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.

Loading

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.

Loading

FlickrShow Demo

Tim Lauer’s blog contains a post describing a Flickr photoset display script called photoshow. A photo set is a subset of your flickr image collection that you have identified. The following link takes you to a demonstration of this script I have added to an independent web page (the script runs automatically when the page opens and I did not want the script to automatically activate when everyone connects to this blog).I don’t like the way the bottom of each picture seems to be cut off, but the script works well.

My Demo

Note: Clicking on an image from the set takes the viewer to the full size image and annotation within Flickr.

My demo and Tim Lauer’s demo stopped working this afternoon. Perhaps the Photoshow server was unable to handle the pressure of the interest generated by the new app. We will have to see if they are able to get their system working again (the message that follows was captured from my screen). I guess you should wait to try this until it is known if they can work out the bugs.
error message

Why is this capability useful? It allows someone with a substantial number of Flickr images to identify those he/she would like others to view for a given purpose.

Loading

Blogs – By the Numbers

Technorati, a popular blog aggregator, has released data allowing a look at blogging in general. Technorati claims (as of today) to follow 50.6 million blogs.

  • The number of blogs continues to grow at a dramatic pace and is presently doubling every 6.5 months.
  • Blogs appear to be very responsive to current events (i.e., bloggers digest the news) and a graphic in the David Sifry post shows how peaks in the rate of daily blogging can be linked to current events.
  • Approximately 39% of posts are currently written in English (Japanese was second). The time at which blogs are written appears to vary with culture and the author notes that English blogs are more likely to be written during the work day and Japanese blogs after the work day.

Loading

Using the work of others

This is another attempt to recover a deleted post and again I think this is an important issue.

I first encountered this issue when a blogger I follow complained that his work was appearing on a blog “syndicator” without permission. I use the term syndication as distinct from aggregation because aggregators (e.g., bloglines.com) typically provide the title and a few lines and then send you to the blog site if you find the topic to be of interest. Syndication appears to offer the reader the full post without moving you to the actual blog site. RSS feeds can be processed to mash together a site providing current posts from popular blogs, but this may not be what the individual bloggers intended.

The discussion that followed considered both legal and ethical issues in the world of bloggers (nice review). Some of the discussion was fairly nasty and focused on personal attacks concerning commercialism (Some bloggers use their sites to promote books, speaking services, etc. and not having visitors prevents them from displaying their promotional materials. However, the syndication sites may also attempt to generate revenue through paid google ad links.).

I think this is a situation in which the willingness of some to freely share their ideas has been abused. Contrived arguments that once something has been openly posted it is there for others to do with as they please seem self serving. Taking the words rather than taking the time to reference the ideas seems a form of laziness. Some may be attracted by the opportunity to contribute to a syndication site but to assume that this is the case is inappropriate.

Loading

Blackboard Patent (from what I remember)

One of the bigger educational tech stories of the past couple weeks (IMHO) is Blackboard’s attempt to patent the LMS. I am making the effort to attempt to remember what I wrote about this issue because I want to have these comments and links for future reference. There is a local connection in this topic for me. A group at my institution (UND) has been developing a commercial LMS (HTMLeZ) and this group like larger players (e.g., desire2learn) and open projects (moodle) now must wait to see how this plays out.

What makes the approval of a patent of this nature scary is that it covers so much ground and this space has already been populated by many companies offering similar products. It is unclear what if anything will be demanded of these other companies and how the general nature of the patent language will influence future developments in this area. It seems to me that attempting to claim a patent on a product that has already been made available by many companies and can be associated with existing categories of sofware (ILSs) is a high stakes move (note Blackboard acquired WebCT recently). Dominating this space would be very lucrative. However, there will be a backlash because of the many existing products and concern for continued efficient advances in products of this type. If the patent is interpreted in a way that allows for continued competition, the Blackboard name will likely be tarnished because of the claims the company has made.

Text of the patent

“The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for the exchange of information between instructors and students in an educational context. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods in which an educational instructor interacts with one or more non-collocated students by transmitting course lectures, textbooks, literature, and other course materials, receiving student questions and input, and conducting participatory class discussions using an electronic network such as the Internet and World Wide Web. The present invention also relates to the provision of an infrastructure that allows for on-line registration and tuition payment of educational courses.”
etc.

Blog post from elearning2.0 sharing the diagrams from the patent request.

Loading

Backup

You may notice the lack of posts since July 20 or so. You may also know that I have added a number of posts since then. For some reason, all of my posts disappeared from my database. Now you know just how frequently I backup. Maybe I made someone mad.

I resolve to backup more frequently.

Loading