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Net Inclusion 2019

Net Inlcusion 2019

https://netinclusion2019.sched.com/

Local Government Digital Equity Plans
Municipal governments are in the forefront of local, collaborative digital access and equity planning. Local leaders will talk about the value of planning, the nuts and bolts of making a plan, and the outcomes of their planning efforts.

How Broadband Adoption Affects Community Prosperity and Opportunity
This research shows that it is more inclusive communities that experience better economic outcomes; that digital inclusion leads to economic benefits at the community level.  Disparities in broadband adoption over time also track the widening inequalities that have become apparent across regions and communities in the U.S., and digital inclusion is a necessary part of policy solutions for narrowing place-based gaps in economic opportunity.

New Tools and Materials for Digital Literacy Training and Assessment
Moderated discussion of the variety of approaches to digital literacy training and management: including the use of volunteers, class structures, certifications, use of online tools, curriculum, etc.

The Young and the Digital

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Beacon Press.

Book review

The young and the digital: What migration to social-networking sites, games, and anytime, anywhere media means for our future, by S. Craig Watkins
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/357/227

p. 1 Digital Migration: young people’s historic move to the online world
p. 8 broadband adoption in 2005-6. p. 9 before broadband, Internet was more textual then visual. p. 11 broadband more then just expand technical capabilities paved the way for profund behavioral shifts and social transformation
Broadband did not create radically new online activities. But expand a relatively small collection of early adopting technophiles into a massive but highly differentiated public of netizens, world builders, blogger, gamers, social networkers, content creators

p. 19 Social Media 101 what schools are learning about themselves and young technology users.
p. 20 DOPA (the Delete Online Predators Act), p. 21 brought the elimination of most interactive web applications from public schools and libraries. Social-Web enthusiasts strongly opposed DOPA. ALA also.
p. 24 MacArthur Foundation’s white paper: Living and Learning with New Media”
p. 30 NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration
p. 36 mother allowed her teenage daughter to use Facebook. The one caveat: the mother would be able to access her daughter’s profile. A common practice. A mother of a fifteen year old boy who recently started using FB occasionally looks at his page. 2007 Pew writes that “41% of today’s teens believe that their parents monitor them after they’ve gone online.” This is not unusual.
p. 41 schools cannot punish for what happened at home. But what about what happened online? Referring to social media: when kids get into disagreements via FB, it often spills over into the schools.
p. 44 sexting.
p. 47 the very well connected: friending, bonding and community in the digital age
p. 52 Malcolm Wiley and Stuart Rice 1933 argued that technology such as the automobile and telephone hastened the unraveling of the social fabric of the American life.
p. 72 phatic exchanges. Vetere, Howward and Gibbs. Brief but sencere. Katz James E and Mark Aakhus call “perpetual contact.”
p. 75 Digital Gates
How race and class distinctions are shaping the digital world
dana boyd 2007 article “Viewing American Class Divisions through FB and MySpace.”
p. 77 Hargittai Facebook is more white then MySpace.
p. 99 television and social network sites represent two fundamentally different kinds of mediated experiences. Whereas television is about watching and consuming, SNS are primarily about doing and sharing.
p. 100 Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner There.com – the virtual world may not prove to be a perfect utopian gateway from the real world.
p. 103 We Play: the allure of social games, synthetic worlds and secnd lives.
p. 106 a growing number of young men are turning to interactive entertainment like games rather than television and movies as their first source for leisure and a desired choice for social interaction with their friends.
p. 131 heavy users of virtual worlds differ from the 68% of young people, who believe that online-only relationships can be as fulfilling as off-line relationships. Synthetic world users are much more likely to believe that online relationships can be just as fulfilling as off-line relationships.
p. 133 Hooked Rethinking the Internet addition debate
p. 134 valid mental disorder. Journal of American Psychiatry 2007 – Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) for DSM-IV. P. 136 some of the problems researchers

 

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more about youth teenagers and social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/10/08/media-literacy-backfire/

corporate monopoly or public control net neutrality

Net Neutrality is just the beginning

Interview with Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard, associate professor of communication at the University Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, whose research focuses on internet policy and the political economy of media.

https://www.academia.edu/35305972/Net_Neutrality_Is_Just_the_Beginning

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/net-neutrality-fcc-ajit-pai-monopoly

with each new victory for the American telecommunications oligopoly, that digital optimism fades further from view.

Definition:

Net neutrality protections are essentially safeguards that prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from interfering with the internet. Net neutrality gives the FCC the regulatory authority to prevent ISPs like Comcast and Verizon from slowing down or blocking certain types of content. It also prevents them from offering what’s known as paid prioritization, where an ISP could let particular websites or content creators pay more for faster streaming and download times. With paid prioritization an ISP could shake down a company like Netflix or an individual website owner, coercing them to pay more in order to be in the fast lane.

Net neutrality often gets treated as a sort of technocratic squabble over ownership and control of internet pipes. But in fact it speaks to a core social contract between government, corporations, and the public. What it really comes down to is, how can members of the public obtain information and services, and express ourselves creatively and politically, without interference from massive corporations?

Should we think of the internet as a good, a service, an infrastructure, or something else?

It’s all of the above.

The internet has been radically privatized. It wasn’t inevitable, but through policy decisions over the years, the internet has become increasingly commodified. Meanwhile it’s really difficult to imagine living in modern society without fast internet services — it’s no longer a luxury but a necessity for everything ranging from education to health to livelihood. The “digital divide” is a phrase that sounds like it’s from the 1990s, but it’s still very relevant. Somewhere around one fifth of American households don’t have access to wireline broadband services. It’s a social problem. We should be thinking about the internet as a public service and subsidizing it to make sure that everyone has access.

In your recent book on media democracy, you discuss the rise of what you call “corporate libertarianism.” What is corporate libertarianism and how does it relate to net neutrality?

Corporate libertarianism is an ideological project that has origins at a core moment in the 1940s. It sees corporations as having individual freedoms, like those in the First Amendment, which they can use to shield themselves from public interest oversight and regulation. It’s also often connected to this assumption that the government should never intervene in markets, and media markets in particular. (My note: Milton Friedman)

Of course, this is a libertarian mythology — the government is always involved. The question ought to be how it should be involved. Under corporate libertarianism it’s assumed that the government should only be involved in ways that enhance profit maximization for communication oligopolies.

There are clear dangers associated with vertical integration, where the company that owns the pipes is able to control the dissemination of information, and able to set the terms by which we access that information.
There have been cases like this already. In 2005, the company Telus, which is the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website that supported a labor strike against Telus.

Net neutrality is just one part of the story. What other regulations, policies and interventions could resist corporate control of the internet?

Roughly half of Americans live in communities that have access to only one ISP.  My note: Ha Ha Ha, “pick me, pick me,” as Dori from “Finding Nemo” will say… Charter, whatever they will rename themselves again, is the crass example in Central MN.

Strategies to contain and confront monopolies:

  • break them up, and to prevent monopolies and oligopolies from happening in the first place by blocking mergers and acquisitions.
  • if we’re not going to outright nationalize them then we want to heavily regulate them, and enforce some kind of social contract where they’re compelled to provide a public service in exchange for the right to operate.
  • create public alternatives, like municipal wireless networks that can circumvent and compete with corporate monopolies. There’s a growing number of these publicly owned and governed internet infrastructures, and building more is crucial.

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more on #netNeutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

FCC and netneutrality

https://hackernoon.com/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6

Jeff Kao Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Language Nerd, Biglaw Refugee. jeffykao.com

More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/fcc-net-neutrality.html

The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for internet service companies to charge users more to see certain content and to curb access to some websites.

The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.

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FCC chairman defends net neutrality repeal plan

“All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet,” Pai said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,”

Pai on Tuesday confirmed his plan to fully dismantle the Obama-era net neutrality rules, which were approved by the FCC’s previous Democratic majority in 2015. His order would remove bans on blocking and throttling web traffic and allow internet service providers to charge for internet “fast lanes” to consumers. The move sparked a barrage of criticism from Democrats and public interest groups who call it a giveaway to big telecom companies.

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What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 06.23.14TIME OF PUBLICATION: 6:30 AM.

The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.

in today’s world, they don’t address the real issue with the country’s ISPs, and if we spend too much time worried about fast lanes, we could hurt the net’s progress rather than help it.

The real issue is that the Comcasts and Verizons are becoming too big and too powerful. Because every web company has no choice but to go through these ISPs, the Comcasts and the Verizons may eventually have too much freedom to decide how much companies must pay for fast speeds.

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FAKE AMERICANS ARE INFLUENCING THE DEBATE OVER NET NEUTRALITY, SAYS NEW YORK’S ATTORNEY GENERAL

http://www.newsweek.com/bots-influencing-debate-over-net-neutrality-says-new-york-attorney-general-719454
An analysis of the millions of comments conducted by the data company Gravwell in October found that just 17.4 percent of the comments to the FCC on the net neutrality rules came from real people.
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Finley, K. (2017, November 22). Here’s How the End of Net Neutrality Will Change the Internet. WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/heres-how-the-end-of-net-neutrality-will-change-the-internet/
Because many internet services for mobile devices include limits on data use, the changes will be visible there first. In one dramatic scenario, internet services would begin to resemble cable-TV packages, where subscriptions could be limited to a few dozen sites and services. Or, for big spenders, a few hundred. Fortunately, that’s not a likely scenario. Instead, expect a gradual shift towards subscriptions that provide unlimited access to certain preferred providers while charging extra for everything else.
Even Verizon’s “unlimited” plans impose limits. The company’s cheapest unlimited mobile plan limits video streaming quality to 480p resolution, which is DVD quality, on phones and 720p resolution, the lower tier of HD quality, on tablets. Customers can upgrade to a more expensive plan that enables 720p resolution on phones and 1080p on tablets, but the higher quality 4K video standard is effectively forbidden.
Meanwhile, Comcast customers in 28 states face 1 terabyte data caps. Going over that limit costs subscribers as much as an additional $50 a month. As 4K televisions become more common, more households may hit the limit. That could prompt some to stick with a traditional pay-TV package from Comcast.
Republican FCC Chair Ajit Pai argues that Federal Trade Commission will be able to protect consumers and small business from abuses by internet providers once the agency’s current rules are off the books. But that’s not clear.
The good news is the internet won’t change overnight, if it all. Blake Reid, a clinical professor at Colorado Law, says the big broadband providers will wait to see how the inevitable legal challenges to the new FCC order shakeout. They’ll probably keep an eye on 2018 and even 2020 elections as well.

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more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

NMC Horizon Report 2017 K12

NMC/CoSN Horizon Report 2017 K–12 Edition

https://cdn.nmc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017-nmc-cosn-horizon-report-K12-advance.pdf
p. 16 Growing Focus on Measuring Learning
p. 18 Redesigning Learning Spaces
Biophilic Design for Schools : The innate tendency in human beings to focus on life and lifelike processes is biophilia

p. 20 Coding as a Literacy

 https://www.facebook.com/bracekids/
Best Coding Tools for High School http://go.nmc.org/bestco

p. 24

Significant Challenges Impeding Technology Adoption in K–12 Education
Improving Digital Literacy.
 Schools are charged with developing students’ digital citizenship, ensuring mastery of responsible and appropriate technology use, including online etiquette and digital rights and responsibilities in blended and online learning settings. Due to the multitude of elements comprising digital literacy, it is a challenge for schools to implement a comprehensive and cohesive approach to embedding it in curricula.
Rethinking the Roles of Teachers.
Pre-service teacher training programs are also challenged to equip educators with digital and social–emotional competencies, such as the ability to analyze and use student data, amid other professional requirements to ensure classroom readiness.
p. 28 Improving Digital Literacy
Digital literacy spans across subjects and grades, taking a school-wide effort to embed it in curricula. This can ensure that students are empowered to adapt in a quickly changing world
Education Overview: Digital Literacy Has to Encompass More Than Social Use

What Web Literacy Skills are Missing from Learning Standards? Are current learning standards addressing the essential web literacy skills everyone should know?https://medium.com/read-write-participate/what-essential-web-skills-are-missing-from-current-learning-standards-66e1b6e99c72

 

web literacy;
alignment of stadards

The American Library Association (ALA) defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate or share information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” While the ALA’s definition does align to some of the skills in “Participate”, it does not specifically mention the skills related to the “Open Practice.”

The library community’s digital and information literacy standards do not specifically include the coding, revision and remixing of digital content as skills required for creating digital information. Most digital content created for the web is “dynamic,” rather than fixed, and coding and remixing skills are needed to create new content and refresh or repurpose existing content. Leaving out these critical skills ignores the fact that library professionals need to be able to build and contribute online content to the ever-changing Internet.

p. 30 Rethinking the Roles of Teachers

Teachers implementing new games and software learn alongside students, which requires
a degree of risk on the teacher’s part as they try new methods and learn what works
p. 32 Teaching Computational Thinking
p. 36 Sustaining Innovation through Leadership Changes
shift the role of teachers from depositors of knowledge to mentors working alongside students;
p. 38  Important Developments in Educational Technology for K–12 Education
Consumer technologies are tools created for recreational and professional purposes and were not designed, at least initially, for educational use — though they may serve well as learning aids and be quite adaptable for use in schools.
Drones > Real-Time Communication Tools > Robotics > Wearable Technology
Digital strategies are not so much technologies as they are ways of using devices and software to enrich teaching and learning, whether inside or outside the classroom.
> Games and Gamification > Location Intelligence > Makerspaces > Preservation and Conservation Technologies
Enabling technologies are those technologies that have the potential to transform what we expect of our devices and tools. The link to learning in this category is less easy to make, but this group of technologies is where substantive technological innovation begins to be visible. Enabling technologies expand the reach of our tools, making them more capable and useful
Affective Computing > Analytics Technologies > Artificial Intelligence > Dynamic Spectrum and TV White Spaces > Electrovibration > Flexible Displays > Mesh Networks > Mobile Broadband > Natural User Interfaces > Near Field Communication > Next Generation Batteries > Open Hardware > Software-Defined Networking > Speech-to-Speech Translation > Virtual Assistants > Wireless Powe
Internet technologies include techniques and essential infrastructure that help to make the technologies underlying how we interact with the network more transparent, less obtrusive, and easier to use.
Bibliometrics and Citation Technologies > Blockchain > Digital Scholarship Technologies > Internet of Things > Syndication Tools
Learning technologies include both tools and resources developed expressly for the education sector, as well as pathways of development that may include tools adapted from other purposes that are matched with strategies to make them useful for learning.
Adaptive Learning Technologies > Microlearning Technologies > Mobile Learning > Online Learning > Virtual and Remote Laboratories
Social media technologies could have been subsumed under the consumer technology category, but they have become so ever-present and so widely used in every part of society that they have been elevated to their own category.
Crowdsourcing > Online Identity > Social Networks > Virtual Worlds
Visualization technologies run the gamut from simple infographics to complex forms of visual data analysis
3D Printing > GIS/Mapping > Information Visualization > Mixed Reality > Virtual Reality
p. 46 Virtual Reality
p. 48 AI
p. 50 IoT

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more on NMC Horizon Reports in this IMS blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=new+media+horizon

student privacy

Report: Tech Companies Are Spying on Children Through Devices and Software Used in Classroom

By Richard Chang 04/17/17

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/04/17/report-tech-companies-are-spying-on-children-through-devices-and-software-used-in-classroom.aspx

according to a new report from the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

shows that state and federal laws, as well as industry self-regulation, have failed to keep up with a growing education technology industry.

One-third of all K–12 students in the United States use school-issued devices running software and apps that collect far more information on kids than is necessary.

Resource-poor school districts can receive these tools at deeply discounted prices or for free, as tech companies seek a slice of the $8 billion ed tech industry. But there’s a real, devastating cost — the tracking, cataloging and exploitation of data about children as young as 5 years old.

Our report shows that the surveillance culture begins in grade school, which threatens to normalize the next generation to a digital world in which users hand over data without question in return for free services

EFF surveyed more than 1,000 stakeholders across the country, including students, parents, teachers and school administrators, and reviewed 152 ed tech privacy policies.

“Spying on Students” provides comprehensive recommendations for parents, teachers, school administrators and tech companies to improve the protection of student privacy. Asking the right questions, negotiating for contracts that limit or ban data collection, offering families the right to opt out, and making digital literacy and privacy part of the school curriculum are just a few of the 70-plus recommendations for protecting student privacy contained in the report.

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more on students and privacy
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=student+privacy
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy+government

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/03/us-senate-votes-50-48-away-broadband-privacy-rules-let-isps-telecoms-sell-internet-history/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/28/the-house-just-voted-to-wipe-out-the-fccs-landmark-internet-privacy-protections/?utm_term=.34ed3dce7494

 

K12 mobile learning

CoSN Survey: Mobile Learning Top Priority for K–12 IT Leaders

By Richard Chang 04/04/17

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/04/04/cosn-survey-mobile-learning-top-priority-for-k12-it-leaders.aspx

Mobile learning is the top priority for K–12 IT leaders, according to the fifth annual K–12 IT Leadership Survey published by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

It’s the first time mobile learning ranked as the highest priority in the survey. The No. 2 priority is broadband and network capacity, which ranked first last year, and the No. 3 priority is cybersecurity and privacy, with 62 percent of respondents rating them more important than last year.

  • Understaffing remains a key issue for technology departments in school systems.
  • Single sign-on (SSO) is the most implemented interoperability initiative
  • More than one-third of IT leaders expressed no interest in bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives, up from 20 percent in 2014.
  • Interest in open educational resources (OER) is high
  • Education technology experience is common among IT leaders
  • Strong academic backgrounds are also prevalent among IT leaders.
  • Lack of diversity continues to be an issue for school district technology leaders.

CoSN is a nonprofit association for school system technology leaders. To read or download the full IT leadership survey, visit this CoSN site.

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more on mobile learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mobile+learning

trump netneutrality

Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules

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more on net neutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

net neutrality back in court

5 Things To Know: Net Neutrality Is Back In Court

It’s the third time in less than a decade that the FCC’s attempts to regulate Internet access have been challenged in court.

1. The key question the court will answer is whether the FCC had proper authority to reclassify broadband Internet as a more heavily regulated telecommunications service.

2. Reclassification is at the heart of the industry’s legal challenge.

3. Another part of the new rules the court will consider will be whether mobile Internet and cable Internet should be regulated the same way.

4. Not much has changed since the rules went into effect in June.

5. Whatever this court decides, net neutrality will likely end up at the Supreme Court.

more on Net Neutrality in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=net+neutrality&submit=Search

Net Neutrality

The companies lobbying furiously against strong net neutrality, in one chart

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/7196761/net-neutrality-lobbying

The companies lobbying furiously against strong net neutrality

What is network neutrality?

Consumers generally connect to the internet one of two ways. They can subscribe to a residential broadband service from a company such as Time Warner Cable. Or they can subscribe to wireless internet access from companies such as Sprint.

These companies have spent billions of dollars laying cables in the ground (in the case of residential internet access) or erecting cell phone towers (for wireless access) to ensure that customers have fast, reliable service.

Network neutrality is the idea that these companies should treat all internet traffic equally. It says your ISP shouldn’t be allowed to block or degrade access to certain websites or services, nor should it be allowed to set aside a “fast lane” that allows content favored by the ISP to load more quickly than the rest.

Since the term was coined more than a decade ago, it has been at the center of the debate over internet regulation. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission(FCC), and the courts have all debated whether and how to protect network neutrality.

Advocates argue that network neutrality lowers barriers to entry online, allowing entrepreneurs to create new companies like Google, Facebook, and Dropbox. But critics warn that regulating the broadband market could be counterproductive, discouraging investment in internet infrastructure and limiting the flexibility of ISPs themselves to innovate.

In January, an appeals court invalidated FCC regulations designed to protect network neutrality. The agency is currently considering how to respond.

QuickWire: College and Library Groups Petition FCC on Net Neutrality

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-college-and-library-groups-petition-fcc-on-net-neutrality/53977

Netflix is a Data Hog And other myths about Net Neutrality

https://medium.com/backchannel/netflix-is-a-data-hog-6e790140b189

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http://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

http://qz.com/294154/the-real-reason-that-us-internet-service-providers-are-terrified-of-strong-net-neutrality/

 

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