Email and Calendaring

/ Christopher Parsons

The University of Guelph will be moving to a new email provider in the next month or two and along with that movement will come (over time) a unified student calendaring system. I want to discuss the role of email, unified calendaring, and how they impact TAs.

Email

Email is the best-known electronic tool amongst TAs. It has been used for years to communicate with students, set up meeting dates, and answer rudimentary questions. The benefit of email is that it allows for relatively confidential communications between TAs and students – others cannot read the message unless either the TA or student break confidentiality. Email is not terribly well-suited for drawn out conversations, however, nor is it very good at developing content amongst a series of participants. It does, however, allow students and TAs to be accountable for what they say, which can be helpful in times of grade challenges that were supposedly made through email. For this reason TAs should ensure that no student information is deleted for at least one year after the course.

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Web 2.0 and Education

/ Christopher Parsons

I’m giving a presentation on Web 2.0 tools in under a month and, since I’ve received notice from the conference organizers, I’ve been working diligently to compile tools and identify their uses and potentials for abuse. Over the coming week or two I expect I’ll be posting a reasonably amount about thoughts and ideas that I have surrounding my presentation – comments are of course welcome here, and you are also welcome to look at and contribute to the wiki article that I’ve set up for the conference.

Before getting into content in any depth I wanted to take a step back and reflect on what I am referring to when talking about ‘Web 2.0’ and how it (potentially) applies to post-secondary education. I’m not going to get into the politics of technology in post-secondary environments, or at least I’m not planning on directly posting about this (largely because I work in an educational institution, and it’s really best to keep some thoughts to yourself).

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One Laptop Per Child and Long-term Possibilities for Education

/ Christopher Parsons

Some time ago a friend and I got talking about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and I haven’t gotten it off my mind since. The OLPC program aims to deliver sturdy, low-power, low-cost laptops to children under the age of 12 in developing countries. The visionary of the program, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to introduce these laptops into second-world, rather than third-world, countries. The difference? Second-world countries face poverty and a host of ills, but possess the resources to purchase these notebooks, to feed their people (at some level), and build roads. The OLPC program is not currently aimed at absolutely poverty-stricken nations – those nations have other, more pressing, concerns, and their resources can be allocated to more effectively than by providing affordable laptop computers for children.

The computers are incredibly simple, providing basic computing. What’s important is that they are almost entirely open-source; kids can take them apart and learn about every element of the computers through trial and error. They’re rugged enough (both physically and code-wise) that kids can put them through hell and they’ll keep on going. While the laptops can be charged by plugging the computers into electrical outlets, they can also be powered by converting physical action to electricity – ride a bike attached to the thing and you’ll be able to charge it. The initial roll-out doesn’t have this, but it’s in the overall specs of the project.

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Online Data Storage and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

Last week Google, Microsoft, and Apple revealed updates to their online data storage platforms – Google now lets users purchase additional space for their various Google applications, Microsoft provides a Live Skydrive (essentially an online network drive), and Apple completely revamped their .Mac solution.

The idea behind these services is that people that are already using, or are considering using, the aforementioned companies’ online services and will be enticed by the idea that they could store hordes of information in ‘safe’ repositories; we can trust that neither Google, Microsoft, or Apple would lose our data, right? This isn’t entirely true – at least Google and Microsoft have previously lost client data and could not always restore it. Individuals cannot count on any of these services, though they are likely to be more reliable than personal backups. What’s more, these online solutions just make life easier by letting users stop worrying about performing personal data backups – this is their real selling feature.

There are issues that emerges with all of these services – first clients cannot know what country their data is being stored in, potentially leaving their data subject to foreign surveillance laws, and second clients cannot verify what any of these corporations are actually doing with their data.

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Search and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

People use Google and Yahoo! throughout their daily lives – they need to know how to get from point a to b, need to find ecommerce sites, need to search friends’ blogs, need to learn how to cook fish, and have (generally) grown used to having the equivalent of electronic encyclopedias at their fingertips at all times. I’m not going to bother addressing concerns that this might be detrimentally affecting how people learn to retain information (i.e. as information is increasingly retained as search strings rather than as info-articles) but want to instead briefly consider how search intersects with privacy.

We hear about the need to protect our private information all of the time. ‘Shred your bank statements’, ‘be wary of online commerce sites’, ‘never share personal information on the ‘net’, and other proclamations of wisdom are uttered in print and video on a regular basis which are, in most cases, completely ignored. Proponents of the commercialization of privacy use this as definitive proof that citizens really don’t care about their privacy like they did in days gone past – people are willing to give up their names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information to receive services that they want. In light of this regulators should just butt out – the market has spoken!

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Unscheduled Broadcast

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

I’ve recently been accepted to present at a conference for incoming TAs to my university. I’m giving a talk for over an hour on Web 2.0, it’s possibilities, and pitfalls. Obviously I’m going to be going nuts building up information to provide, but does anyone have anything that I *need* to be talking about? The current list is going to include things like blogging, wiki’s, and online data archival tools.

I’m going to have a 100% captive audience, and lots of time, so your ideas and suggestions would be extremely appreciated!