February, 2018 | Read Write Collect

Bookmarked The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change (Om Malik)

Facebook is about making money by keeping us addicted to Facebook. It always has been — and that’s why all of our angst and headlines are not going to change a damn thing.

Om Malik explains why Facebook will not be changing, it is not in its DNA. This is epitomised by the spamming of two-factor authentication users and the skimming of VPN data only adds to this. As Malik explains:

The DNA represents a company’s ethos — and to a large extent, its ethics. Microsoft was and will always be a desktop software company, albeit one that is doing its best to adapt to the cloud and data-centric world. It has turned its desktop offerings into smart revenue streams on the cloud.

Google’s core DNA is search and engineering, though some would say engineering that is driven by the economics of search, which makes it hard for the company to see the world through any other lens. Apple’s lens is that of product, design, and experience. This allows it to make great phones and to put emphasis on privacy, but makes it hard for them to build data-informed services.

Facebook’s DNA is that of a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.

Even with the personal adjustments to the feed in response to issues with fake news and manipulation, this is akin to the spin by the tobacco industry in the 70’s to hide the effect of smoking.

Liked Taking vs Valuing Attendance (Reflecting Allowed)

I don’t want students to feel obligated to come to class because of attendance

Bookmarked The tools matter and the tools don’t matter (austinkleon.com)

You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.

Austin Kleon reflects on the pride and place of the tool for the artist. Although he suggests that it does not necessarily matter, he also argues that we need to find the right tool that helps us sing. So often we talk about transformation or redefinition, but how often do we consider that the tool for each student ‘sing’ maybe different?

Bookmarked The Problem With Facts (Tim Harford)

Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow. It seems to be one of the only cures for politically motivated reasoning but it’s also, into the bargain, the cure for a society where most people just don’t pay attention to the news because they find it boring or confusing.

Tim Harford explains that the solution for fake news is not simply facts, rather we need to foster an attitude of curiousity. For as he demonstrates through a number of examples, even when armed with the supposed truth, we cannot escape the engaging influence of the lie:

Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims.

This comes back to a point that Barthes’ made in regards to mythologies and advertising. The strength lies in the power of first impressions, to manipulate individual preconceptions of a sign. It does not matter than after the initial contact a more rational meaning be found, a myths power to distort still remains and does not diminish. For

Myth is imperfectible and unquestionable, time or knowledge will not make it better or worse.

🎧 On Foreign Aid (Future Tense)

Eleven Chinese warships reportedly sailed into the East Indian Ocean this month, amid a constitutional crisis and state of emergency in the Maldives. In part, this is claimed to be in connection with aid.

As Future Tense captured in the first of a two part series, China is an emerging player when it comes to overseas aid. The problem with this is that much of it is not actually ‘aid’ money. As Brad Park explains:

China actually provides a lot of state financing that is more commercially oriented and is provided market terms or close to market terms. And so much of the money in fact that is going to Russia is not aid in the strict sense of the term, they are loans offered on close to market rates, and China is offering those loans in part because it’s one of the world’s largest net creditors, it’s sitting on very large reserves, it wants to earn an attractive financial return on its capital, and so it has an aggressive overseas lending programs. So China wants those loans to be repaid with interest.

This is also a part of China’s growing international expansion.

In part two, Samantha Custer, Abhijit Banerjee and Stephen Howes discuss the sustainable development goals developed by the United Nations. These provides the policy and guidance for how aid should be spent.

Watched

Along with Alexandra Samuel’s work and Doug Belshaw’s reflection. this webinar featuring Anya Kamenetz poses a number of considerations in regards to parenting in a digital age.

Move No. 1: “Here are some scary things that can happen with too much screen time — obesity sleep issues…behavioral issues, issues around the kid’s relationship to the media that they’re using … If you’re seeing any of that, then whatever you’re doing, you should do less,” she said.

Move No. 2: “You do need a system for what the rules are going to be that is clear and communicated to your kid. And, you can do it based on time, but you can also do it based on occasion, and/or priority. … Cut back if you need to cut back, make a system, and then, think about shifting toward the positive. What is it that our kids love about the time they’re spending online. How can you build on that? How can you stretch it toward other interesting uses? So that’s the enjoy part. I think it’s fairly simple. It’s a formula for making decisions. It’s a rubric. It’s not a rule,” Kamenetz added.

Replied to WordPress Timeline JS Plugin by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)

Writing blogs posts is nice because it documents things and makes me notice all sorts of things I missed in the heat of trying to get a working plugin but it also sucks because it takes me forever to write the post. These asides are also the reason I have 223 draft posts on my site.

I am loving all your work at the moment Tom around visualisations. I am going to spin this plugin up and see how I go. In regards to ‘events’, how does this relate to the idea of.h-events? Is it the same?

Replied to Google My Maps Tips and Tricks by Tom Mullaney (Sustainable Teaching)

Google My Maps is a great tool for teachers and learners. Teachers can use it as an interactive platform to present lesson materials. Learners can use Google My Maps to document what they have learned.

This is a good overview of Google Maps Tom. I note your issue with sharing ‘a copy’ of a map. I wonder if this relates in part to the fact that MyMaps is not a part of the core Education offering? One workaround that I have used in the past is have teachers provide a copy of a KMZ and then get students to load this. Although it involves a few more steps, it at least gets there in the end.

📓 Demagoguery

Reflecting on the state of democracy, Branko Milanovic looks back at the work of those like Max Weber and the concept of demagoguery:

These old-school writers were also very astute about the political science of demagoguery, which Weber defined as manipulation of the electorate through proffering of unrealistic promises. He thought the rise of demagogues was specific to Western political culture; it was a potentially dangerous side effect of democracy. Demagoguery appeared, according to Weber, first in the Mediterranean city-states and then spread to Western parliamentary systems through the role of party leaders.source

Wikipedia defines a demagogue as:

A leader in a democracy who gains popularity by exploiting prejudice and ignorance among the common people, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation Demagogues overturn established customs of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so.source

Bookmarked Seven things teachers agree on about teaching reading in Australia. Stop all the political haranguing over phonics by By Robyn Ewing (EduResearch Matters)

I am continually asked: why are we are once again adopting UK policies and accepting as ‘evidence’ the Rose Report from the UK? This report recommended that synthetic phonics be the preferred method for teaching early reading in the UK, but the ‘evidence’ quoted in the report has been widely disputed, including in the UK, by highly respected literacy education experts. The way the report has since been used politically is of ongoing concern.

This was the impetus for the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney to hold a symposium on The role of phonics in learning to be literate last week in Sydney in conjunction with The Australian Literacy Educators Association.

Robyn Ewing reflects on a recent symposium looking at Phonics. She shares a series of agreements from the event:

Learning to be literate is crucial for children’s life chances.
Socioeconomic status has a big impact on how well children read
Learning to be literate is a highly complex contextualised social practice – not a series of hierarchical skills
Learning to read is about making meaning. There are no easy, one size fits all recipes.
Rich literature, real texts should play an important role in any literacy program
Phonics and other code-based literacy practices are widespread in early years learning contexts in Australia. Where is the evidence that teachers aren’t using these strategies?
Another test is highly problematic and will disadvantage our EALD (English as an additional language or dialect) learners as well as many in vulnerable situations

Bookmarked “Tell me about yourself” in a critical auto-ethnography (W. Ian O'Byrne)

In my language and literacy courses, I have students critically reflect on their identity, and the pathways that brought them to this point in their lives. They research and write an “auto-ethnography” which becomes an analytic, multimodal portrait of one or some of their literacy learning experiences, placed within social, historical, cultural context. It should go beyond summary and autobiography to incorporate ethnographic analysis of the cultural contexts and practices, relationships, dynamics of power, etc.

Ian O’Byrne documents the structure that he uses in getting his students to write auto-ethnographies. Along with Curt Rees model and Naomi Barnes’ post, they offer a useful place to start when considering the topic.

Read Write Microcast #009(6 minutes 22 seconds)

Sometimes it pays off to think small. Think next door, down the hall, at the next meeting. Act large in small spaces. Notice who’s speaking and who isn’t. Practice not knowing and being curious. Be kind. Welcome warmly and mean it.

Sherri Spelic

This microcast is my response to the pop-up MOOC, Engagement in a Time of Polarization, currently running. I have been following proceedings, but have struggled to contribute. After trying to write a more comprehensive reflection, but not knowing where to start, I decided to ‘think small’ and just share a short microcast. For so long I thought ‘engagement’ involved measuring the number of tweets etc, but I have come to respect lurking more and more as a legitimate (in)action.

Bookmarked The Digital Poorhouse by Virginia Eubanks (Harper's magazine)

Think of the digital poorhouse as an invisible web woven of fiber-optic threads. Each strand functions as a microphone, a camera, a fingerprint scanner, a GPS tracker, a trip wire, and a crystal ball. Some of the strands are sticky. Along the threads travel petabytes of data. Our activities vibrate the web, disclosing our location and direction. Each of these filaments can be switched on or off. They reach back into history and forward into the future. They connect us in networks of association to those we know and love. As you go down the socioeconomic scale, the strands are woven more densely and more of them are switched on.

Virginia Eubanks compares the restrictive nature of the poorhouses of the nineteenth century with the digital spaces of today:

The differences between the brick-and-mortar poorhouse of yesterday and the digital one of today are significant. Containment in a physical institution had the unintended result of creating class solidarity across the lines of race, gender, and national origin. If we sit at a common table to eat the same gruel, we might see similarities in our experiences. But now surveillance and digital social sorting are driving us apart, targeting smaller and smaller microgroups for different kinds of aggression and control. In an invisible poorhouse, we become ever more cut off from the people around us, even if they share our suffering.

The digital poorhouse has a much lower barrier to expansion. Automated decision-making systems, matching algorithms, and predictive risk models have the potential to spread quickly.

In conclusion, Eubanks suggests that we need to work together to build a solution:

If there is to be an alternative, we must build it purposefully, brick by brick and byte by byte.

This reminds me of the point Brent Simmons made in regards to Micro.blogs:

We’re discovering the future as we build it.

Listened How white is the tech sector? – Chips with Everything podcast by Jordan Erica Webber;Chella Ramanan;Danielle Stephens from the Guardian

Has the technology industry truly embraced diversity? What more needs to be done to make it a more inclusive industry? Inspired by Black History Month, Jordan Erica Webber and Chella Ramanan try and answer these questions.

In this episode of Chips with Everything, Webber and Ramanan talk to Carlton Cummins of Aceleron, junior software engineer Bukola Thompson, and Tom Ilube, founder of the African Science Academy. Many touch on the need for diversity, particularly when personal biases are often baked in, a point David Williams makes on the Team Human podcast.

Bookmarked Why Less News on Facebook Is Good News for Everyone by Will Oremus (Slate Magazine)

To what extent Facebook’s disruption of the media facilitated the political upheaval and polarization we’ve seen over the past several years is a question that researchers will be debating and investigating for some time. But it seems clear they’re related. And it was Facebook’s takeover of the news that gave Russian agents the tools to influence elections and civil discourse in democracies around the world.

Will Oremus discusses Facebook’s flip to prioritise the personal over corporation. This will have a significant impact on the way that news is portrayed on the site. It comes on the back of a series of changes in which Facebook has broken the back of digital news coverage:

First, by encouraging people to get news from all different sources in the same place, Facebook leveled the playing field among publishers.

Second, whereas human editors used to be trained to select and emphasize stories based on their news value, Facebook’s news feed algorithm optimized for clicks, views, likes, and shares.

This move isn’t to repair the damage done to democracy, but rather to limit the damage done to its users.

Liked Why are the Liberals so terrified of our schools? by three anonymous teachers (The Age)

We have had nearly 10 years of Labor’s MySchool website, which encourages parents to play the school system like the stock market. Low scores are punished with low enrolments, as privileged families flock to high-performing schools, and the least socially mobile remain at schools with the least resources to support them.
As a result, when public schools in Victoria have received meagre funding increases, these are too often wasted on programs that principals think will boost scores and reputation – even if they undermine real learning. Despite plenty of evidence that streaming actually reduces student achievement, select-entry programs are breaking out like algae plagues around the state. As are uniform policies that mimic private schools in pettiness and pricing.

Bookmarked that doesn’t mean dumbing it down by Anne Helen Petersen (TinyLetter)

My advice to the group of academics, then, was two-fold. First: recognize that both sides need to be more flexible. Understand that journalists have to have somewhat reductive headlines, and that they operate on deadlines. But also assert, at the beginning, that you are unwilling to provide a soundbite — and want, above all else, to insert nuance, instead of a flat argument, and if they can’t deal with that (even if it’s just three sentences of complication, instead of one declarative sentence) then you will not do the interview. It’s not that academics should request quote approval, it’s more that they should be able to reach an agreement with the journalist about the sort of argument to which they’re affixing their good name.

Anne Helen Petersen explains how to work with and in journalism to extend the reach of academic ideas.

Listened Searching for an Alzheimer’s cure while my father slips away – podcast by Peter Savodnik;Simon Barnard from the Guardian

Science might be able to return my father (or, more to the point, future Alzheimer’s patients) to his pre-Alzheimer’s state, but it could not undo the sea change that had taken place in the people who loved him. For that to happen, we would have to forget everything that had happened in the past decade – and our memory, for better and worse, is perfectly intact.