trust

Why are Third Party Vendors Such Arses?

Posted on by Jon K.

The short answer is that they’re not. They’re experiencing culture shock between higher education and capitalism. Their goals and higher education’s are entirely different, and sometimes diametrically opposed. Sometimes they’re not, but I’ll leave that for the Marxists out there to critique.

I’ll outline a few examples, no names except for where I need a name for a tool because it’s too hard to keep using “middleware” that could mean anything from a database to a API connector to something like IFTTT. I’m not writing this to shame edtech vendors or name call, but if you are a vendor and you do these sorts of things – maybe consider stopping.

Hyper aggressive sales.

You’ve all seen this, or gotten emails day after day from the same vendor telling you about their great product. Or, you’ve been a teacher, and they call you periodically. Or more frequently. Daily even. I’ve gotten relentless edtech bros emailing me on LinkedIn then at work. By the way, if you do this and it’s part of your company culture, you do know that I mark that stuff as spam, right? All it does is create one of two things for a relationship… you either gain someone who just capitulates to you (but resents you) or you anger someone (who then holds a grudge for longer than an eon). Neither of those are great, but one is a sale. In an extreme case, you might get a cease and desist from a CIO who is tired of your harassment.

Circumventing process.

EdTech workers have definitely been asked for this sort of stuff continually. Move fast and break things is not a good mantra for education, nor public institutions. If your company wants to do it your way, rather than a standard LTI 1.3 kind of way, and then refuses to budge because your API way (to simply manage single-sign-on!) is already built, you’re an ass. If you are ever told, “we don’t just enable every option in LTI 1.3 settings” and you turn around and suggest you need all those data options – you most definitely don’t. If we have a process that we tell you takes months to go through, no, it can’t go quicker. It’s literally my job to ensure the security of the data in the system you’re trying to connect to, so work with me, not against me. It’s not my fault you left it to the last minute before semester and are trying to rush the integration through, literally using teachers as a sacrificial wedge to bypass security, privacy and accessibility. You know what that makes you.

Oh, and when the vendor agreement allows an instructor to sign off for an entire institution? That’s no good.

Data greediness.

Outlined above a little bit, but when you ask for an API integration, you should be able to easily answer “What API calls are you making?”. If you have an LTI 1.3 integration, and we ask “what do you use this data for?” you should be able to answer that within minutes of asking. Dancing around that question just raises my suspicions. You might actually need all that data. In 20 years of doing this work, and probably working on 100+ integrations with the LMS and other tools, it’s happened twice. Those two vendors were very quick to respond with what they use each data point for, how long they kept it, and why they needed it for those functions. That’s excellent service. Also that wasn’t the sales person… so yeah. Oh, and 99% of integrations between the LMS and something else can be done with LTI 1.3. Vendors out there, please use the standards. And get certified by IMS Global/1EdTech. It goes a long way to building your reputation.

Third-party malfeasance.

OK, it’s not that bad, but a new trend I’ve started seeing is a vendor using another vendor to manage something (usually data). EdLink is the sort of thing I’m thinking about here. EdLink allows easy connections between two unrelated vendors with no established connection method. So think, connecting McGraw Hill to your Student Information System (not the actual example I’m thinking of to be clear, we don’t have, or want, to connect McGraw Hill to our SIS). To be honest, this doesn’t bother me as much as some of the other grievances I’ve got – but obfuscating your partnerships and running all your data through a third-party that we don’t have an agreement with, is definitely something that raises an eyebrow or three. As one starts to think about what-if scenarios (also my job) it makes clarity around who has your data at what time and for how long all the more difficult. The service doesn’t bother me, as long as the middle-person in the scenario is an ethical partner of the vendor you’re engaging with. In many cases, you need to have a level of trust in the partner, and if they’ve shown themselves as less than trustworthy, then well, you’ve got a problem.
Again, I’m sure EdLink is fine, but when a vendor uses EdLink, and is presented with that fact, it’s a challenge for security experts as they not only have to do one analysis, but two. I understand why a vendor might try to frame EdLink as their own service, but it’s undeniable that it isn’t. So just be honest and upfront. You may pass by a team that doesn’t prioritize this level of detail, but we are not blind. We will figure it out.

One other big challenge with third-parties acting on behalf of a vendor is that if there’s a problem, you typically have to go through the vendor to access the middle person’s support team to get it rectified. This adds a layer of complexity AND time to something that was likely intended to save time and hassle for the vendor.

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Be All and Goog-All

Posted on by Jon K.

A new study is indicating that students trust Google too much – assigning it too much trust to it’s ranking algorithm. I frankly don’t see the problem with this, seeing as trust is crucial to Google’s ranking scheme – Google is based on reputation. So the results you get have to be somewhat right otherwise you’ll turn somewhere else, that was the problem with Altavista and other search engines circa 1997, the ranking schemes weren’t trustworthy. It seems to me that the authors of the study might have missed that point, or maybe the brief didn’t spell out that issue in full detail (being brief and all). Of course people trust Google, it’s right most of the time. What the article should be looking at is if it’s the correct answer. It would be interesting if in this data if Google did return unreliable results… that might be useful. Seeing as Google’s main factors in ranking are essentially crowdsourced, it might be some evidence of the wisdom of crowds.

After a bit of searching, and looking at the previous works of the author, it seems that despite previous knowledge of the subject, that she’s missed a big piece of the puzzle. In the previous piece she’s dismissed that search engine use has been generally measured by folks like Danny Sullivan who’s been tracking that sort of information for years. If you cross reference Sullivan’s work with the two or three other measuring sticks and the reported use from the sites themselves you get a good picture that Sullivan is pretty close with his findings. Again, trust built up over years of work, I trust Sullivan’s results. Lots of other people do as well, there’s a reason he’s the guy to go to when you want numbers about the web.

The premise is correct though, people need to be more critical about the media they’re consuming and sure there’s a slippery slope concerning the dominant culture overwriting less dominating culture (specifically cultures that have a minimal web presence). Just seems that the issue could’ve been dealt with deeper. It’ll be interesting to read the study when it becomes available.

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Where Journalism Can Go From Here

Posted on by Jon K.

Happy new year!

There’s been a lot of talk about the death of the newspaper over the last year. In fact, the postings and articles range from the dire to the hopeful almost dismissive (midway down the page). The main culprit is, of course, “the Internet”. Really, this economic downturn has been a chance for further consolidation of corporate assets. It’s not the Internet that has killed these small papers, it’s the (profit) margins. Here’s an idea where journalism (and newspapers) can go from here.

First thing, for full disclaimer, I’m not educated in journalism, although I use a lot of it’s tenets in my Searching The Internet Effectively course when speaking about verifying information and trust. Trust is a very fickle friend that only comes after time, and those who trust implicitly are likely to be burned somewhere along the course of time. Hopefully, these experiences come early enough and without any major damage and the person will gain experience with those situations. As an educator, and a human being, truth is very important to me. Journalism should be the attempt to discover truth, although I suspect that journalism (…not truth) currently resides in the realm of entertainment or at a minimum, distraction.

So with Google working on better search results for you, personally, and a world of apps for the iPhone that focus on geo-location, you’d think local news would be important. Local news is important. So much so, it saved the Birmingham Eccentric from the axe. Yes, the paper was transferred to being a weekly, but newspapers bringing recent news died in the 80’s with a refocusing on TV news. Certainly the rise of cable news and CNN Headline News being a 24 hour news channel for the headlines, helped nail the coffin for breaking news in newspapers. News from your newspaper should contain stories tailored to the location. Yes, I know that this is taught to journalism students everywhere, but it seems like it is ignored. I know that corporate media recycle their wire stories for several different communities, and I’m sure it’s a fairly commonplace activity. Why?

Newspapers aren’t breaking immediate news anymore, so why focus on what isn’t their strength?

Newspapers should be bringing more in depth news, the “why” in the stories. Part of the “why” should be the reason an article is appearing in the local paper. In “Made to Stick“, the book by Chip and Dan Heath, they talk about relevance and how it is important to transmit the relevance of information to an audience. One of the examples of relevance to an audience was about how a local paper focused almost exclusively on local news. If this simple idea of making things relevant to people works, why aren’t people using it? The term for the “why” in a story has become a part of slow news. Much like the local food and slow food movements, slow news can bring a better and deeper understanding of ideas, relevant to people in a community (you can get your Jane Jacobs texts out now to define community). Pausing to reflect on an incident, newspapers can provide this in depth clarification and corrections to the initial news “outbreak” via cable news and online sources that are, ahem, questionable.

You can even have spicy tag-lines, “News you can really trust” and prove it. From a business sense, people are looking for trust, honesty and things we are sorely lacking from our public institutions. Perhaps, a refocused and brave cadre of journalists can bring that to society.  Plus it’ll save paper where they used to be printing corrections (that no one read anyways).

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