (XFN, FOAF).

I suppose the idea that taking advantage of linkages among people associated with ideas may seem a little intrusive. However, once one advances past the first level of people links a similar issue arises. My kids and I share each other as “friends”. This means I am one link away from the others on their friends lists. I feel myself growing younger by the moment, but I have no interest in discussing how to get tickets for the next Hannah Montana concert. 

Perhaps author to author links should be weighted 1 and friend to friend links should be designated 2 in creating a network map. Then, you would have the “best of both worlds”.

BTW – if you don’t understand the reference to “best of both worlds”, you need some younger friends. 😉  

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Aging Companies and New ideas

Perhaps you have noticed the bid made by Microsoft to purchase Yahoo. It always bothers me when innovators (not certain I would categorize either company among the new innovators) gets gobbled up. This seems to happen everywhere I look – it has happened to the textbook market and it clearly happens to technology companies. Joe Nocera (NY Times) makes the observation that this is a move of an old company. Remember IBM? Microsoft has been so productive, but now seems destined to try to hold on by using its financial leverage rather than its innovation and creativity. Can’t keep up with Google, buy the nearest competitor.

Flickr would be a great acquisition for Microsoft, but if Flickr is generating enough revenue to keep and develop this service, I would rather it remain elsewhere. I understand the struggles of the startups, but I object to the ponderousness when megacompanies inhale smaller companies. So, I could move my flickr images to Picasa as a protest, but that would be lot of work and I would then simply be moving between what have become the two big players. There must be a sweet spot in there somewhere. How to protect it?

Some do disagree and see this as a way to encourage rather than discourage competition.

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Kaiser Parents, Children and Media Report

I encountered a reference to the 2007 Kaiser report “Parents, Children and Media” in reading I was doing and investigated. Kaiser has been sponsoring annual studies of media for several years and the organizations funding allows them to secure a large sample size. I keep taps on the statistical data they make available.

The content in this report I found most useful described parental strategies for assuring their children use the Internet safely. It has been my opinion that school measures are too severe and home measures are too lax. The data from some 1000+ parents reported here imply parents are reasonably aware of Internet dangers.

A few sample statistics (children 9 and older):
13% of children have a computer in their bedroom (not as high as I would have expected – 78% have access)
76% of parents sometimes check on the web sites their children (not details examine histories?)
41% filter
61% have read child’s email
87% have checked child’s buddy list
82% have looked a child’s social network profile (38% of children have a social network site)

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iTunes U

Educators should make the effort to familiarize themselves with the offerings made available through iTunes U. I say this as a suggestion to you and to myself. Even if you presently have several feeds coming in, it is worth the effort to see what is new. I was reminded of this when I read a short post from MacWorld concerning new material from PBS. Before I could locate the PBS material, I noticed that MITOpenCourseware has just posted a new “World is Flat” piece by Thomas Friedman. You do need iTunes (which is free), but you don’t need a Mac.

BTW – regarding the PBS material, check out the KQED series on digital storytelling.

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Magical Techno Powers

This just in – digital natives may not have magical techno powers. Mark Baurlein, Emory University, points to an ETS study conducted with a very large samples of college students demonstrating that web search skills and the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate the quality of information located through web searches were often not sufficient to complete college level assignments. I agree that too much has been made of the general technical sophistication and applied capabilities of college students.However, like unwarranted assumptions regarding the breadth of tech skills those who walk onto our campuses might possess, I also think it inappropriate to assume technology offers little of academic value.

The report is part of a body of discouraging findings and outcomes regarding the academic benefits of technology. Unfortunately, those reports are pretty much swamped by the flood of enthusiasm (and money) pouring over newly-wired classrooms and campuses. Given the enormous cost of technology, we should pay more attention to actual results and give less credence to airy predictions.

While I deal with students and understand the limitations as described, my wife works directly to help future teachers develop skills necessary to integrate technology when they move on to classrooms of their own. I like how she describes the situation. Her students seldom have the technical skills or pedagogical insights she attempts to develop, but they come with sophisticated technical expertise in other areas that has transfer value in taking on these somewhat different goals and they typically (but not always) see the value in making the effort.Search skills can be learned. Naive assumptions that all information is created equal can be overcome. Given some general guidelines and heightened awareness, critical thinking tends to be applied when we value the consequences of decisions we make.

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1001

Saturday at the office. Cindy is out of town. Time for a “project”.

This morning while browsing LifeHacker, I read a description of a flickr tool called 1001. 1001 is a Mac only application that performs several tasks in conjunction with flickr. The one task that seemed kind of interesting was the monitoring of flickr to identify new uploads fitting user defined characteristics. This capability seemed like it might have possible classroom implications so I thought I would give it a try.

I created three streams – democrats (today is primary day in S. Carolina), North Dakota (just to see if anything is happening), and trld (Cindy is presently attending a conference titled Teaching, Reading and Learning Difficulties). I then entered tags associated with each stream (e.g., democrats – obama, clinton, edwards). Every 15 minutes (the setting I am using), 1001 scans flickr for new images relevant to my streams. See image below for the images/links from the democrats stream located in a little over an hour.

dems101.jpg

There must be some interesting things you could do with this tool in a classroom setting. Wouldn’t it be cool to leave the 1001 tool open on an interactive whote board. The most obvious application would be to set up streams associated with topics being discussed (especially if the topic is associated with an active issue) and see what pops up. I wonder if frequency of flickr images predicts election outcomes?

BTW – I know you are curious about the North Dakota stream. Did the 12 people in North Dakota with digital cameras take any pictures today? Absolutely – there were several very nice images. 😉

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