Month: June 2016

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Yesterday I tweeted a link to a great post, the transcript of a talk about some social aspects of technology and how allowing technologist to lead our progress might have negative impacts on our privacy and lives, here is a quote.

Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life.

Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

This spoke very much to some thoughts I’ve been having about our relationship to technology companies. Some of these were sparked  by Dean Groom, Why not to buy Minecraft Education Edition.  Some more idaea were discussed at the Always on (them) event at the University of the West of Scotland and I am in the midst of exploring those in a few microcasts, tagged DigitalUWS & microcast (one down a few more to go).

I’ve not come to any great conclusions but I do think it is something we should be thinking a lot harder about.

More grist arrived today from Stephen Downes:

I can see how the presentation would engage school leaders looking for a way to address current trends in learning, but they need to look beyond the single-vendor approach proposed here, and they should be clear that technology companies are service providers who are held accountable for delivery, not partners taking a hand in pedagogical and educational decisions.

Looking back to move forward: A process for whole-school transformation ~ Stephen Downes

I know myself enough to recognise that I am somewhat enthralled by technology and software. I certainly need to think about my relationship, on so many levels, with the technology I use. Should we be addressing this in the classroom with our pupils?

featured image is probably walking a copyright tightrope, but seems appropriate

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As Natasha Dow Schüll shows in her excellent book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, while casino operators want us to think that addiction is the result of our moral failings or some biological imbalance, they themselves are to blame for designing gambling machines in a way that feeds addiction. With social mediaâ “much like with gambling machines or fast food” our addiction is manufactured, not natural.

from: Technology’s Mindfulness Racket | New Republic

Today’s stillness prompt connects with the idea around software design I’ve been thinking about recently.

On the one hand, I’d guess, GUI designers are trying to help us do something; communicate, connect etc.

On the other if we don’t pay for their services, they are serving the service. We, or I certainly, forget this when thinking about how a piece of software works.

I also wonder how deep it goes, I notice that phone apps that I’ve turned notifications off for fell quite different that ones I’ve left them on for.

Some things seem to slip by but are still under our control:

gif showing flickr settings

But there are surely a lot more subtile things that we normally don’t notice or understand going on that will require a fair bit of mindful attention if we are to even notice them.

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On Thursday I attended the Always on (them): Digital and Social Media use in Education event at the University of the West of Scotland. This was organised by Professor David McGillivary.

I only stayed for the morning as I had to get back to run a twilight course. Very disappointed to have to leave early as the morning set up some great questions for discussion in the afternoon. I was speaking just before lunch and as I listened to other speakers I had to update my talk on the sly.

I recorded the audio for all morning speakers for edutalk, I’ve now posted them with a DigitalUWS tag.

In my presentations I briefly described my own history of blogging and podcasting at Sandaig, Glow Blogs and ended with some questions. Preparing for the talk allowed me to think sound some ideas that have been buzzing in my mind for a while. I hope to tease them out in a few subsequent posts or microcasts.

My rather rough slides at: Always On

Audio, from Edutalk:

And the questions I ended with:

ARE THESE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS?

  • Are we getting the best out of Social Media?
  • Should pupils be more involved in posting?
  • Do we read others productions or are we using SM as a broadcast?
  • Are we aware of the costs & implications of using free commercial software?
  • Do we need to teach, copyright, ownership, where is my stuff?
  • Long form via short form, where is your attention at?
    Media, 140 chars vs Video vs Audio vs Long Form?
  • As professionals do we have enough understand the tools and their affordances?
  • Do we know any more about Internet Princes than youngsters?

I think these are important questions and the answers to some are simple but others are very complex indeed.

I referred and pointed to a post I read on the way to the event:
Stereotype Threat and Police Recruitment | Hapgood
Where it said:

We get hung up on “ease-of-use” in software, as if that was the only dimension to judge it. But social software architectures must be judged not on ease of use, but on the communities and behaviors they create, from the invite email to the labels on the buttons. If one sentence can make this much difference, imagine what damage your UI choices might be doing to your community.

I believe we need to think a lot more about the software we use and the effect it has on communication and on us. Hopefully I’ll think a bit more about this in some subsequent posts/microcasts.

If you didn’t make the event I’d recommend listening to the audio and the Twitter stream #DigitalUWS has some good stuff too.

Featured image, my own photo, I though my lock screen image is relevant to some of the things I was trying to talk about.

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Alan asked, Call / Plea / Beg for Responses: What If Creative Commons Certifications? for some feedback on Creative Commons. He is working on a project to educate folk about Creative Commons.

Here are the Questions:

  • Who are you? Introduce yourself, first name fine, where in the world you live, what kind of work you do.
  • What role does Creative Commons play in the things you do? This could be related to work/teaching, but also in terms of media sharing for content created. Or it could be “none”.
  • What would it mean to you to have a Creative Commons certification? What would you do with it, how would it play into the things you do. What is its value? And like in Bill’s video, that answer might be “nothing”.
  • What might it look like to earn a certification? Imagine, project a vision for what it would take for you to get a Creative Commons certification, how/where is it done (in person, workshop, course, online)? How long does it take? What kinds of things are you doing to earn it?

Alan suggested spending around 5 minutes recording. I spend a little more and my recording was shorter. I’ve taken a oblique shot at answering the questions, having a wee bit of fun. Here is my video:

 

On reflecting I should have spent a bit more time on this, but hopefully folk will get the idea. I like creative commons, publish using that license and consume a fair amount of cc material.

Some of the audio is a bit muffled, the video in the first section is poor, but I like the “poem” and the idea. The major faux-paux is the badges in the 3rd section, which is a public domain image, not one with a CC license.

Here is the text of the second section:

Creative Commons how do I love you, let me count the ways:

I love how you decorate my blog posts,
How you provide me with a grist for my mash ups,
You allow me to share and be shared,
Give me hope for a world that is less greedy.
You articulate freedom,
Win by losing,
Hint at the richness that the digital may provide,
You alliterate a connection to the best of the past, level the creative field,
And enrich the world.

Hopefully the hints at the levellers (not the band), and the commons on both of which my knowledge is slight and romantically tinged.

The Third and Forth Questions I try and combine:

These next two questions I though I’d tackle together.
I don’t have many certificates. I’ve passed the odd exam, got a degree but these have never really driven me to learn.
I’ve had a look at open badges and earned a few mostly tyre kicking.

What does drive me to some extent is approval from peers and betters. I like being involved in a community. I learn slowly in bursts and revisit things. I’ve learnt a bit about creative commons over the years, mostly by using and making and doing.

So rather than earn a certificate I might like to be loosely joined to a community with room for practise, play and learning. I would probably like a sticker or a t-shirt, I would not want a test.

My main though around creative commons is about sharing resources to be used creatively. I love to play with media and make things, Creative Commons is one of the things that really help. I don’t have any great claims for their worth, but I learn by doing. As a final aside I read this in the Observer today:

We’re creating more and more, this is the interesting thing, if you track the number of songs being written every year, there are millions and millions. We’re on a curve where basically everybody in the world will have written a book or a song or made a video, on average. Most of this is going to have a very small audience but that’s fine. Who cares? I think it’s OK that most of it is crap.

from: Digital prophet Kevin Kelly: I’ve learned a lot from Spielberg | Books | The Guardian

How nice if CC helps us move to a world where creating is not limited to the chosen few.

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There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.

 

William Makepeace Thackeray from: The_History_of_Henry_Esmond- William Makepeace Thackeray – Wikiquote

This is my 1000th post on this blog. Just over a year since I marked 10 Years Blogging here on John’s World Wide Wall Display.

The main benefit from blogging these 1000 posts has been the thinking that goes into them and their unpublished siblings. The main beneficiary of my blogging has been me (I see my stats). Even without many readers it is worth it.

Thinking about this post has given me the chance to think about where and what I post. This blog would be bigger if I had not hived off my DS106 blog where I’ve over 200 posts. I move them when I though it might make this blog a little strange. If I could figure out how not to break links I would now recombine them.

I am becoming more and more interested in the indieweb concept of publishing all of your content to your own space and pushing that out to silos. I’ll be thinking about all the other places I post content soon.

The second greatest thing about blogging is reading other blogs.

Serendipitously 1 I read this:

Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.

…

Here’s the thing: Google doesn’t want you to read blogs. They shut down their RSS reader and they’re dumping many blog subscriptions into the gmail promo folder, where they languish unread.

And Facebook doesn’t want you to read blogs either. They have cut back the organic sharing some blogs benefitted from so that those bloggers will pay to ‘boost’ their traffic to what it used to be.

BUT!

RSS still works. It’s still free. It’s still unfiltered, uncensored and spam-free.

from: Seth’s Blog: Read more blogs

One of the most enduring features of my blogging years has been the reading of other blogs via RSS 2. I’d suggest that if you are interested in using the Internet to read, RSS is a great thing to learn about.

The post linked above shows one way, but there are many other services and app that will help you read, news and blogs from across the Internet. Currently I uses inoreader.com and Feeddler RSS Reader Pro 2 (iOS), to read blogs.

Featured image credit: thoughts are just water drops by Benjamin Balázs on Flickr kindly shared in the Public Domain. I though this on was interesting given my recent interest in the accidental allure of blended images.

1. one of my favourite words: searching here serendipitous 7 & serendipity 12 posts ↩

2. I like to write about RSS too. Currently I’ve mentioned RSS in 161 posts ↩