Author: grabe

Reality Check! Cindy’s adventures in the real world.

Cindy provides this account of yesterday’s adventure.

The schools in our region have agreed to form a consortium in order to secure prof. development resources from the state. They bring in some external “trainers” for some things and rely on local people for others. Cindy was a local person involved in providing sessions on new technology opportunities.

So – Cindy is doing a session on teacher and student blogging. Those of you who have done tech training in an unfamiliar setting can probably appreciate how this goes. She decides to begin by showing them a blog aggregator and explain how to locate and follow useful blogs. It turns out bloglines.com was blocked by the state filtering service.

“I tried showing the the blogspot site I created when I spent the summer in Japan,” she said. It was blocked. “I thought it might be an objection to blogger.com, so I tried showing them the .mac blog I created this summer. It was blocked too.”

“Maybe the Internet wasn’t working,” I volunteered.

“No, I was able to show them Anderson Cooper’s blog,” she replied.

“This makes no sense to me,” I said. “Do you think the group responsible for the banned list knows that Anderson Cooper works for CNN.” (previous caustic comment on filtering)

“Can’t you unblock sites.”

“Sure,” she responded. “But they can’t. They would have to locate the person that has that authority and ask that it be done. Teachers, particulalry those less interested in technology, often won’t do this. It works or it does not and they just move on.”

“So, what did you do to fill out the time allocated for your session.”

“I told them they had to speak up.”

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Software Patent Epidemic

When I first read that another software provider offering a product within a crowded field of competitors had secured a patent, I thought the message was a spoof of the Blackboard patent. Red Herring reports that Friendster has secured a patent in the “social network” space.

Perhaps this situation offers a solution to those who object to MySpace. It may be determined that MySpace has violated Friendster’s patent. 😉

It is time for the software providers of yesteryear to rise up. I checked and the University of Washington still maintains PINE. I see PINE is a registered label, but has the Univ. of Washington secured a patent on email? There are probably earlier products, but PINE is about the limit of my personal experience.

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WordPress Tutorial

I am an advocate for moving the control of server technology as close to the user as possible. Everyone’s computer would function as a server if I had my way. In keeping with this way of thinking, I have the opportunity to run the server and software responsible for this blog.

This blog operates on open source software. The software for the blog is WordPress and WordPress requires that the server also be running PHP and MySQL. If you are interested or just want to learn a little about what it takes to do this (might be less of a hassle than you anticipate), I have run across a useful audio/video tutorial that describes the process of setting up a WordPress blog.

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Blackboard Patent

Michael Geist, columnist for BBCNews, has added his commentary on the Blackboard patent claim. His comments describe the confusion that exists within the education community among academics who have worked with other learning environments for years and now are uncertain whether the software they use is in some type of patent violation.

In commenting on the Blackboard postion, Geist notes that Blackboard claims to be making a specific rather than general claim.

For its part Blackboard claims that the patents only cover narrow company-created innovations.

After reviewing the patent description, I find the claim of narrow company-created innovations difficult to interpret.

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Copyright – Berkman Center White Paper

A recent White paper provided by the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society contends that copyright law represents one of the major obstacles to the use of the Internet in education. Their paper provides a nice summary of copyright law (copyright fundamentals) and through several case studies examines some significant areas of frustration. As an instructor, this resource would make a good “assigned reading” and provide a nice way to generate discusison.

I find myself identifying with the examples and situations the authors provide, but I also identify with a party not well represented in this review – those who created the content being copied. While it is true that without copyright it would be easier to access content, utilize content effectively in instructor presentations and incorporate content in student authored products, I feel the authors of this review make a fundamental assumption that may not be realistic. Would the content exist without the protections afforded by copyright law? When I read the white paper, my reaction is often – it would be nice to be able to that, but if you could do that someone else might do this.

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Online Danger – A Look At Some Data

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has released a recent study entitled Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. Given recent political consideration of this topic focused on school and library access (DOPA), I read the report looking for some specific things. While any danger directed at our sons and daughters should concern us (I encourage you to take the time to read the report rather than rely completely on summaries such as this), each of us must also acknowledge that as adults responsible for children (as educators or parents) we constantly make decisions that expose our children to some element of risk. How do the risks match up with the educational potential of applications that may involve a certain element of danger?

A couple of data points from this study:

  • Four percent of those surveyed indicated experiencing an “aggressive sexual solicitation” (perpetrator made an effort to take the “experience” offline through phone contact, mail, or face to face meeting).
  • Location of computer when experiencing an agressive sexual solicitation – 79% home, 12% friend home, 9% school, library, or other.
  • Age of solicitor associated with “aggressive solicitation – 44% <18, 34% 18-25, 15% >25, 7% – no clue
  • Means of access – chat 32%, IM 54%, other 13%
  • Reaction – 44% removed self from situation, 23% warned solictor, 7% changed online name, 15% ignored, 2% reported to parent or authorities, 7% met person

It is the combination of these percentages we have to process. Is there a risk to adolescents? Obviously! Are school uses of communication technology involved? Rarely! Do adolescents act responsibly? Mostly!

While harsh, we have to make decisions about how a technology with a less than perfect record, but benefits to our children is to be implemented.

As a parent, I made a similar conscious or unconscious decision every time I let me children drive to school or take public transportation. It would probably have been safer for me to take the time to provide transportation myself. Maybe I was lazy. Maybe I decided that learning to drive responsibly or to handle the people one meets on the bus was part of the process of growing up.

What are the odds my son might have experienced permanent damage to his knee playing football? What are the educational benefits of playing football when evaluated against this potential for physical harm? Do a search on “high school”, “football” and “heat stroke”? You might be surprised by the number of deaths. It is interesting which risks seem to generate a response from the politicians.

The list of decisions goes on and on.

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Content-Based Ads?

My wife and daughter are in Europe and are soon to take several flights that will eventually get them home. We have been following the latest terrorist threat very closely.

I noticed something while reading the latest news (see below). Note the ad that accompanies (probably automatically) this story from CNN – Oil of Olay. The ads were generated by Yahoo (Advertiser links are provided by Yahoo! Search Marketing through its Content Match product.) and this is a great example of context “sensitivity”.

googlead

As you might expect, I am monitoring Cindy’s journey home. Here is her most recent email:

We are in the Budapest airport and I picked up a free wireless. We had no trouble checking in and I am able to take my computer and camera on the plane. Kim had pop in her backpack and they didn’t even make her throw it away. Our plane was to have taken off at 8 and it looks like it won’t go until 9:15. So far it has not been a problem but this is a small airline. I was very impressed by how quickly they got all of us processed.

Not sure whether this is good news or not.

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