Enough is Enough
I just posted my final status update on Facebook...
Dear Friends,
As some of you know, I have been wary about the direction Facebook has been taking for quite a while. Their everchanging and confusing privacy settings, the dubious way they treat your personal information, the sneaky way they phrase things in their terms of service... the list goes on... in short, I have gotten to the point where I simply no longer trust Facebook with my information. The recent (and soon to be released) changes like the Timeline View and the "frictionless sharing" that Zuckerberg talked about at the recent f8 conference have started to change Facebook into a service that I'm no longer willing to use. Articles like this one (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2114059/Your-Facebook-Data-File-Everything-You-Never-Wanted-Anyone-to-Know) make me feel entirely distrustful of the whole thing.
Despite reservations I've had about it, I've really tried to like Facebook. I've enjoyed making and maintaining connections with people here, but Facebook's cavalier attitude to my personal information makes it impossible for me to continue being a user of the service. While I certainly have nothing to hide, in principle I simply no longer wish to support Facebook and its services.
I have disabled my account over the last few days and have realised that I really don't need Facebook. Soon after I post this message I will be deleting my account completely. Unfortunately, I realise that even after I delete my account, I still have no real idea about how much of my information Facebook will continue to retain and use. That's pretty appalling don't you think?
I still think the basic ideas of social networking online are wonderful, and I've been really enjoying what's going on over at Google+. To me, Google+ feels like a far more vibrant, interesting (and trustworthy!) place than Facebook. I like the way Google have been upfront and open about what they do with my information. To be clear, it's not the giving of the information that concerns me at Facebook, it's the sneaky, convoluted ways that they miscommunicate their intentions about it. I feel like Facebook have crossed the line with my trust.
There are lots of people I'm going to miss being in contact with here on Facebook. But I hope you understand that I just can't continue to support a service that acts so sneakily, so unethically, and treats me and my information with so little respect.
Chris
It's a bit of a shame really, as I have a lot of friends on Facebook, but I just can't do it any more. At the heart of it, I think Facebook is ultimately bad for the future of the open Internet. It gives the impression of being all warm and fuzzy and connecting you with your friends and family, but the motives of the company are entirely Facebook-centric. Facebook cares only about Facebook. As I watch it grow bigger and stronger it feels to me like what Germany must have felt like in the mid 1930s. There was a time when people were great supporters of Adolf Hitler too. We all know how that turned out.
Oh, and take a moment to read that article linked above. Scary! Seig Heil indeed.
Image: 'DSC_0076.JPG'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24095119@N06/2324843973
Popularity: 19% [?]
A Public Life
Many people don't realise it, but if you use Google's search services while signed into your Google account (which you already have if you use Gmail) then your entire search history is automatically archived for you, along with statistics about how often you searched, for what, and when. It will track how many times a day you've Googled something, and even displays a little colour coded calendar to show you your overall search patterns. Some people may find the whole thing a little scary, a little Big Brother-ish maybe.
Perhaps it is, although it doesn't actually bother me at all. I find it useful to have a complete history of what I've previously looked for, and there have been a number of times that being able to go back through my search history has been very useful. If there are negative aspects to this sort of tracking, then, for me anyway, the positives have far outweighed them. I pretty sure that I function far more effectively by being able to turn to a search service to ask questions (and get answers), and I really don't mind that there is a history kept of them. I've nothing to be embarrassed about, and seeing the hundreds of questions I've asked each month really does make me wonder to whom these questions were directed in pre-Google days.
Whether this sort of thing bothers you or not might depend, in part, on what the search history shows. I'm reasonably confident that I could pick a random date from my search history and have it displayed publicly and not worry too much about what it might show.
I'd like to think that the same would apply with my overall online presence, my "digital footprint" as they call it. For the last several years I've been pretty open about sharing a good deal of my personal life in public online places, and although I can only speak for myself, the opportunities that "publicness" has brought into my life have been overwhelmingly positive.
Whether we like it or not, in a digital age we all leave a trail behind us.
Something we constantly remind our students about is the need to leave a positive digital trail behind them. I wrote a post recently about a lesson I had with a Year 6 group. In this lesson I asked them to Google their own name and many of them were surprised that there was already considerable evidence of their existence in the Google database - evidence that they didn't put there and that they were unaware of. As I said to them at the time, the question is not "Will I appear in search results?" but rather "What will the search results say about me?"
While working with a small group of teachers the other day, we did a similar exercise. I'll write more about this in another post, but suffice to say that some of these teachers were shocked when they Googled their own names. One found a fairly nasty comment about herself on RateMyTeachers.com, (a site she was completely unaware of) while others found no evidence of themselves at all in the search results. I'd suggest that both of these outcomes are not desirable. Having something negative turn up about you in a search is clearly not a good thing, but having nothing at all turn up about you is probably just as bad. I know some people who go to great lengths to avoid having an online presence - usually because they want to maintain a sense of privacy - but they need to realise that not turning up in a search result also says a lot. Unfortunately, not having a digital footprint makes a statement about you too.
Like it or not, in an age where "if it's not on Google it may as well not exist", we need to be really mindful about what our digital footprint says about us.
The notion of a personal resumé is quickly being replaced with the digital footprint. Do you have a positive online presence? How "Googleable" are you? Are you on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Do you participate in online communities? What projects have you been involved in that support your professional practice, and are they visible to the world? If your next employer was to Google you before asking you to come for an interview, would you be proud of what they'd find, or embarrassed?
These are realities we need to teach our students, and I'd suggest we can't do a good job of it unless we start with ourselves. When someone wants to know a little more about you, you need to be able to proudly say "Just Google me" and know that what they find will be the right stuff.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:05 — 4.7MB)
To be an ADE
I've always aspired to be an Apple Distinguished Educator, but I've never actually done anything about applying for it. As far as my own personal computer use goes, anyone who knows me knows that I am most definitely a Mac guy, but I assumed that I wouldn't be able to apply to be an ADE because most of the schools I've worked in have been primarily Windows schools. As they say, one should never assume.
While it's true that many - probably most - ADEs work exclusively in Apple schools, apparently it's not always the case. While chatting with someone from Apple a while ago I mentioned this, and they replied that the ADE program is aimed at recognising teachers, and does not necessarily focus on the type of computers used in the school that teacher works at.
To become an ADE you obviously need to be active in certain ways that help spread the message about technology and it's value for education. You need to be passionate about the ways that digital technology (and pretty obviously, Apple digital technology in particular) can make students more engaged and creative. You need to demonstrate some degree of innovative practice and a reasonable level of experience in the classroom. I hope I can do all these things. And you need to fill in the appropriate forms. I'm pretty sure I can do that part.
Oh, and you also need to make a short 2 minute video that gives a bit of an insight into who you are and what you do and what you might bring to the party. Apparently the video is pretty important. I gave it my best shot.
Anyway, I finally got my ADE application in for this next intake of teachers (a few days before the deadline too! Woohoo!) so my fingers are crossed. If you're interested, here's the video.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Chance Favours The Connected Mind
Great video. Great message. I must read this book.
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Should Students Learn to Write HTML Code?
I saw an email from someone today suggesting that they would be starting next term to teach their students to write HTML code from scratch, so the kids could make their own webpages. My initial reaction when I read this message was to ask "Why?" Why would anyone bother to learn HTML coding from scratch when there are so many great editing tools around? Surely, in a WYSIWYG world, learning how to to actually write HTML code is a complete waste of time? With so many great web editing tools around, isn't learning to write raw HTML code a pointless exercise?
In once sense, these are valid questions. There's no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an "engine" such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, etc. It's also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or NVU editor.
However, on reflection, I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to understand basic HTML code. Take using Moodle as an example... as much as I would like to tell my teachers at school that Moodle has a wonderful WYSIWYG editor, and that it will automatically format all the text and images for you just by cllicking on the little buttons in the editing bar, the fact remains that I still find myself hitting the little <> button on the Moodle editor bar to dive into HTML code on an almost daily basis just to fix little quirky things that are going on.
It's also true that, although you can use the buttons on the editor to align text to the left or right (which in HTML, behaves quite differently to how it behaves in, say, Word) knowing a little bit about what those buttons are actually doing on a code-level makes it much easier to predict how things will actually look. Being able to manually write a link to a URL, being able to strip out some rogue heading level text, fixing paragraphs that have gone askew because of a stray tag, and so on... these are all things that I find myself doing fairly regularly, even WITH access to fancy WYSIWYG editing tools. I taught myself the basics of writing HTML nearly 15 years ago now (well, to be completely honest, one of my students taught me!) and I can't even begin to tell you how handy it has been and how often I have used that knowledge. Although I would like to think that we are living in a world where it SHOULD be completely unnecessary to know how to write HTML source code, the truth is that over the years it's proven itself to be a damn handy skill!
Even being able to use the provided code to put an YouTube video or a Google Map into a wiki or blog, for example... sure, you CAN do it without having the slightest idea of how it all works, but if you want to make a minor adjustment such as changing the width or height of the frame, just being unintimidated by the code makes a big difference to your general level of technological fluency.
I'm not saying that everyone should be able to write heavy-duty CSS code or be able to create complicated PHP script, but HTML is dead simple... and for the number of times I find myself rescuing a page because of a relatively simple adjustment to the underlying code... I gotta say, I can't think of anyone who would not benefit from knowing the basics.
So, should this teacher spend time teaching his kids to code? Some may disagree, but I say yes. My advice would be to teach kids to write a fairly simple webpage. They should know the core structure of html, head and body. They should understand heading levels (and depending on the age of the students, how these can be tied to style sheets). They should know how to manually write (or at least understand) the code for a hyperlink, for an image, and for an embed. It's good to know these basics. I guarantee you those kids will find them useful at some point in their future.
For the majority of your students, that's probably all they need to know. Then, once they have a grip on the basics, switch over to a decent visual editor like Dreamweaver or similar... some tool that lets them switch back and forth between code view and output view. Output view will make SO much more sense once they see the relationship between code and output!
And who knows, just that small exposure to the underlying code could make all the difference to that one kid in your class. It could open them up to a whole world of coding and being interested in what really makes a computer tick. In this WYSIWYG world, God knows we need more kids like that!
And if nothing else, you'll at least understand why the picture that goes with this post is so funny! 
What about you? Do you think teaching kids to understand HTML is a useful skill, or a waste of time?
Image: 'html tag italicized'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30127486@N00/346483297
Popularity: 14% [?]
Bye Bye Facebook
As you may have noticed, Facebook has been copping a great deal of flak in the media lately for recent changes to its privacy policy. There is growing evidence that Facebook as a company has few scruples or ethics when it comes to the way they view and use your personal data. The company has continually “baited and switched” the privacy settings in Facebook to the point where they have become so confusing and complex that few people truly understand them. There are something like 50 choices leading to about 170 different privacy variations possible, all needing to made in multiple locations in Facebook, with very little consistency or “expected behaviour” between them... consequently, there could be significant parts of your personal data that is being made public without you realising. Facebook seems to be working on the principle that most users never look at the default settings or take the time to think through their options. The most recent changes made to their privacy policy have made the sharing of your personal information “opt-out”, rather than the previous method of “opt-in”. This means that, unless you wade through the many privacy settings to turn them off, you are probably sharing far more than you realise. Added to this is the recent change to the Facebook Privacy Policy that essentially grants Facebook the rights to give your data to third parties and advertisers in order to target marketing to you. The infographic to the right was created by Matt McKeon, and links to his page where you can explore an interactive version which shows how the default sharing policy on Facebook has changed over time. It's a bit scary!
Interestingly, the Facebook Privacy Policy –which all Facebook users must agree to in order to use the service - has grown to become almost 6000 words long. Do you know what it says?
Personally, I find this unethical behaviour completely unacceptable and, along with many others across the web, have decided to close my Facebook account. Like many Facebook users, there have been times when I’ve found the service useful in helping me connect to friend and family, but their recent display of unethical, almost fascist, behaviour has left me with little choice but to cancel the service. Although I had taken the time in the past to secure my Facebook account (and I was savvy enough to do so) I cannot, in principle, support a company that shows such a cavalier attitude to the privacy of their user base.
If you are a Facebook user, I would strongly encourage you to check the settings in your account to make sure they are doing what you expect. There is a useful tool at http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
that will actually probe your Facebook account to show you how it looks to the outside world. I would strongly encourage you to take the time to check yours.
There is also much bigger issues about Facebook. Its disregard for open standards, its walled garden approach that continually borrows steals ideas from all over the web, its willingness to do whatever it takes to keep users within the Facebook environment... I believe in the longer term will be bad for the Internet in general. That's a much bigger issue and beyond the scope of this particular post, but when you add it all up, I can't in all good faith continue to support a company that continually exhibits evil motives. Facebook might be a useful service for many, and it might offer a certain convenience factor by bringing things into one place, but there is no doubt in my mind that Facebook will bad for the open web in the longer term.
Many people in the Internet community are so outraged by the continual display of unethical behaviour of Facebook and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg that here is an official “Quit Facebook Day” organised for May 31.
If you feel strongly enough about the approach that Facebook is taking, you may also decide to close your account to send a message to the company that you are not willing to use a service that shows such scant concern for their users privacy.
Here are just a few articles (of many!) about the recent changes that you may want to read if you need more information. It's worth getting the full story.
- The Erosion of Facebook Privacy eff.org
- Facebook Privacy Changes eff.org
- 7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook yahoo.com
- Facebook's Gone Rogue wired.com
- Top 10 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook gizmodo.com
- The Evolution Of Privacy on Facebook matt mckeon
I realise that many people find Facebook very useful, and many will not want to take the extreme step of deleting their account, but I do hope you take the time to make sure your account is sharing what you think it is, and to even perhaps share some of this conversation with your students.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
If there's one thing I hate it's when people assume I'm an idiot and try to rip me off.
So when I got home today I opened the mailbox (yes, the real one!) to find this letter from a company called the Domain Renewal Group. Their letter - which looked very much like an invoice - was addressed to me as the owner of the domain betchablog.com and kindly informed me that this domain was due for renewal soon and that I should pay this as soon as possible. The wording on the letter said that "the domain name registration is due to expire in the next few months"... and that... "Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity."
All of that is true. Betchablog.com IS coming up for renewal, and I DO need to renew it. The problem is that Domain Renewal Group are NOT my domain registrar, and they never have been. I happen to have all of my various domains registered with GoDaddy, and I've never even heard of this other mob.
A closer reading of the letter reveals that all of the statements in their letter are technically correct, but written in such as way as to be misleading and underhanded in their deceptiveness. The letter reads just like a regular renewal notice, but is in fact a transfer and renewal notice. By signing it and sending it back with payment it would authorise them not just to renew the domain, but to take the domain away from the current registrar and move it their overpriced services. How overpriced? Well, I just took a look at GoDaddy's site and it seems the going rate for a new .com domain is USD$10.69. Their price for a domain transfer with 12 months renewal is only USD$6.99. For the same thing, the Domain Renewal Group were about to charge unsuspecting or careless domain owners AUD$45 (about USD$41.50).
The thing is, there are many organisations where the bills are often paid by a different department to the ones that register the domains, that wouldn't even question such an invoice when it arrived. The wording is sneaky enough, and the format looks enough like an invoice, that many people would just pay it without even questioning it. I find this notion of trying to trick people into doing things they don't mean to do is an appalling business practice.
There happened to be a Toronto-based phone number on the form so I rang it using Skype. The guy who answered asked what he could help me with, so I told him that I was very unimpressed with this deceptive and misleading way of doing business. He sounded both surprised that someone would bother to call just to complain, but judging from his tone this was not the first time he'd had a complaint about it. His response was a careless, "Like, whatever", but he incorrectly assumed that there is nothing I can do about it other than complain.
He forgets that we live in an age where everyone is a publisher. He stupidly neglects to consider that the very customer base they are trying to mislead - those domain owners who own blogs and websites - are the exact same people who own their very own "personal printing presses" in the forms of blogs. If you're going to pull this scam-like crap on people, how stupid do you have to be to do it to people who can publicly tell the world about it?
My advice? NEVER do business with the Domain Renewal Group. Tell your friends never to do business with the Domain Renewal Group. And if I did have any domains registered with them I would be immediately transferring them elsewhere.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Big Twitter, Little Twitter
This video just went live today from New Zealand's wonderful EdTalks collection. I'd forgotten all about it, but it was recorded back in October at the ULearn conference in New Zealand. It's kind of weird looking back at things you said many months ago and had forgotten you'd even said.
Anyway, for what it's worth, here's a few thoughts about the use of Twitter for ongoing professional development, and some musings about how kids might use it (or something like it) to develop good digital citizenship skills.
Popularity: 4% [?]
VSR 32: Be Very Afraid
In this new episode of the Virtual Staffroom podcast I have the great pleasure of enjoying a casual chat with the enigmatic Professor Stephen Heppell. With a story for just about every occasion, Stephen is a absolute mine of great insights and perspectives about the future of education.
Be Very Afraid is one of Stephen’s many educational projects. It brings together students from all over the UK to showcase some incredible ICT related projects. There is some truly amazing learning taking place here. In this episode we get to hear some of the backstory to BVA as well as a few of Stephen’s personal insights about it.
We finish with a chat about education in general and some really wonderful insights into getting the best from our students.
PS: As usual this recording is posted over at the Virtual Staffroom site, but I'm going to start crossposting them here too, just to make them a little simpler to access.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:18 — 29.9MB)
So What Should We Be Amazed By?
I wrote a blog post a little while back called This is Not Amazing, and the basic thrust of it was that, after more than 30 years since "the personal computer revolution", more than 10 years of living in a post-Google World, and now almost a full decade into the 21st century, that we should stop being so amazed at things which are simply just part of our normal world. The post gave a few examples of things that are, quite frankly, pretty average tasks that can be accomplished on a personal computer and it relayed the story of how I had a day where I kept getting told how "amazing" these rather mundane tasks were, by people that were, in my estimation, too easily impressed. I tried to tie that all together by observing that we probably do our students a great disservice by being easily impressed by technologically ordinary things, since this is pretty much just the world they live in. I think when we 'ooh and ahh' over things that are simply just a regular part of our kids' worlds we make it all too obvious that we are a little out of touch.
The comments on that post were a very interesting collection of responses; from those people who nodded their heads in total agreement, to some who felt I was being a bit condescending and impatient. That certainly wasn't my intention. I must apologise for not responding to some of the comments at the time... It was the end of the school year, I had a few personal things happening at the time, and I got sidetracked in moved the blog to a new server shortly afterwards. In all of that, I didn't properly follow up on the ideas raised in that post, and I feel I really missed the opportunity to engage in more discussion about it.
For reasons that I'll tell you about later, I'm interested in pursuing a further response that blog post. In particular, I'm wondering what sort of things you think SHOULD be "amazing"? For the record, I truly believe that the world is a wonderful place with lots of incredible things going on in it, and that we should most definitely retain a childlike sense of wonder, curiosity and awe when we see things that amaze us. I just think we need to be careful about being too awestruck by things that, really, are now just a standard part of our digital landscape.
I'm trying to build a better understanding of what people think deserves to be "amazing" (and maybe what doesn't). If you wouldn't mind, could you drop a comment here about anything you've done with your students that you think really does fall into the "That's amazing!" category. I would really appreciate it. Thanks!
Image: 'Crowdsource'http://www.flickr.com/photos/38307206@N02/3649959327
Popularity: 4% [?]
Things I said recently…
- The Connective Writing Project
- Season’s Greetings
- Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.
- My Edublog Award Nominations 2011
- Happy Snappy
- The Ron in Toronto
- Steve
- Enough is Enough
- Lessons from the Yamanote Line
- G’day from Yokohama
Things you said recently…
- Graham Wegner on The Connective Writing Project
- Chris on The Connective Writing Project
- Day 4: Are You Ready to Be a 21st Century Teacher? « EDIT 2000 Spring 2012 on The Myth of the Digital Native
- Graham Wegner on The Connective Writing Project
- Graham Wegner on The Connective Writing Project
- Day 3: e-Portfolio and More about Learners « EDIT 2000 Spring 2012 on The Myth of the Digital Native
- Allanah King on The Connective Writing Project
- Peter Price on Season’s Greetings
- Joseph on Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.
- Rick on Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.
Ah, Nostalgia!
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The way I see things
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