privacy

(Ex) Twitter

Posted on by Jon K.

I was an early adopter of Twitter, circa 2007 or so, but didn’t really get going for a couple years. I really loved it. While Jack Dorsey wasn’t an ideal CEO, and his vision and mine often differed, I didn’t believe his motives were anything but to build a business that he could eventually sell and disappear off into the clouds with millions of dollars. So, I understood why he and his company left hateful speech up (it engages/enrages people) but eventually someone would be so heinous to get it taken down. Then 2016 happened, and well, America elected a guy who says the racist, sexist, hateful things out loud. In 2022, that Elon Musk fella bought it and I knew it was going to become a worse place. To be honest, I kinda’ stopped with Twitter (and all social media) during the pandemic. Sure, I’d browse through feeds, and out of all of them, Twitter was still useful – someone would post something at least once a day that would be click-worthy.

Twitter is no longer useful. With different people scattered across the multitudes of places (Mastadon for some, Bluesky for others and any number of other places for many more) educational technology is worse off.

In the face of the rampant racism, being lead by a man-child who does it all for the lols, I can’t be there any more, and I don’t want my 14 year old account to represent me there anymore. I left it in the slight chance this wouldn’t happen, but it did.

I haven’t really thought about how I’ll replace the serendipity of Twitter. Of finding someone working on bullshit detection, or commentary about how Google’s ethics team was rapidly fired – or more important things like the Arab spring uprising and the Hong Kong protests. Or more mundane things like Mandarake’s posts about keshi from their store in Nakano Broadway. If you follow that link, welcome to my new obsession, Onion Fighter.

Now I did the right thing and downloaded my archive. I don’t know if they make sense to republish without the context of the surrounding conversation… or if it’s even feasible. Oh well, end of an era. Hope we find each other, wherever we end up!

No comments yet

ETEC 511: New Foundations of Educational Technology

Posted on by Jon K.

This was a core course and to me the framing of the course was slightly confusing. We talked about tools, and the two phenomenological positions that tools might occupy (tools control and condition us; tools are controlled by us). To me that was the key feature of the course, but it was clouded with some distracting approaches to the readings – there was never a key linkage back to the core concept of the course, and while that makes for a challenging course… it also makes for a confusing effort. The assessments never made a clear connection to the theoretical approach – in fact the rubrics had to be consulted to see the connections, which again could be the way the instructor approaches the course, and could be the way the course itself was constructed. I liked the use of other tools, however, I really really wish this program would be really student-centered and allow US to select the tools we want to use for communication. There’s a lot of hand-waving about student focused (at one point, the instructor made a point of saying “the LMS is terrible for teaching” to which I wanted to respond, the LMS isn’t doing the teaching… it’s the place we the students are looking to keep track of stuff). We used Slack, which I have a personal set of problems with (the threading of the chat is limited at best; search is abyssmal; I really have a problem with the way sub-channels? group conversations? are managed) which seemed to be more of the instructor’s choice rather than a collaborative effort.

And if one was concerned about student data being in a private, for-profit, hosted in the US system like Slack when Mattermost is available free to any UBC user makes a ton of sense…. but alas.

Technical choices aside, although in an educational technology course I don’t think you can put them aside, this course was disjointed, the assessments were all over the place – the individual assignments worth 5% apiece – some were written; some required media elements to be designed. There was no equivalency in the time spent between them. I can write a page in about a couple hours of focused work. I can create a video in about a day. In the end, I didn’t really want to engage with any of them as they were all duplicating effort based on the weekly readings and discussions we had already on the topics. While I did find the variety of topics engaging, some of the assignments made some gross errors of assumption. Like I can’t control the use of my phone. Or I don’t use my technology critically. I’ve been working in technology related fields since the late 90’s. I was early in on designing web pages. I saw some of the first javascripts to alter peoples behaviour on webpages (this was in 1997 advertising to draw people’s mouse pointers to elements, think image maps with gravity wells to slow mouse speed and to subtly draw their pointer to hover over objects with pop up descriptions). I taught a course on searching the web as Google moved to a semantic engine for analyzing search results, thus shifting their focus on quality search to engagement on search and selling advertising. The majority of the general populace may not be attentive to attention; but the people in a Master’s level program about technology should be paying attention. Professionals in the field damn well better be. I’m sure that particular assignment about attention could be framed more neutrally.

I realize the design has to hit both audiences for these courses – teachers new to the field and educational professionals who are seeking a post-graduate level degree (like myself).

I was shocked that there was no readings whatsoever about danah boyd’s work, or Ursula Franklin or Neil Postman (beyond the one article) or well, any of the history of the Internet. I’m lucky to have lived through it, but if you’re talking about the foundations of educational technology, you’re talking about the foundations of the world wide web. If you’re talking about the foundation of educational technology outside of the basic roots of web-based instruction – you really need to start talking about Audrey Waters most recent book, Teaching Machines. If you’re talking about online communities you need to include Howard Rheingold’s works. I guess the foundations course I’d design is far-and-widely different than what UBC has done. That’s fine, and probably the perspective I need to hear, rather than the perspective I’d want to hear. Most of that work was done outside academia. It’s not lost on me that most of the educational technology work is historically at-risk as it’s been published on the open web and not in academic journals.

Outside of that, I really, really loved the first thing we did in the course, which was take time to think about settler relationships with indigenous populations through text analysis. It was a thoughtful exercise and I’m constantly thinking about how I can fold that into our work as educational technologists.

No comments yet

Why Can’t Students Opt-Out of Data Collection in Higher Ed?

Posted on by Jon K.

You know, for all the talk from EdTech vendors about being student centred (and let’s face it, LMS’s and most of the other products are not student centred) and all the focus on data collection from student activity – why don’t products have an easy opt-out (being student centred and all that) to not allow data to be collected?

What makes matters worse in many ways is that the data collection is hidden from student’s view. For instance, in many LMS’s they track time spent on content items or files uploaded. This tracking is never made explicit to the student unless they go and dig into their own data. And doing that is incredibly difficult and you don’t get a complete picture of what is being collected. If I was a more conspiratorial minded person, I’d suggest that it was done on purpose to make it hard to understand the amount of total surveillance that is accessible by a “teacher” or “administrator”. I’m not. I honestly believe that the total surveillance of students in the LMS is really about feature creep, where one request turned into more requests for more information. LMS’s on the other hand want to keep their customers happy, so why not share what information they have with their clients, after all it’s their data isn’t it?

Actually, it’s not. It’s not the client’s data. It’s the individual’s data. To argue otherwise is to claim that what someone does is not their own – it reduces agency to a hilariously outdated and illogical idea.

The individual, human, user should be allowed to share or not share this data, with teachers, with institutions or with external companies that host that data in an agreement with an institution that probably was signed without them even knowing it. There’s an element of data as a human right that we should be thinking about. As an administrator I have a policy I have to adhere to, and a personal set of ethics that frankly are more important to me (and more stringent) than the obscurely written-in-legalese policy. An unscrupulous, or outright negligent LMS administrator would mean that all bets would be off. They could do things in the LMS that no one, except another administrator, could track. Even then, the other administrator would have to know enough to be able to look at all the hundreds of different changelogs, scattered across different tools, across different courses and do essentially a forensic search that could take a good long time to undo any damage. That lack of checks and balances (a turn of phrase that appears purposefully as I think we’ll see what a lack of checks and balances will be like in the US the next few years) which could be implemented as part of using the system, but aren’t, leaves education in precarious situations.

The idea that the data locked in the LMS without the students being able to say, “I only want my data shared with my College” or “I only want my data shared with company X for the purposes of improving the system” shouldn’t be hard to implement. So why hasn’t it been done? Or, even talked about?

In my opinion, the data that gets harvested (anonymously of course) provides more important information to the company about how people use the system than the optics of having an opt-out button. It allows Blackboard to say how instructors use their system. We could talk about how terrifying this blog post is (instructor use is a proxy for how students use the system because LMSs give power to instructors to construct the student’s experience), or devoid of solid analysis. I’ll deal with the analysis later, so let’s just consider how this is entirely without context.  Blackboard hosted sites have been harvested (probably with the consent of the people who signed the contracts, not the instructors who actually create things on the system, or the students who engage in the system) by Blackboard to tell you how you teach. In one of the cited pieces, Blackboard says that they used this data to improve their notifications. If I put this through for ethics review, and said I’m going to look at notifications improvement and then released a post about how people used the whole system, it may very well be in their rights (and I suspect it is) but it is ethically murky. The fact they’ve released it to the public allows the public to ask these questions, but no one really has? Or if they have, I missed it.

The fact that Blackboard can do this (and I’m talking about Blackboard because they did it, but there’s a similar post from Canvas that’s making the rounds about discussion posts with video being more engaging or some such idea) without really clearing this with any client is chilling. It also constrains how we perceive we are able to use the LMS (it sets the standards for how it is used).

2 Comments

Digital Marginalia 2 – Electric Boogaloo

Posted on by Jon K.

Digital Marginalia is an infrequent blog post series that captures some links I’ve retweeted or looked at, grouped into a theme, and commented on.

Disrupting Education/Learning – Whatever that Means

There’s two related bunch of links that are tied here; the first being the onslaught of Richard Branson, Disrupting Education:

http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/disrupting-old-education-models

http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/education-outside-the-classroom

And the response:

What disruptors really want

http://cogdogblog.com/2015/10/05/richard-branson/

It’s strange because I understand what Branson’s saying, and yes, education needs more flexible education. But to criticize something he doesn’t really know, because he didn’t go into it forty years ago, and isn’t part of it now, and clearly doesn’t get that in fact, higher education does do a lot of the things he says it doesn’t. Business schools basically train their graduates to be startups. Many, many MBA programs have that as their overarching theme. Our Master’s level Engineering program is based on a business project model with real clients. We aren’t unique in this. Our Geography department have several trips to real world places to do the work that they will do post-graduation. When I went to community college a decade ago, we took several entrepreneurship classes, because they knew that software designers would likely be their own bosses. Should things be more flexible? Yes. Often the reason things aren’t flexible is because someone, somewhere along the line bought a student information system that can’t schedule things in less than three hour blocks, or doesn’t understand that a course isn’t 14 weeks. That’s the sort of flexibility that the private sector brings you. Get real, Branson. Martin Weller said it better (first link under responses) so go read his post and give it some love because it’s so terribly spot on.

https://www.lrng.org/

“LRNG redesigns learning for the 21st century so that all youth have an opportunity to succeed.”

Really, I don’t have any non-vulgar words… OK here’s a fact you may want to consider, YOU CANNOT REDESIGN HOW I LEARN. I control how I learn. YOU control how you communicate information to me; I control how I receive that information. If you do not agree, then you are working on a paradigm that reinforces that students are empty vessels that need to be filled with knowledge. Again, I agree with connecting someone’s passion with learning, doing it through an online medium, sure that’s awesome. I love the Cities of Learning program, I really do. Just “redesigning learning” is like saying you’re “redesigning eating”.

Closing of the Open Web

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/06/reddit-upvoted-launches-aggregated-news-site–with-no-comments-allowed

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/im-on-twitter-too

Commenting, whether you think it valuable or not, is one of the best features of the world wide web. The amount of time I’ve found something in the comments of an article that links to another great thing is staggering to think about. The Vice thing is kind of delicious, in that after years of cultivating this vacuous audience (looks directly at Dos & Don’ts) they now want a civilized discussion. I guess people can grow up, but instead of turning off comments, why don’t you do like many other places and cultivate the commentary by moderating it. That way, you approve the good stuff and your audience doesn’t have to change the way they interact with the site.

Privacy

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/09/28/deep-learning-privacy-research-gets-google-go-ahead.aspx

Google and privacy? Uhhh, the jokes write themselves.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-see-what-facebook-tells-advertisers-about-you

Undoubtedly, not all of what Facebook tells itself about you.

Manditory watching. Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important journalists of our time. Seriously undervalued/rated.

 

 

 

 

 

No comments yet

i>Clicker Integration with D2L/Brightspace

Posted on by Jon K.

I’m sure i>Clicker won’t be particularly happy with this post, that’s ok, because I’m not happy with them. The one thing as an LMS administrator that you should feel very, very sanctimonious about is sharing data. We have an internal policy that we’ll never share student numbers. I also think that we shouldn’t share usernames, however some folks feel that’s ok. I guess it depends on your username convention. First dot last as a convention is great, except in these cases when you’re trying to maintain privacy. Now, if you’re making a single sign on connection through LTI, you can have the originating LMS username obfuscated, which essentially boils down to a paired database table that has two usernames in it – the one handed off to the third party via LTI, and the one in the LMS. Typically, I’m a little bristly about this as well, because you become reliant on the system not changing how this is handled, and if there’s an HTTP call mixed in there, it still could be sniffed out while in transit… but that’s not what this post is about.

Since last year, I’ve been bugged by i>Clicker to do an integration to make sign-up with their service seamless for students. There has been some requests for integration between i>Clicker and the gradebook in D2L from some of the more heavy users. The first request, I’ve always put off because, frankly, I don’t do anything a private enterprise wants me to do, they aren’t my boss, nor are they a member of my community. They serve one purpose, and that’s collecting money. The second, however, does benefit a select user group on campus. We were thinking about this since last year’s summer of integration, and April had a couple minutes free (more on that in forthcoming blog posts), so we scheduled some time to finally make it happen.

We schedule a call, to walk us through the integration and see if there’s anything that we have questions about. I don’t need anyone to walk me through an integration, but I often like to raise privacy, data collection policies, and other awkward questions to the poor sucker who’s on the end of the other line. Typically they are ill informed. I didn’t even get to the awkward stage, as a request was made that was frankly shocking. I was asked to turn on passing the Org Defined ID – or our student number – to facilitate the connection. Not just at the tool level, but at the configuration for the Tool Information. See below:

config_tool_consumer (1) Now if I understand this panel correctly, it not only changes the configuration settings for the tool in question, but for all the tools. ALL the tools. So not only i>Clicker, but anything else you have connected through using the External Learning Tools administration panel. I asked our technical account manager about changing it, and he basically said, “yeah, that’s not good.”

So in the middle of this exchange where I explain how we don’t pass the student number under any circumstances, the i>Clicker representative seemed to be a little miffed about my protests. He wasn’t particularly nasty about it, but certainly didn’t seem to understand why this was an issue at all. Looking at i>Clicker’s website, students are asked for their ID. It’s different asking a student to give them their ID (consent) and setting up access to everyone’s ID (no consent).

What makes me wonder is, how many other institutions even give this a thought? Surely we can’t be the first person to balk at the idea of handing over student data like this? Or maybe we are being too paranoid? I mean, I guess there’s people who have faith in the third-party vendors, but I’d prefer having a license, stating exactly what they are doing with data, how they’re using it, how long it’s retained and an agreement signed between the two parties. That way if the external party violates the agreement, the institution can hold them liable for the data breech – something a little stiffer than “oops”.

No comments yet

RSS is the Most Important Web 2.0 Tool (for Privacy)

Posted on by Jon K.

RSS is the most important web 2.0 tool because it respects your privacy. When you pull information from another user – they know much less about you than when you read it on their website. They can’t set cookies.

When you read at a distance through RSS, at your convenience, your information isn’t given to the server you’re reading it on via cookie – no time or date stamp, no location rough estimate via IP, no browser information, no information about whether your using a mobile device or not – in fact most of that is irrelevant. It’s about the content of your post. You can choose to interact by posting a comment, which then can give the owner of the feed a bit of information should they want to.

It’s like standing in the square, yelling into a megaphone, announcing some great feat. Some will just listen, some may yell back in opposition, some will walk away. This is how the web should work.

This brief post was inspired by several, but most recently this post at O’Reilly Media about RSS decentralization and Dave Winer’s brilliant but underused RSS Cloud.

No comments yet

Always-On/Off/On?

Posted on by Jon K.

As we move to  a pervasive, constantly connected state – and isn’t mobile just another word for everywhere – what does this mean for us as a whole? We’re already struggling for a work-life balance – and stresses are showing at the margins already. People are overwhelmed, unable to keep up and give up. These people are the new impoverished. Impoverished in the sense that they can’t control, manage and then articulate themselves in an information-rich environment. Will this mean a backlash? What will people do?

One thing might be that people create areas of their lives that are unavailable to networks – in essence a “safe room” or along the lines of a sensory deprivation tank. I can see this being something that futuristic home builders might already be working on; a bedroom where no wireless or cellphone network can access. Where else would you want this? Anywhere your privacy might be important. We’ve seen what happens when two people in a relationship at distance will do to show their love (lust), and then later embarrass the other in a revenge plot. Emotions can get in the way. I see the Japanese inventing private hotels, much like the love hotels they have now to service young couples who have no privacy at home.

As we see the Internet of things evolve, we’ll need these sorts of strategies to allow maybe our fridge, stove and phone to talk, but not our fridge and furnace. And this opens hackers to having a real effect on human lives – if we trust devices to tell us we’re out of milk – does that mean a hacker could get us to buy two dozen bags of milk because they spoof a message from the fridge? Brings a whole new meaning to “your fridge is running… you better go catch it”.

This post was inspired by:

Mobile Trends 2020

View more presentations from rudydw.
No comments yet

Who’s Watching The Wikimen, Or Wikipeople

Posted on by Jon K.

I just found in a random search (for editing Wikipedia) an article by Wired about an effort to see who’s editing the world’s largest encyclopedia. I have some privacy reservations about this sort of third party monitoring, especially if corporations are turning the screws on people writing about their excesses. I guess though, if everyone can do it, everyone should. Of course, corporations are the sort of bodies that have people who can spare the time to do this sort of activity, which could lead to that sort of misuse. Now, I’m sure that’s not happening, because corporations never behave badly. Right?

No comments yet