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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Teaching to learn – 1

Teaching to learn is one of the generative activities that intrigues me. This may partly be a function of personal experiences as a teacher. Being put in the position of having to stand in front of others and explain requires something different from the study of a topic. Just what is different though. I intend to offer a couple of posts based on research to answer this question. 

The first explanation is based on research claiming the preparation to teach amounts is a variant of the retrieval practice effect. Retrieval practice involves attempts to recall the content to be studied. This is best done with recall that does not involve prompts such as would be the case with multiple choice questions. Something like flash cards with general requests for recall/explanation would be an example. 

A study by Koh and colleagues (reference at the end of the post) was designed to test this hypothesis. 

The study involved four groups – a control group that studied the assigned content; the teaching group that studied the material and taped a 5 minute presentation without notes; a group that studied and then delivered a 5 minute presentation using a prepared script; a group that studied and then completed free recall questions about the material.

Consider what is required in each treatment. The teaching group not allowed to use a script had to rely on what they knew when making their presentations. The group allowed to use a script could rely on the external source of information. The free recall group used an established method of retrieval practice.

Both the teaching group and the retrieval practice group performed better on a later test than the control condition which involved traditional study behavior. The group that taught with the use of the script did not. The authors argued this pattern supports the retrieval practice explanation.

This study was designed to test the value of retrieval practice and showed the two retrieval practice treatments were most effective. For classroom application, consider what was actually involved. Making a video is only part of what one does when teaching. It demonstrates a value in the requirement of using what you know to create a representation. This sounds like writing to learn or in this case multimedia content creation to learn. 

Teaching involves other potentially important activities not testing in this research. What about interacting with students? Interaction is even more demanding than presentation as it is not totally under the control of the educator and involves more cognitive flexibility. There are other aspects of teaching that may also contribute to personal learning. 

Koh, A. W. L., Lee, S. C., & Lim, S. W. H. (2018). The learning benefits of teaching: A retrieval practice hypothesis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(3), 401-410.

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Linking notes to recorded audio

One advantage I see in using a technology device instead of a paper notebook is the opportunity comes from added capabilities of technology. When it comes to taking notes, I would propose that the simultaneous recording of audio linked to personal notes is a great advantage over taking notes on paper. The addition of the linked audio allows the note taker to revisit the audio in a precise way when notes are confusing or incomplete. A more complete and personalized representation of key information can then be generated after the presentation.

There are several different applications for doing this. The demonstration that follows makes use of Notability on a tablet.

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