Education

This category dominantly identifies educational Web2.0-style posts.

Reading, Reviewing, and Recording

/ Christopher Parsons

I want to toss up a few links that I’ve found particularly interesting/helpful over the past couple of months. I’ll begin with a way to read, move to a review of the newest tool for electronic education, and conclude with an article concerning the commercialization of the core platforms electronic resources are accessed from.

Reading 102

We’ve all heard of data-mining; the FBI has been doing it, the NSA has been caught doing it, and corporations are well known for it. Citizens are getting increasingly upset that their personal information is scaped together without their consent, and for good reasons.

What if those citizens used data-mining principles to prepare and filter their reading? Donal Latumahina has eight processes that you can use to get the most out of the books that you’re reading, processes that are guided by the objective to get the greatest possible amount of useful information from the text. It’s amazing what happens when you objectively structure your reading, rather than just letting yourself be carried along by it.

Continue reading →

Teaching Portfolio – Save Everything?

/ Christopher Parsons

Normally when I talk about retaining data, I talk about retaining targeted information – don’t save everything, only what you need, and (if the information is about other people) only what you said you’d retain for particular stated purposes.

I was at a TA Conference yesterday, and at the tail end of it one of the presentations was about creating a teaching portfolio and a teaching philosophy. In particular, we were encouraged to save everything from students that pertained to how we taught, as well as copies of course outlines/lecture notes/etc. The idea was that by aggregating all data, especially that from students, we could filter out what we don’t need – it’s easier to filter than to find more data.

This is the exact opposite way that I think that data retention should operate, and I’m not alone. The principles standing behind the EU’s Safehabour, as well as UoG privacy policies, both support my stance that all collected information must be targeted, people whose data is being collected must be aware of why it is being collected, and there must be a stipulation on the duration of time the information must be retained. I’m not really concerned with whether this particular presenter was recommending actions that at the least were in tension with the UoG’s privacy principles – what I’m interested in is whether you would keep all of this information? I can’t, not unless I’m totally up front with students, but I don’t know if that’s just me being particularly paranoid. Is retaining this information common practise in the teaching profession?

Social Networking – Why We Need to Educate Youth

/ Christopher Parsons

This is a short post, but gives three definitive examples of why we need to develop and instill norms in youth concerning how to use digital resources.

Let’s help this woman find her camera!

Here’s the story (remember that…story).

In Britain a young woman (unfortunately) lost her camera. Some delightful chap decided that, rather than keeping the camera to himself, he’d try to get it back to her. Problem: he didn’t have her name, address, or anything that identified her beyond the pictures on the camera. Solution: post all of the pictures from the camera on Facebook and encourage tons of people to join the group the hopes that someone recognizes her. Problem: the embarrassment of having adult and non-adult pictures of yourself posted on the net.

Now, it turns out that this whole thing was viral marketing – the woman is an adult model and this was intended to promote a particular adult website. Nevertheless, based on the posts in the group that was set up, people saw this as a legitimate way to deliver missing property – many didn’t see anything wrong with deliberately posting pictures of a woman in various states of dress without first receiving her willful consent.

Continue reading →

Education, Social Networks, and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

In this post I want to consider privacy from a bit of a ‘weird’ point of view: What information do you want students to reveal to each other and yourself, and what do you want to reveal to them? What ethical responsibilities do educators have to their students concerning their disclosure of information to one another?

In many classrooms, instructors and their students develop bonds by becoming vulnerable to one another by sharing personal stories with one another. ‘Vulnerability’ should be understood as developing a rapport of trust that could be strategically or maliciously exploited, though there is not an implicit suggestion that vulnerability will necessarily lead to exploitation. Some of the best teachers and professors that I have ‘revealed’ themselves as human beings – once I saw that they were like me I felt more comfortable participating in the classroom environment. With this comfort and increased participation, I developed more mature understandings of subject material and my personal stances regarding it. The rapports of trust that I developed with faculty led to the best learning environments I have ever experienced.

Continue reading →

Education, Web 2.0, and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

I have a lot that I could talk about here, but rather than working through philosophical arguments for the value of privacy in education, I want to constrain myself to establishing some key points that educators should be mindful of when using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom. I begin by listing a series of factors that organizations should consult to determine if they are collecting personal information, and then follow by talking about the value and importance of privacy statements. I will conclude by providing a brief (and non-comprehensive) list of personal information that educators probably want to keep offline, unless their University can provide granular access to the information.

Is this information personal information?

Pretty well all Web 2.0 tools gather some kinds of data from individuals that use them, be it in the form of email addresses, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, telephone numbers, messenger names, or social networking information. Before deploying any Web 2.0 technology it is important for organizations to determine whether they are capturing what is identified as ‘personal’ data, and can do so by reflecting on the following factors:

Continue reading →

Wikis and Education

/ Christopher Parsons

Wiki means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian and is commonly used to refer to relational databases that allow for collaborative content creation and revision. These databases have some similarities to blog structures, insofar as they allow a group of people to comment on content, but are distinct from blogs insofar as they upset blogging’s authorial structure by letting readers make modifications to articles’ content. Whereas in blogs, readers can comment on content, in a wiki the readers can modify and come to ‘own’ the content. Wikis have been called the simplest kind of database, and this is (in part) due to ease of inserting and modifying content. All wiki’s use the following process for content generation: Edit >> Write >> Save. That’s it!

In situations where students are increasingly learning online, wikis can provide a space for them to work with one another to address/confront common problems and challenges. This can mean that a group of students use a wiki to write an essay so that they can all contribute to the project (and track each others’ modifications) without needing to find a time and space to sit down and talk with one another at length, to creating a set of class notes that reflect what occurs in lectures, to establishing a coherent content management system that lets students track how the courses they take throughout their academic degree interrelate with one another. In transitioning from analogue technologies and environments to digital wikis, students can (at least partially) overcome the challenges of space, scheduling, particular content retention, and tedious subject cross-references.

Continue reading →