Author: grabe

Internet Economics

If you are reading this, you are a financial participant in the economic system that supports the Internet. This claim is not intended as a reference to the fees you pay for your phone data plan or the connection you use at your home or business. The money we all pay to access the Internet is another issue and beyond access has nothing to do with supporting the service providers and the content creators that make the Internet worth using.

Beyond the money paid for general Internet access, many spend no more money for the services they receive. They don’t use a check or credit card to compensate Google for searches, Facebook for social interaction, or the writers and videographers for the content users access. Others may pay for a few services, but also use many others without spending a cent.

I am guessing you understand and see in your own online experiences that your willingness to view ads is how you compensate someone for the valuable experiences you receive. I am assuming you are not among those who block ads as this action would violate the trust the free services put on you to understand that the services you receive are really not free for them to provide. Internet ads interest those who pay to have them posted largely because these ads can be targeted to the interests of viewers and thus are more valuable than ads they could have placed on television, radio, or in your daily paper (if you get a print copy). Of course, this means that to receive targeted ads companies have collected information about your online behavior to make educated guesses about your interests. Just to be clear, ads cover a wider variety of targeted information than most of us probably recognize. Ads may attempt to interest you in a specific car or brand of laundry detergent, but also a political candidate or cause. You may not recognize that those who want to convince us of specific facts or fallacies may also send information or disinformation our way based on what they can learn about you. It is this hidden effort at persuasion that is of concern, but part of the financial incentive opportunity that supports the Internet.

The hidden incentives that encourage Internet service providers have drawn the attention of politicians and this attention may eventually result in some restrictions. Of course, any time politically mandated restrictions are mentioned, other politicians will resist and legislation becomes very difficult to pass.

Allow me to propose a solution you might try while we all wait for legal guidance.

I think that Internet users should pay for the services and content they receive. I think this is the only commitment that makes long-term sense in terms of saving the open Internet. There are several ways to do this without relying on the collection of personal information and targeted ads. Some form of micropayments makes the most sense. You pay a small amount when you visit and use content or a service. Just to be clear, I am describing a system that replaces the types of access now funded by ads and not the services that are behind a paywall (another issue not addressed here).

What I recommend is that you explore and use the Brave Ecosystem. I have no official connection with Brave, but have used this system as my primary way to work online for a substantial amount of time. Brave is a browser that is based on chromium. The Brave browser should be an easy transition for anyone familiar with the Chrome browser.

It is an understanding of the ecosystem behind this browser that is what I am promoting. This ecosystem could be used in what I consider an unethical way, but the system is designed with the potential to compensate participating online services and content creators. The Brave browser allows you to block ads and the collection of personal information. If this is all you use it for, I regard your behavior as unethical. Brave allows you to support the online community by contributing money to the ecosystem that is allocated to online resource providers based on which sites you visit and how much time you commit to specific sites.

In addition or as an alternative to contributing money, you can also commit to viewing ads on Brave. Those wanting to advertise on Brave pay just like those wanting to advertise through other online ad systems, but these ads are not shown based on information shared back to the ad companies. Brave uses a system that resides on your devices to categorize you in a way that determines the type of ads you will see. You can keep the money you receive OR you can allocate these funds to compensate the providers associated with the sites you visit. These funds work just as well for compensation as funds you send Brave out of your pocket.

Brave is not perfect, but I support this model and have participated since the early days of its development. Like so many ideas associated with the Internet, the value of an idea grows with the number of participants. More participants would attract more companies to have their ads included and more participants among resource providers. The success of Brave would also encourage other companies to try similar models.

I hope the following video provides a concrete look at how Brave works.

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Earth Day 2022

I try to come up with a useful post for educators as we approach earth day. Earth Day offers a great day to highlight the challenge of climate change which is so easy to forget in the midst of other concerns. In the long run, the urgency of addressing climate change at this time is possibly greater than other concerns that preoccupy our political processes and our attention.

There are plenty of only Earth Day resources for educators, but I will offer a few for those who have not had the opportunity to search.

Project Learning Tree Page

Earth Day Official Site

Clean Energy

Free Tech 4 Teachers Suggestions

By chance, I can offer something a little more personal this year. I have been interested in solar panels for some time. We decided to move beyond my small-scale explorations and add solar panels to our home. The process has stretched over a couple of years. By chance, the process was completed this week. We now have our panels installed, know they work, but still must wait for our power company to approve the installation and make the connection. 

The delays or the past year or so involved 1) needing to replace our shingles which had some hail damage and were old (you don’t want to pay for panel installation if you will have to pay for their removal and reinstallation within a year or two) and 2) waiting for the solar panel subsidy to be renewed in a new year. We were told that our investment would not actually cover the cost because our electrical bills were low. We use natural gas for heating our home, cooking, and heating our water. These commitments are new and we won’t change for some years. I suppose air conditioning is our largest use of electricity. Maybe we will add an electric vehicle within a couple of years. We installed solar because we wanted to be involved in alternate energy production.

Here are a few photos I took of the process. 

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Medium

I have decided to cross-post some of my blog content to Medium. Medium offers content creators the potential for revenue based on the amount of traffic you generate once you accumulate 100 followers. When you get to this level you are eligible to earn money based on views of your content that you are willing to put behind a paywall. Of course when you place content behind the paywall only Medium paid members can view this content. This is the point at which you may have to decide whether you are interested in reader attention or some small amount of income. At some point, I hope to have to make this decision.

You pay $50 a year for full access to Medium as a reader.

There are plenty of ways a writer can make content available on the Internet. I have had a blog since 2002 and I created other web content at an even earlier date. I have always either run or leased a server to post my content (see previous post about running a server). There are some technical challenges in controlling your own server, but purchased hosting can now rely on scripts that automatically update software and databases so you don’t have to keep your own software current. This blog and others I run make use of WordPress and use a MySQL database backend. It is great not to have to continually patch this software yourself. For the curious, I pay about $200 for server rental and domain registration per year through a company called Bluehost. This amount allows me the opportunity to host multiple blogs and other content.

I have never thought of my online content as a way to make money. If I have ever had a motive beyond that of an interesting hobby, the motive would have been to bring attention to the textbooks I have and continue to publish. 

There are some interesting issues some consider when deciding where and how to offer the content they create. Here is an example. You may spend some of your time making contributions to and reading the contributions of others on Facebook. As a content creator, you receive no compensation from Facebook for the content you create. You do benefit from a free service that allows others to read your content. The argument is that while this is a benefit, you are already compensating Facebook through your attention, the sharing of your personal information, and the view of the ads Facebook posts. Content creators may take their elsewhere for this and other reasons.

Other situations involve different considerations. For example, this blog does not require me to allow a service such as Facebook to use my content at no expense and I can show ads on the blog as a source of revenue. There is that $200 that the hosting site makes and the reality that the ads I show generate maybe $15 a year, but at least I own and control my own content. 

Here is the complicating issue. Revenue is one personal benefit, but so also is the attention of others. I may have benefit from this attention (e.g., interest in my books) or just the satisfaction of offering a service others find valuable. Whichever it might be, the reality seems to be that reader interest in personal blogs seems to be on the decline. Competition with information sites that offer all you can read or view content (Facebook, Instagram) and large commercial information sites (e.g., Google or Apple News) provide an easy one-stop shop that satisfies the needs of most readers. The decline of the use of RSS readers by which a reader could set up a feed providing them with any updates from multiple blogs they designate is associated with this change. It is hard to know if this decline is a cause or consequence. I do know that much of my blog traffic now comes from Twitter (a tweet is generated when I generate a new post) or searches. Much less comes from subscriptions to an RSS feed. Twitter works great as a referrer, but the impact is limiting to the number of Twitter followers I have.

Medium offers an interesting middle ground. It consolidates content from many writers providing the potential for the discovery of content from new writers. It does not show ads or collect data from readers and it is free to a point for readers. Medium supports itself by taking a cut of the $5 a month or $50 a year all you can read readers pay. Medium allows cross-posting and makes this process fairly easy so there is not a need to make the choice between a blog and Medium. I would not shut down my blogs under any circumstances. I have too many years (decades) of investment in the body of work I have built up. I have just decided to experiment to see if an expansion of outlets will expand my reader base. 

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You get a server, you get a server, ….

I intend to write a couple of posts that explore issues that are related to whether content creators should serve their content themselves or rely on a service to host the content. In exploring background material for these posts, I could not help considering my own history. Strange as it may sound, I ended up trying to establish how I did what I did. Trying to establish my own behavior was a bit of a challenge as some of these personal experiences happened long ago. 

If you have long been a Macintosh user, it may surprise you to learn that any Macintosh could quickly be turned into a server. So, think of a Mac on your office desk on which you did your daily work and imagine this computer had a folder that any HTML docs placed in this folder would be immediately available on the Internet.

This option was built into all versions of the Apple OS Lion and earlier. I used to do a lot of K12 staff development sessions and I enjoyed explaining to the educators that I could turn one of their Macs into a server in less than 5 minutes. Macs are built on Linux (BSD I think) and at the time came with the Apache server software built in. Most of the servers on the Web still run on more recent versions of Apache. Anyway, the issue with the demonstration for teachers was that most computers are connected to the internet with a dynamic and not a static IP. This translates as the IP with a dynamic connection may be different each time you connect. The IP is often called a dotted quad and looks like 75.168.107.115. You can locate your present IP using this link. You can use either the dotted quad or the site name to connect to the site. The familiar approach using the site name happens through a DNS server (domain name server) so when you use the Internet you enter a site name which ends up being converted to a dotted quad. However, even with a dynamic connection, as long as you are connected others can connect to your server by using the dotted quad.

As I was remembering the tests I did using the Mac as a server, I realized there could be a way to look back in time at this behavior. The Internet Archive project operates a system called the WayBack Machine that attempts to archive Internet content for historic use. I had static Internet connections at that time and was allowed several reliable IPs because of the research I did. I remembered the address for my office desktop machine was grabe.psych.und.nodak.edu (my name, department, university) and I entered this address in the Wayback Machine. Sure enough, the page served from this desktop had been stored for posterity.

I can tell looking at this page that it was not coded in HTML by hand. At that time Apple offered a web development tool called iWeb as part of its basic productivity suite of software tools. iWeb provided a graphic interface for laying out web pages and then generated the HTML automatically. This would have been the only way I could have included something like a guestbook on the site.

So, there was a time when any user who wanted to have their own website posted from their personal server was part of the vision (the date on the page above was 2003, but Wayback says it was first created in 2001). The idea of Web 2.0 was emerging and alternate terms for this trend were the read/write web and the participatory web. The read/write web probably is the most descriptive meaning the Internet was not just for the consumption of content, but also for the creation and sharing of content. How this is done now is through a site both creators and consumers visit (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), but there was a time a different approach was being explored and anyone who wanted to operate a server could.

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Online synchronization and online storage are not the same thing

I  was listening to this episode of a podcast on iPhone photography dealing with iCloud storage that revealed information about iCloud that I had not understood or at least considered carefully. I have been using iCloud as a backup for several apps because the online service allows me to work on the same files from several devices. You have one iCloud account for all of the Apple devices you own. What I had failed to recognize was what synchronization actually means. The iPhone photography discussion concerned the issue serious iPhone photographers have with the capacity limit they encounter when keeping thousands of photographs on their phone. The auto-backup to iCloud is not really a solution because images are deleted from iCloud when deleted from the phone. This is what synchronization means. Yes, Apple does offer an approach that downgrades the quality of images on your phone while keeping full quality images in the cloud if you use this option, but just the idea of not considering when I delete something on a device, the synchronized file in the cloud is also deleted was a revaluation. Note – Apple does recognize this issue and provides a way to recover deleted iCloud files for thirty days. My concern was more general in that I could have deleted old files thinking there was a backup when this was not the case. 

Here is a kind of experiment you can perform. If you are an Apple user, visit iCloud.com and open iCloud Drive. Take a photo file copy it to the drive from your desktop and then copy the same file to the Documents folder on your computer. It will soon appear in the documents folder in iCloud. Now, on your computer, delete the photo from the documents folder. If you look in iCloud, you will find that the photo still exists on the iCloud drive, but not in the documents folder on the ICloud Drive.

This image shows iCloud (online) and the Cloud Drive as a subfolder.

Within Drive you have synchronized folders and other files

The file stored within the synched Documents folder. This is the file that would be removed when the file was remove from the computer.

Photos are not an issue for me because all my photos are automatically backed up to Google Photos and I also use a backup service for my desktop computer so I can probably recover any file whether it is in the iCloud service or not. However, coming to the understanding that I have does give me some concern about relying on iCloud storage. I use iCloud as a way to access certain files from different devices and this is probably not ideal. I have hundreds of highlighted and annotated PDFs I keep for use with Bookends and Highlights, the note-taking files I use with Obsidian, and the documents I have written with Scrivener are vulnerable in this way. All assume synchronization and are vulnerable to universal deletion.

What to do?

The typical recommendation for backup is to have a copy on a local computer, a local separate storage device, and online. I have decided it makes the most sense for my personal situation to periodically duplicate the synchronized document folders that I am concerned about and upload these folders to Google. Apple makes it very cumbersome to download content from the iCloud. You must download files one at a time rather than select all and then download or download a folder. This limitation is not practical when you have hundreds of files you might want to backup once downloaded from iCloud.I may need to purchase a little more Google Drive storage, but the security is worth it.

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Information worker skill development

Sometimes I can’t tell if a trend in an area I follow is emerging or a small shift in my interests reveals a new area that has long existed but now has entered my awareness. Such is the case with digital note-taking. There is some overlap with the note-taking of students, but my focus here is on note-taking for purposes other than getting through the next test. What is different about these activities is the focus on a longer term process that may feed into something other than exam performance. Such long-term goals may involve the easy rediscovery of specifics that were available at an earlier point in time and may now be a challenge to locate and perhaps the integration of such archived insights into a combination to be expressed as a written product or the solution to some information-based problem. Unlike or perhaps more accurately building on the benefits of hand-written notes, there are digital advantages that aid rediscovery (e.g. tags, searching). 

As an information worker, I have had a natural tendency to explore systems and tools purported to make the processing of information easier or more productive. As digital tools became available I have taken the time to explore. There is a risk in this tendency. You can spend so much time exploring new tools and translating artifacts created with an older system to a new system you risk using time that could have been used to get work done. It is kind of a “grass is greener” problem. I legitimate my time investment as partly a function of my professional interest in learning tools. I have come to personal decision about such activity. I have decided it is important to differentiate the capabilities of a tool and the activities that these capabilities enable (or not). When you study the work flows those who develop such tools imagine, you can identify a tactic you had not considered that could potentially be implemented with a tool you already use. If you get focused the combination of tool and tactic, you limit the flexibility that might be available.

If you are interested in this topic, you can explore by searching “note-taking” within the Apple or Google stores. Or, just try a general search for something like “best note-taking tools”. 

Here is one final observation. Note-taking and note collection have become a personal productivity theme and productivity experts have recognized the opportunity. I have no idea if this is an example of following the money or promoting the details of a unique insight that most do not recognize. I will give two examples. The first is Sonke Ahrens promotion of digital applications of the Zettelkasten. My recent posts have offered several comments on both the process Ahrens promotes and the tools that might be applied. Ahrens work and the benefits he has received as a consequence come from his writing and insights rather than the promoting of any specific tools which he describes. My second example is the Forte Lab’s (Tiago Forte) promotion of the “Second Brain”. Forte offers seminars/courses (very expensive and beyond the budget of most academics) and a book (not released yet). The concept of a second brain taps into some of the ideas as the Zettlekasten and the core ideas can be implemented with multiple apps. 

To this point, my personal insight has resulted in a change in my own behavior derived from investigating these ideas and tools. This insight can be described as write earlier in my information processing work flow. This idea comes from Ahrens (Smart Notes) and I would translate the tactic as take notes that capture an idea in enough detail (context) that the note still offers useful information when reviewed after a significant delay. Increase the rediscovery of these notes with tags and links to notes offering related concepts/ideas.

I think it time to move on focusing so much of my time on this topic. Unlike the research that informs learner classroom note-taking, there does not seem to be a research literature to consider when it comes to personal productivity. It is worth an investment of attention for anyone reading and applying (writing), but once basic issues have been understood exploring logical application to personal tasks is where effort should be focused.

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Teaching and authoring to learn

I have long been interested in the instructional strategies of teaching and what I call authoring (e.g., writing) to learn. These are concepts that seem to resonate with educators and that have a substantial research base arguing for effectiveness in applied settings. Both teaching and authoring seem excellent culminating activities for project-based learning activities which is another approach that many educators find appealing. Some of my existing resources on these topics are available here and here.

From time to time I review the research literature to catch up on new developments related to the topics I write about. This has recently been the case with what is formally called “noninteractive teaching”. This is a variant of teaching to learn in which the student as educator writes or generates a video intended to explain something to learners (e.g. Book Creator, Explain Everything, Screencastify). As a classroom strategy this approach is argued to be more practical as the task does not require the arrangement of the interactive component of teaching. It is in some ways similar to writing to learn, but it now frequently involves the creation of multimedia content or the use of video. Students can create these products as an assignment.

Applied research in education can be very frustrating. Findings often do not replicate for many reasons – the content to be learned, the background knowledge of the learner, the outcome variable used, and so on. This is what I seemed to encounter when reviewing recent research on “noninteractive teaching”. I had hoped to write a review of research, but decided to reference a recent review instead.

Several authors (Lachner & colleageus) who have investigated non-interactive teaching generated an article to speculate about about the inconsistencies in their own and related research (see reference at conclusion of this post). They generated a review paper that first differentiates interactive teaching from non-interactive teaching and then attempts to address the inconsistencies in findings of the second category of studies. The review is thorough and I recommend it for academics interested in this topic. While urging researchers to continue to refine their understanding of this activity, the authors concluded with the observation that the following recommendations seemed to have emerged – verbal (video) rather than text-based, from memory rather than while accessing a source, and restudy after presentation rather than presentation being the final experience.

I disagree to some extent with the authors’ conclusion regarding the generation of text (text integrated with other media) as multiple studies support the learning that results from summarization and writing to learn. Why the expectation that writing to teach would generate a different outcome for the author makes no sense to me. My effort here is to report the recommendation of the group summarizing the recent research focused on the generation of content intended to teach.

Lachner, A., Hoogerheide, V., van Gog, T., & Renkl, A. (2021). Learning-by-Teaching Without Audience Presence or Interaction: When and Why Does it Work?. Educational Psychology Review, 1-33.

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