Category: General

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

I came across several studies from a group that have been investigating what could be described as education influences. Those of us who have attended educational conferences and followed educational topics on social media likely can identify several of the individuals these scholars now study. Back when Cindy and I attended several tech conferences a year, the same names seemed to surface across conferences as invited or highlighted speakers. Social media has increased the visibility of individuals who would qualify in this category.

The cast of characters seems somewhat different as some of the individuals I saw at conferences do not all expend their energy posting to social media. Others by way of high level of online activity and a message that attracts followers seem to have emerged without face to face appearances. More and more the payed invitations to present at conferences probably follows rather than precedes social media activity.

Because I come from a research tradition and attend researched focused conferences as well as what I would describe as conferences that were mainly attended by practitioners, I have always been intrigued by the lack of overlap between what seem two different worlds. The “rockstars” of one setting seem either invisible or avoiding the other setting. My training would argue that this is not the way it is supposed to work. 

Personal observations aside I have come across a group investigating educational influencers and recommend their observations for consideration (see references at the conclusion of this post). 

The work of the individuals I am now reading focus heavily on the role of social media and identify two concepts of interest – the micro-celebrity and the social media influencer. I will try to summarize their thinking but as always I encourage the reading of primary sources. 

A micro-celebrity comes across as an ordinary person (probably a teacher or administrator in the beginning) who takes advantage of thoughtful self-presentation skills and engagement with online individuals they might encounter to increase their perceived status. They weave in their personal lives in their social media presentation and interactions to develop a sense of authenticity and connectedness. To some, the sense that one is reading or listening to the experiences of regular people is consistent with the understanding of social media as a democratic environment. 

Once established some micro-celebrities take advantage of their followers to accept compensation for endorsing products and practices. The articles I cite seem to focus more on compensation for focusing on others and commercial products, but I would suggest that many I categorize in this group promote themselves and their own content. For example, they suggest their potential as a conference presenters or providers of professional development. Authors of texts and resources such as those available through teachers pay teachers would be included. 

Without completely condemning this trend, the scholars studying this phenomena note that this process of micro-celebrity emerging as influences can have detrimental consequences. One area they have investigated is the qualify of resources available through teachers pay teachers focusing on content for the teaching of history. Analysis of these resources indicating that some of the resources are inaccurate and some even racist.  They point to a concern that services such as teachers pay teachers exercise little effort a quality control. They have lobbied for improvements in such efforts. The concerns they express seem similar to what so many regulators are concerned about with the general lack of monitoring of information quality from politicians appearing on social media sites. 

Carpenter, J. P., Shelton, C. C., & Schroeder, S. E. (2022). The education influencer: A new player in the educator professional landscape. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 1-16.

Harris, L. M., Archambault, L., & Shelton, C. C. (2021). Issues of quality on Teachers Pay Teachers: an exploration of best-selling US history resources. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 1-19. [for a resource not behind a pay wall see this article from Slate]

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