Month: April 2018

Liked How firms you have never interacted with can target your Facebook by Alex Hern (the Guardian)

Facebook provides me with the ability to opt out of advertising from those companies, just by clicking a cross in the corner. All I need to do is devote some time to clicking a small button 174 times in a row and I am free from those companies – at least until the next 174 decide to upload my information.

What I cannot do is anything with real power. I cannot tell Facebook that the vast majority of these companies cannot possibly have acquired my email address legitimately; I cannot opt out of them all at once, defenestrating advertisers in their masses with a single click; and I certainly cannot request that no company be able to target me simply by uploading an easily guessable address to the site.

Replied to #rawthought: Weed or Wish: Sunday Morning Metaphors (AmusED)

what if what we thought was detrimental was really beneficial?
what if the messy was better than the perfectly manicured?
what if the foreign (or at least outside influence) was better than the domestic?

Amy, this reminds me of your post about balance and seasons. So often we focus our attention of giving student choice and action, without scaffolding to that point.

We cannot just rip the ‘weeds’ out. There must be flowers in their place for the bees. This is not about ignoring the weeds to me, but accepting then for now for the place they serve.

I think that Benjamin Doxtdator captures this in a recent post on instruction in the classroom:

There is a strong and powerful role for direct instruction and using model texts, but this must take place inside a larger liberatory project that aims to undo deficit theories of language use.

It is about the intent and sometimes that is where the wish lays waiting.

Liked Facebook warns investors to expect bigger and worse scandals than Cambridge Analytica by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing)

In reality, Facebook is designed to allow its partners to violate its users’ privacy, so the fact that Cambridge Analytica got caught with its hand in 80 million of our cookie-jars is an indication of how incompetent they were (they were the easiest to detect, in part because of their public boasting about their wrongdoing), and that means there are much worse scammers who are using Facebook to steal our data in ways that makes CA look like the petty grifters they are.

Liked From Student Agency to Dating Agency: Hiring Teachers by Algorithm (maelstrom)

There is probably little doubt that the analysis of data will play an increasing role in teacher recruitment. I am sure that among the companies involved in the development of such platforms there are many good people with solid beliefs and values, individuals who will want to see these systems used in conjunction with personal connections, interviews, and relationships. In other words, in very humane ways, using the algorithm as a guide, not a decision-maker, and this is where biometric data may prove initially attractive. The question, of course, with all “data-driven” initiatives lies not so much with the intent or even the veracity of the data collected, but with how it is used. Data can too easily become the decision-making tool of lazy convenience and ends up being used in ways never intended. When I consider my teaching colleagues, I recoil at the prospect of viewing them as data points. Someone needs to shout stop.

Bookmarked Malcolm Turnbull backs Gonski 2.0 ‘blueprint’ for radical overhaul of Australian curriculum (The Sydney Morning Herald)

Students’ progress will be assessed alongside standard academic benchmarks under a new approach to school education.

So the wheel continues to turn. First we had progression points. Then we moved to ‘Standards’. Now we are focusing on the individual:

Under-achieving students would focus on improvement, while more advanced students would be pushed to meet “stretch targets” beyond their age or year level. End-of-year results would be scrapped in favour of “learning progressions” that can be assessed and attained at any time – and tracked, even if a student changes schools or states.

Although this is a considerable change, it has been something spoken about for a number of years. Interestingly, this comes with a review of ‘autonomy’ and the ‘social status’ of teachers:

Mr Gonski also called for an “urgent” review of what students are taught in years 11 and 12, greater autonomy for school principals and measures to boost the social status of teachers.

This seems fair until the buck is passed from Federal or State level to the school. Again no mention of equity (opps, that was Gonski 1.0). In a post for The Conversation, Glenn Savage argues that any changes must be in addition to those called for in the first review, not in replace of this:

We need to (once again) question whether the contemporary reform fever does any more than treat symptoms while deeper structural conditions continue to ensure, as the original Gonski report put it, unacceptable links between young people’s socioeconomic backgrounds and levels of achievement.

We need to be careful not to stray too far from where the first Gonski report started out. That is: addressing inequalities in Australian schooling through re-distributive funding.

Interestingly, on the one hand we want to boost teachers, while also undermine them with a ‘new online assessment tool’ to seemingly justify results:

The restructured curriculum would be underpinned by a new online assessment tool teachers use to gauge where their pupils are up to and develop “tailored teaching and learning strategies” for individual students.

With all this said and done, I was a little confused by the discussion of ‘de-privitisation of teaching’:

There was emerging evidence to support what the report called the “de-privatisation of teaching”, which involved moving away from a model where teachers would stand alone at the front of the classroom and took sole responsibility for their pupils, towards greater collaboration.

I look forward to reading the analysis from those much more informed than me.

There is a summary of the report that can be helpful to look at:

Bookmarked The Real Deal About rel=me by Martijn van der Ven (wiki.zegnat.net)

The me link relationship can be seen as saying: the URL I am pointing to is about the same person as the page I am on. Schwartz’ Twitter profile (@rustybrick) links to his RustyBrick profile page using this link relationship, making it clear that those two pages are about the same person. And that is what rel=”me” is for. The microformats wiki (/rel-me) calls this “profile equivalence”.

This is a useful post on rel=me, an important ingredient to webmentions and the #IndieWeb.
Liked It’s Time to Stop Saying “If You’re Not Paying, You’re the Product” (Slate Magazine)

There are at least two alternative ways of viewing our relationship to Facebook that hold more promise for making that relationship a healthier and less exploitive one. The first is to view ourselves as customers of Facebook, paying with our time, attention, and data instead of with money. This implies greater responsibility on both sides. If we understood that Facebook and other “free” online services exact real costs to things we value, we might use them more sparingly and judiciously. We might finally grasp that every time we grant new data permissions or sign on to a new privacy policy, we’re almost certainly giving up a lot. Even if we don’t have time to read the whole thing, let alone comprehend it, we could equate it in our minds to spending hundreds of dollars—and then make better decisions about whether that specific app or update is still worth it to us. Ideally this formulation of users as customers forces on Facebook and other apps the responsibility of earning their loyalty, convincing them that their service is worth the tradeoffs, and not violating their trust.

The second is to view ourselves as part of Facebook’s labor force. Just as bees labor unwittingly on beekeepers’ behalf, our posts and status updates continually enrich Facebook. But we’re humans, not bees, and as such we have the capacity to collectively demand better treatment. The technologist and activist Jaron Lanier, carrying this analogy to its logical conclusion in the book Who Owns the Future?, suggested that users of Facebook and other data-hungry online services rise up and demand actual monetary compensation for their data. That seems a little far-fetched, but at the very least citizens and their representatives in governments should demand more robust protections and legal rights. The European Union’s new privacy law, the General Data Protection Requirement, could be viewed as akin to a bill of worker’s rights for users of online services.

Liked No. 263 by Audrey Watters (HEWN)

It’s worth remembering, of course, that A Nation at Risk wasn’t so much a fact-finding commission as it was a carefully constructed (and statistically suspect) narrative about “failing schools” – a narrative that continues to be wielded in sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel.

Filed an Issue “Post New” page not showing Reply to URL · Issue #168 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds (GitHub)

Sorry, David, I seem to be breaking your stuff left right and centre. 🙇‍♀️ I’ve been using Post Kinds plug to post replies to other websites, but then last night when I clicked on "reply&q…

I am not sure if it is the same experience, but sometimes when I use URL Forwarder on my phone or my bookmarklet on the desktop, I just get the ‘Response Properties’ box and nothing else. If I create a new post and paste the URL, most times it works.

Maybe it has something to do with the URL? The added information? It has always mystified me, but I have learnt to live with it.

I will capture an image next time it happens.

Liked Testing is not a moral agent (drbeardface.net)

We should stop treating tests like moral agents that can define the future. I agree with David Rutkowski’s point about agency, perhaps we’d be well-advised to think about what is enabled, and what we don’t have to do, when we cede our agency to tests and ask whether we really breath a sigh of relief that it is our responsibility we can explain away. The desire for a testing regime is a symptom, not a cause, and it seems to me if you better understand those individual and collective desires at work, you may understand why it is that reconciliACTION and social justice remain distractable.

Listened An Indieweb Podcast- Episode 2: IndieAuth by David ShanskeDavid Shanske from David Shanske

I must admit, I am still getting my head around all the Micropub stuff. This discussion involving David Shanske and Chris Aldrich was helpful. Although I still have questions, it helped with making a bit more sense of Aaron Parecki’s IndieWeb Reader.
Replied to How I Set Up My Indieweb WordPress Site – 2018 Edition by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)

For anyone who comes here considering trying my setup, I’m always available to help. For those who are trying my plugins…they are still being refined, but feedback and contributions(of code) are appreciated.

Thank you David for the updated post. I really should write a similar post for prosperity. One question, what are your concerns with SNAP? I think it could be better, but is 10x better than Jetpack in regards to customisation?
Liked Syndication not Silos by john john (John's World Wide Wall Display)

The great thing about a syndication is that the content doesn’t go away if the syndication does. Any discussion can take place on the participating sites. All the hub does is make it easy to read and make connections. Micro.blog reminds me of this in many ways, although the participants are not grouped round a class or topic.

Bookmarked The gardens where ideas grow by Austin Kleon (austinkleon.com)

Many musicians who use recording technology as a compositional tool refer to their studios as gardens. It’s an interesting contrast to Motown, which was conceived as a factory, or Warhol’s studio, which was actually named The Factory.

Austin Kleon discusses gardening as a metaphor for creativity, referencing artists such as Prince and Brian Eno. I have written about gardening in regards to learning before and the way in which a garden never stops growing, even if you stop caring for it. Michael Caulfield uses the metaphors of the garden and the stream to discuss the web, with the garden being rhizomatic in nature without a centralised structure, whereas the stream brings everything together. Amy Burvall considers the cycles that exist within the garden, suggesting that there is a time to grow and a time to flower. I am interested in investigating the different sorts of ideas and creativity within the garden. I wonder about the propagation of covering other artists? Is this borrowing second-rate? Where does this fit within the cycle? Or is it a reminder that we need dots to make new dots.
Replied to Blog Celebration: 10,000 Comments and Counting by Kevin Hodgson (dogtrax.edublogs.org)

Social media platforms have overtaken blogging in many ways. People (and not just the young kids) are more apt to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr (sort of a blog), and more, and the decline of RSS readers (I still use one) as a way to gather aggregated feeds from blogging writers and educators is less a reading experience for many. Blogging isn’t dead, not by a long shot, but it has faded a bit into the busy background of the social media landscape.

Well done Kevin. Your dedication is an asset to the blogging community. I wonder what this space will look like after another 10,000 comments?