Searching for "Internet"
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/29/751116338/china-intercepts-wechat-texts-from-u-s-and-abroad-researcher-says
Chinese cyberspace is one of the most surveilled and censored in the world. That includes WeChat. Owned by Tencent, one of China’s biggest companies, the chat-meets-payment app has more than 1 billion monthly users in China and now serves users outside the country, too, although it does not divulge how many. Researchers say its use abroad has extended the global reach of China’s surveillance and censorship methods.
“The intention of keeping people safe by building these systems goes out the window the moment you don’t secure them at all,” says Victor Gevers, co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collective.
Every day, Gevers scans the Internet for vulnerabilities to find unsecured databases, and he has exposed a large number of them, particularly linked to China.
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more on WeChat and surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=wechat
https://www.wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/
Pearson “digital first” strategy.
My note: see our postings
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/07/09/pearson-selling-us-k12-business/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/04/19/change-in-the-k12-sector/
It also enables Pearson to staunch the bleeding caused by an explosion in the second-hand market. A company called Chegg launched the first major online textbook rental service in 2007; Amazon followed suit in 2012. Both advertise savings of up to 90 percent off the sticker price.
But more technology doesn’t always mean better results. Within K-12 learning environments, the digital divide means that students in low-income and rural households have less access to reliable internet and fewer connected deviceson which to complete the online portions of their homework. And while Pearson’s initiative applies only to textbooks in higher ed, the shift to digital has implications at the collegiate level as well.
Just as traditional software has a thriving open source community, textbooks have Open Educational Resources, complete textbooks that typically come free of charge digitally, or for a small fee—enough to cover the printing—in hard copy. And while it’s not an entirely new concept, OER has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as support has picked up at an institutional level, rather than on a course by course basis. According to a 2018 Babson College survey, faculty awareness of OER jumped from 34 percent to 46 percent since 2015.
One of OER’s leading proponents is OpenStax, a nonprofit based out of Rice University that offers a few dozen free textbooks, covering everything from AP Biology to Principles of Accounting. In the 2019–2020 academic year, 2.7 million students across 6,600 institutions used an OpenStax product instead of a for-profit equivalent.
The knock against OER is that, well, you get what you pay for. “One faculty member told me only half-jokingly, that OER is like a puppy that’s free. You get the free puppy, but then you have to do all the work,” says Cengage’s Hansen, who argues that traditional publishers provide critical supporting materials, like assessment questions, that OER often lacks, and can push more regular updates.
By virtue of being free, OER materials also heavily skew toward digital, with hardcover as a secondary option. (Or you can download the PDF and print it out yourself.) The same caveats about efficacy apply. But at least OER doesn’t lock you into one digital platform, the way the major publishers do. OpenStax alone counts around 50 ecosystem partners to provide homework and testing support.
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Or you could always split the difference.
That’s the territory Cengage wants to stake out. Late last summer, the educational publishing behemoth—it announced a planned merger with McGraw Hill in May; the combined company would surpass all but Pearson in market capitalization—rolled out Cengage Unlimited, a “Netflix for Textbooks” model that rolls all textbook rentals and digital platform access into a single rate: $120 for a semester, $180 for a full year, or $240 for two years. Almost a year in, the US-only program has a million subscribers.
My note: more about Cengage and McGraw Hill in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/06/22/textbook-model/
this added Sept 13, 2019:
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more on textbooks in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=textbooks
third Library 2.019 mini-conference: “Emerging Technology,” which will be held online (and for free) on Wednesday, October 30th, from 12:00 – 3:00 pm US-Pacific Daylight Time (click for your own time zone).
Tomorrow’s technologies are shaping our world today, revolutionizing the way we live and learn. Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Drones, Personalization, the Quantified Self. Libraries can and should be the epicenter of exploring, building and promoting these emerging techs, assuring the better futures and opportunities they offer are accessible to everyone. Learn what libraries are doing right now with these cutting-edge technologies, what they’re planning next and how you can implement these ideas in your own organization.
This is a free event, being held live online and also recorded.
REGISTER HERE
Ellis, D. A. (2019). Are smartphones really that bad? Improving the psychological measurement of technology related behaviors. Computers in Human Behavior, 97
, 60-66
Conclusions sur- rounding use have therefore been
largely negative and smartphones have repeatedly
been associated with depression (Elhai, Dvorak,
Levine, & Hall, 2017), anxiety (Richardson,
Hussain, & Griffiths, 2018), disrupted sleep
(Rosen, Carrier, Miller, Rokkum, & Ruiz, 2016),
cognitive
impairment (Clayton,
Leshner,&
Almond, 2015), and poor academic performance
(Lepp, Barkley, & Karpinski, 2015). This repeats a
pattern of research priorities, which previously
focused on the ne- gative impacts of many other
screen-based technologies, systematically moving
from television and video games, to the internet
and social media (Rosen et al., 2014).
There is also little
evidence to support the existence of the constructs
under investigation (e.g., technology ‘addiction’),
yet many papers and scales continue to use
language associated with a specific diagnosis (see
Panova & Carbonell, 2018 for a recent review).
When it comes to understanding the impact of
technology more generally, there is an intrinsic
lack of high-quality evidence (Ellis et al., 2018a).
Revised psychometric tests may hold some value
in the future, provided they are grounded in
relevant theory and validated accordingly.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/49742/deciding-at-what-age-to-give-a-kid-a-smartphone
Nov 21, 2017, Claire McInerny
We hear that smartphones can be addictive, that screen time can hurt learning, but can’t these minicomputers also teach kids about responsibility and put educational apps at their tiny fingertips?
safety
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on kids and technology, says rather than considering the age of a child, focus on maturity. Some questions to consider are:
- Are they responsible with their belongings?
- Will they follow rules around phone use?
- Would having easy access to friends benefit them for social reasons?
- And do kids need to be in touch for safety reasons? If so, will an old-fashioned flip phone (like the one Sydney never charged) do the trick?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/technology/personaltech/whats-the-right-age-to-give-a-child-a-smartphone.html
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/right-age-for-smartphone-child/ 2016
While Pew Research from 2015 puts adult smartphone ownership in the U.S. at 72 percent, there’s some debate about smartphone ownership among children. The average age for a child to get their first smartphone is currently 10.3 years according to the recent Influence Central report, Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives.
An average of 65 percent of children aged between 8 and 11 have their own smartphone in the U.K. according to a survey by Internet Matters. That survey also found that the majority of parents would like a minimum age for smartphone ownership in the U.K. to be set at age 10.
However, some kids are using smartphones from a very young age. One study by the American Academy of Pediatrics that focused on children in an urban, low-income, minority community suggested that almost all children (96.6 percent) use mobile devices and that 75 percent have their own mobile device by the age of four.
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peer reviewed
Lauricella, A., Wartella, E., & Rideout, V. (2015). Young children’s screen time: The complex role of parent and child factors. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 36, 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2014.12.001
Wood, E., Petkovski, M., De Pasquale, D., Gottardo, A., Evans, M., & Savage, R. (2016). Parent Scaffolding of Young Children When Engaged with Mobile Technology. Frontiers in Psychology. Retrieved from http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10024286/1/Wood_Parent_Scaffolding_Young_Children.pdf
Rikuya Hosokawa, & Toshiki Katsura. (2018). Association between mobile technology use and child adjustment in early elementary school age. PLoS ONE, 13(7), e0199959. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199959
Percentage of moms whose children used device by age 2.(THE DATA PAGE)(Statistical data). (2011). Editor & Publisher, 144(10).
PERCENTAGE OF MOMS WHOSE CHILDREN USED DEVICE BY AGE 2
Gen Y moms Gen X moms
Laptop 34% 29%
Cell Phone 34% 26%
Smart Phone 33% 20%
Digital Camera 30% 18%
iPod 34% 13%
Videogame System 13% 8%
Hand-held gaming device 13% 10%
Source: Frank N. Magid & Associates, Inc./Metacafe
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more about the use of mobile devices in the classroom in this IMS blog entry
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/04/03/use-of-laptops-in-the-classroom/
https://nyti.ms/2LzRzwq
Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.
More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.
American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
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We Don’t Need Social Media
The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good
Colin Horgan, May 13, 2019
https://onezero.medium.com/we-dont-need-social-media-53d5455f4f6b
Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made
Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalism and a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
Under Employers’ Gaze, Gen Z Is Biting Its Tongue On Social Media
April 13, 20195:00 AM ET
HAFSA QURAISHI
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/13/702555175/under-employers-gaze-gen-z-is-biting-its-tongue-on-social-media
The oldest members of Generation Z are around 22 years old — now entering the workforce and adjusting their social media accordingly. They are holding back from posting political opinions and personal information in favor of posting about professional accomplishments.
only about 1 in 10 teenagers say they share personal, religious or political beliefs on social media, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center.
70 percent of employers and recruiters say they check social media during the hiring process, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder
Generation Z, nicknamed “iGen,” is the post-millennial generation responsible for ‘killing’ Facebook and for the rise of TikTok.
Curricula like Common Sense Education’s digital citizenship program are working to educate the younger generation on how to use social media, something the older generations were never taught.
Some users are regularly cleaning up — “re-curating” — their online profiles. Cleanup apps, like TweetDelete,
Gen Zers also use social media in more ephemeral ways than older generations — Snapchat stories that disappear after 24 hours, or Instagram posts that they archive a couple of months later.
Gen Zers already use a multitude of strategies to make sure their online presence is visible only to who they want: They set their account to private, change their profile name or handle, even make completely separate “fake” accounts.
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
and privacy
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
Follow Along With a Grad Seminar About Edtech: Part 1, Picking the Best Tech
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-12-follow-along-with-a-grad-seminar-about-edtech-part-1-picking-the-best-tech
a tech catalog for students to explore and choose from, partially based on Georgetown’s enterprise suite, including a learning management system (Canvas), blogging (WordPress or other), student-run web domains, web annotation (Hypothesis) https://web.hypothes.is/, collaborative writing (Google Suite), discussion boards (Discourse), and videoconferencing (Zoom).
Neil Selwyn’s excellent Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates.
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How Can Digital Audio Enhance Teaching and Learning?
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-28-grad-seminar-on-edtech-part-2-how-can-digital-audio-enhance-teaching-and-learning
Before there were podcasts, there was pirate radio, rogue broadcasters flinging unusual sounds over borders and adding new music to cultures. And before that there was the “theater of the mind,” harnessing radio’s deep power to inspire listeners’ imaginations.
Then we advanced to podcasting’s second wave—the one we’re enjoying now—the one sparked by Serial’s massive success in 2014. When you consider audiobooks in the mix, it’s clear how varied and mainstream portable digital audio is today.
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https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-04-18-video-assignments-are-the-new-term-paper-how-does-that-change-teaching-and-learning
Digital video has taken the world by storm. Netflix is busy changing television and movies. YouTube may be humanity’s largest collaborative cultural project, aggregating an astonishing amount of user-generated content. The Google-owned service is widely used that it may already soak up more than a third of all mobile traffic.
Unsurprisingly, we increasingly learn from digital video. The realm of informal learning is well represented on YouTube—from DIY instruction to guerrilla recordings of public speakers. Traditional colleges now rely on digital video, too, as campuses have established official channels and faculty regularly turn to YouTube for content. And new kinds of educational institutions have emerged, like the nonprofit Khan Academy,
We also explored the rise of teaching via live video. More colleges are using it for online learning, since it can make students and instructors more present to each other than most other media. We also saw videoconferencing’s usefulness in connecting students and faculty when separated by travel, illness or scheduling challenges.
Our readings—Zac Woolfitt’s “The effective use of video in higher education,” and Michelle Kosalka’s “Using Synchronous Tools to Build Community in the Asynchronous Online Classroom”—and discussion identified a range of limitations to video’s utility. Videoconferencing requires robust internet connection that not all students have access to, and even downloading video clips can be challenging on some connections. People are not always comfortable appearing on camera. And some content is not well suited to video, such as mostly audio conversations or still images.
McMullan, T. (2018, April 26). How Technology Got Under Our Skin – Featured Stories. Retrieved April 2, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.com/s/story/how-technology-got-under-our-skin-cee8a71b241b
anthropocene
Like the circle-bound symmetry of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the meat and bones of the human race are the same in 2018 as they were in 1490. And yet, we are different.
Michael Patrick Lynch, writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
“The digital revolution is more like the revolution brought on by the written word. Just as the written word allowed us to time-travel — to record our thoughts for others, including ourselves, to read in the future — so the internet has allowed for a kind of tele-transportation , breaking down barriers of space and physical limitation and connecting us across the globe in ways we now take for granted, as we do the written word.”
In the book Self-Tracking, authors Gina Neff, a sociology professor at Oxford University, and Dawn Nafus, a research scientist at Intel, describe this phenomenon as a shuffling between physical signs and observed recordings: “The data becomes a ‘prosthetic of feeling,’Advocates of this “prosthetic of feeling” argue that self-tracking can train people to recognize their own body signals, tuning the senses to allow for a greater grasp of biological rhythms.but what if the body-as-data is exploited by the state, or by an insurance company that can predict when you’ll get diabetes, or a data analytics firm that can use it to help sway elections? The Chinese government is going so far as to plan a social credit score for its citizens by 2020, giving each of the country’s 1.3 billion residents a reputation number based on economic and social status. What is particularly subtle about all this is that, like a scientific épistémè, our way of thinking is perhaps unconsciously guided by the configurations of knowledge these new technologies allow. We don’t question it.
Hannah Knox. Computational machines are “shaping what we expect it means to be a human”, Knox wrote for the Corsham Institute’s Observatory for a Connected Society.
Facebook goads us to remember past moments on a daily basis, the stacked boxes of tape in Beckett’s play replaced with stacks of servers in remote data centers in northern Sweden.“There is reasonable evidence that [the internet] has reduced our internal memory ability,” says Phil Reed, a professor of psychology at Swansea University.
Moderate tech use correlated with positive mental health, according to a paper published in Psychological Science by Andrew Przybylski of Oxford and Netta Weinstein at Cardiff University, who surveyed 120,000 British 15-year-olds.Again, the crucial question is one of control. If our way of thinking is changed by our intimacy with these technologies, then is this process being directed by individuals, or the ledgers of private companies, or governments keen on surveilling their citizens? If we conceive of these systems as extensions of our own brains, what happens if they collapse?
Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) are coming in leaps and bounds, with companies like Neuralink and CTRL-Labs in the United States exploring both surgical and noninvasive processes that allow computers to be controlled directly by signals from the brain. It’s a field that involves fundamentally changing the relationship between our minds, bodies, and machines.Kevin Warwick, emeritus professor at Coventry University and a pioneer in implant technology
What the World Can Teach the US About Education Technology
By Wade Tyler Millward Mar 24, 2019
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-24-what-the-world-can-teach-the-us-about-education-technology
Omidyar Network’s report on what works in scaling education technology in different regions worldwide. Governments, educators, advocacy groups and companies large and small need to work better together. Long-term planning and investment in infrastructure for widespread and improved access to the internet and mobile devices is critical.
But what may surprise some readers of the report, released Monday, is what the United States can learn from developing nations when it comes to bringing together all parties interested in edtech.