iSean

there has been much hype about the Google and Verizon proposal for the future of Net Neutrality. my experience is that many people are fairly ignorant about Net Neutrality and have not given the subject much thought. now, if you’re reading this blog then chances are likely that you’re not ignorant on the subject. but i wanted to provide an account of why Net Neutrality is something that i desire . . . that i expect . . . and that i require to be effective in my profession.

let me first provide a brief overview of Net Neutrality as it’s being discussed here in America. Wikipedia provides a fairly succinct description so i’ll quote it here:

Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet Service Providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

now i want to provide a description of how i currently teach and how that could be disrupted without Net Neutrality. i teach at a decent sized public university in Michigan with about 25,000 students. i largely teach online or hybrid courses to graduate students enrolled in an education technology integration master’s program. i use open source tools like Moodle and phpBB and even sometimes Drupal. i am eagerly looking forward to using Big Blue Button, which is open source web conferencing software that allows me to synchronously meet with students and share classroom resources — all online (e.g., VOIP; but also other protocols). in the meantime, i use Skype to video conference with individual students or we’ll use iChat to video conference for an advising session or to discuss current curricular issues in a specific class.

Net Neutrality fits into my workflow because it ensures that the tools i use also continue to work for my students and me during the semester these students have paid for an education. i understand that discussing my fears about Net Neutrality will inevitably make me appear to be a conspiracy theorist since many of these fears have year to materialize. however, we have already seen Comcast block users from using peer-to-peer file sharing protocols. a peer-to-peer file sharing program allows users to share large or small files easily. so, if i were to make an instructional video for my students that was 25 minutes long, i could place this video into a Bit Torrent file sharing program and provide access to my students who could download this 25 minute video directly from me without using a service like YouTube (which has a 15 minute time limit anyway). this Bit Torrent connection is a direct connection between my students and me and it is efficient. unfortunately, the bigger use for a Bit Torrent service is to share music, videos, software and files, which are often illegal depending on the copyright and so it gets a bad rap. but the fact remains that i can use this service to better educate my students and Comcast blocked this service. this has already happened so the fears are not unsubstantiated.

my concern is that Comcast (my provider) would enter into a deal with Blackboard (now the owner of Elluminate Live). Blackboard could make a deal with Comcast ensuring that their Elluminate tool gets priority access. Elluminate is a tool that is in direct competition with Big Blue Button. potentially, Comcast could make Big Blue Button no longer work or become extremely slow so that video fails, which would force my students and me to use the more expensive Blackboard Elluminate for our needs. while my university provides Blackboard for my use, i do not use it because there are no school districts around who also use it. i would rather use tools that are being used or can be used by public and private schools who are strapped for cash — thus, open source solutions like Moodle. the notion that Comcast or another ISP could block access to freely available tools or websites should be the catalyst for most citizens to contact their various elected officials in congress. tell them you want Net Neutrality right now.

now the Google and Verizon proposal does propose enacting Net Neutrality to the wired internet that most homes have. unfortunately, they specifically noted that they do not want this policy to apply to the wireless internet. this includes mobile phones, for example, but it also is starting to go beyond mobile phones. here in Grand Rapids, we now are a little over 1 week into having WiMax 4G from Clearwire & Sprint. this means we now have a wireless BROADBAND network for the city of Grand Rapids — this is happening more and more across the USA. and here, they are even providing broadband to individuals who cannot afford typical broadband at a very reduced rate (potentially $9.99). this network would be excluded from the Net Neutrality proposal that Google and Verizon outlined last week. but we should be against this even if it just included mobile phones as my students will often email me when they notice a problem on our class website. i need to be able to get in and fix the problem right away and i’ll typically use my smart phone. i need my smart phone to be able to access the websites and tools i use and that wouldn’t be guaranteed under the Google/Verizon proposal. why should my smart phone be forced to access a different internet than my laptop? it shouldn’t!!!

the internet is certainly an entertaining tool much like television. many people see it very much like the tv industry so it’s harder to prioritize Net Neutrality when you think the internet is just a giant fun toy. however, the internet is much more than entertainment and has now become an important way for citizens to participate in all aspects of society. a few years back, democrats in Michigan were able to vote in a primary election from their home using the internet — read: citizens participating in a democracy online. many people learn about political candidates or issues by using the internet; we pay our city water bill online; we can go online to check the latest appraisal on our home and fight property tax increases when we feel the appraisal is wrong. many people rely on the internet for their employment and/or to comparison shop and find local businesses, etc. — in fact, e-commerce is now pushing towards $200 billion spent online each year. the next Google or Amazon could be starting in a garage as i type this and a lack of Net Neutrality could prevent them from ever getting off of the ground. enough from me, but if you want to read a nice review of the Google and Verizon deal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, please see this link.

once again, i urge you to contact your elected officials in congress and tell them you want Net Neutrality right now for wired and wireless access to the internet. do not allow Google and Verizon to shape the future of how we educate our students.

the Center for American Progress (the think tank that John Podesta runs) has a new report out describing the failures of teacher prep programs. the report can be found here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/07/teacher_accountability.html

the gist of the report is that a new accountability system is needed to ensure that more quality is being injected into teacher prep programs and teacher licensure. the report provides a number of recommendations for individual programs and also states. for example:

• Program accountability—and teacher preparation itself—must focus exclusively on what improves instruction and produces necessary school changes.
• State accountability for teacher preparation should be built on a set of clear signals about program quality that policymakers can understand and program faculty and institutional leaders can use.
• Signals of program quality must be empirically based, measurable indicators and should be derived from a small number of key outcomes.
• Every state’s teacher preparation program accountability system should include a teacher effectiveness measure that reports the extent to which program graduates help their K-12 students to learn.

i suspect that this report is not going away; certainly reform is coming. i think it’s time for those of us in ed tech to promote how technology can play a larger role in improving teacher education and k-12 teaching. if new accountability models are going to be developed then having future teachers held accountable for information literacy skills is necessary, for example. this is our chance to help build classroom observation standards that include integrating educational technology effectively. i encourage everyone in ed tech to be involved in helping to shape our future for the better. this is no time to be passive.

if nothing else, read through the report and start thinking about how you can help shape our future for the better. and then act!

i am writing this blog entry from my iPad using my wireless bluetooth keyboard and the WordPress app for the iPad. i actually like the interface quite a bit; however, the WordPress app doesn’t quite seem ready from prime time. as i typed the title to this blog entry and hit the tab button to move to the next text field the app crashed — repeatedly (3 times in a row). so i am now using my fingers to just move the cursor to the next field of entry. not optimal, but it works. if the kinks were worked out of this app then i could see this method of adding blog entries as being as good as anything else i do on my main computer. with a bluetooth keyboard i can lounge on the couch and add to my blog and that makes this quite convenient. i’ll have to check out other blogging apps to see if there is something rated better.

but overall the iPad is working its way into my workflow. i still haven’t found a free twitter app that allows me to have multiple Twitter accounts so i use 2 different apps . . . certainly not ideal. but the dictation app works extremely well for my needs. i was able to write 2 emails on the way to work on Friday. i couldn’t send them until i arrived, but it was nice to easily write them while driving with both hands on the steering wheel. i have used iBooks (to read The Great Gatsby) and i am reading The Fourth Way on the Kindle app. they both seem like good book apps, but the Kindle app has better selection and allows me to have the screen black with white text and that’s nice while reading in bed.

i am not ready to say that this is a device of the future, but it’s a nice first step. i don’t think this can replace a laptop for my kids’ needs even though it could do most of what they need for school. the point isn’t to have a device that can almost equal the status quo; rather, it has to add value or, at least not regress so perhaps the iPad version 2???

i spent the past week at the SITE Conference in San Diego and had a great time and learned much. however, one of the featured speakers was Chris Dede of Harvard speaking about Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skills and this was one of the sessions i most wanted to see. the room was large and a lot of people were in attendance eager to learn the latest and greatest. Dede operationally defined 21st Century Skills with a few examples, but not once did he simply define these skills. from my experience, when you bring these skills up each educator thinks of something slightly different as it’s a nebulous topic. not only that, but these schools i am currently studying are having great difficulty in measuring these skills. it’s just not something that can be done easily. in fact, no school we studied has figured it out. and this gets back to Chris Dede’s lecture on the topic. i had hope that he would come through with a promising new development or practice. unfortunately, after describing a current project he’s working on he then proceeded to explain that the real audience for his product is not educators; rather, the real audience is the Educational Testing Service (ETS). so the future of 21st Century Skill assessment is via ETS and schools paying a fee per student to learn whether they are teaching the correct 21st Century Skills or not? hmmm. i certainly didn’t expect a free system to emerge, but i was hopeful that a more simple site-based solution could be described or suggested (and it didn’t have to be THAT simple either). ah well, this still leaves me room to figure it all out . . . then again, perhaps Dede is on the right track??? if there was a simple solution to 21st Century Skills assessment then we’d know about it by now, eh? /sigh.

Google has a test related to Javascript 3 in browsers that runs over 5000 tests on the browsers you choose. they show results for PCs with Opera and Safari both beating Google’s Chrome on its own test. i thought i’d try a few popular Mac browsers on the same test and here are the results with best = #1:

so, it looks like Safari wins this test easily. i rarely use Safari as my typical browser is Firefox and i’ve been using Chrome quite a bit lately because i got frustrated using Firefox with Google Wave. perhaps it’s time to consider Safari?

quick update since i intend to note this tomorrow in my session, but using Twitter Widgets is one way to post your tweets to your class website. or, you can do a search for a specific topic. for example, here is a search for the hashtag of #edtech for the MACUL Conference 2010 — continuously updated (i used a conference hashtag originally, but that hashtag is barely used a week later so i switched to #edtech):

I am missing much of Thursday and i had 2 sessions i really wanted to see. dang. but later today and tomorrow i have a full day planned.

Thursday
• I Can Do What With Moodle? in the Vandenberg B room (4:00 pm- 5:00 pm)

Friday
• Evaluating K-12 One-to-One Laptop Initiatives in Lower West Michigan in the Nelson room (8:30 am- 9:30 am) *I am a presenter
• Resources for Assisting in the Transition to Online Learning in the Nelson room (10:00 am-11:00 am)
• Twitter: #Teaching #Learning in the Emerald B room (11:30 am-12:30 pm) *I am a presenter
• Transforming Our Classrooms With a One-to-One Laptop Program in the Grand Gallery B room (1:00 pm- 2:00 pm)

perhaps i’ll see you around at MACUL 2010.

i use Google Reader to read all of my students’ blogs. it works very well for reading news stories and blog entries . . . so i suppose the name of the application is perfect. however, i want to participate in dialog with the authors of the various blog entries i read, particularly since the vast majority of the blogs i follow are my students’ blogs. currently, Google Reader requires me to read an entry and then click on the title of the entry to actually go and visit the blog on Blogger.com. when i arrive i can leave comments and then i have to type in a security word verification. when you have a lot of students, this word verification becomes quite burdensome. add the step to actually leave Reader to visit the blog to physically leave a comment there and Reader loses some of its appeal. now, it’s still nice to quickly grade blogs and find all of my students’ blogs in 1 place, no doubt. i just find it curious that Google owns Blogger and they fail to link these 2 services together any better when these 2 services should work together like a hand and a glove. it’s hard to complain when you are using tools and services for free, so let’s pretend that i am not complaining and instead just offering some constructive feedback in the hopes that Reader gets improved in the VERY near future.

i joined Facebook many years ago before it was open to anyone outside of higher education. some of my students had requested i join and i did . . . and for the first few years on Facebook i checked in maybe once a year, if that. once Facebook opened up to the masses, i suddenly started seeing old high school and college buddies appearing (to the tune of hundreds). for that matter, even my mother joined Facebook. and that’s when i started checking into Facebook more often. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was the fact that i could be the public Sean (e.g., the educator Sean) on my wall and i could control how i was seen by various groups of friends. i tried to keep my wall fairly humorous with somewhat clever status updates or even mundane (e.g., a cooking update), but i stayed away from posting anything that could be perceived as being controversial. this is the public me that a student might see around campus or at the library or the grocery store. all educators have their public side. but all educators have their private lives as well. heck, we even have public lives that are largely private when we travel to see old friends in other states, etc.

last month, Facebook changed their privacy settings to force everyone to be more open. so now, if i respond to a friend’s status update with something goofy that the private Sean would say, but the public Sean wouldn’t say then instantly a notification will appear on my wall as “recent activity.” i can no longer keep this hidden automatically. to be fair, Facebook allows me to delete this from my wall once it appears, but i don’t know whether this information is still appearing in my students live feeds, etc. — and the fact of the matter is that even in the seconds before i delete my recent activity then someone could see my comments and i shouldn’t have to run back to my wall after everything i post around Facebook. prior to these privacy changes, i could respond to a friend’s photo or status update with an inside joke and i had privacy settings to ensure that none of my students would see those comments . . . unless they were also friends with my former college buddies, for example. this was highly unlikely given that all of my old buddies live in other states. so, while nothing was entirely private even before, i was comfortable with the level of perceived privacy that i could be the highly sarcastic Sean and not have to walk on egg shells with my comments. i should note, nothing i write would get me fired or in trouble; rather, my little interactions with old buddies would probably just help people realize more quickly that i am a big goof. i’d rather not make it easy for people to figure that out. ;~)

i get that the founder of Facebook has this vision of everyone being open with their lives. good for him. clearly, the guy has never been a teacher . . . and i doubt he’s ever even lived in the real world.

i serve on my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) for human subjects research. i have been charged with developing policy and procedures for how principal investigators should ensure data from human subjects is protected. this is my thinking thus far and any feedback is welcome:

• Electronic files containing participant data must be password protected even if the computer requires a login to access the computer.
• Online databases containing project data should be secure. One strategy to better secure online data is to have the database encrypted. The PI is responsible for providing the IRB with details on the following:
1. The online service provider agreement for service with regard to the storage of the data;
2. How long data will remain in online databases;
3. Any circumstances in which the database company can use, share, or archive the de-identified data. Note: not all study data will be de-identified.
• PIs using online-based data collection tools (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang) must provide the IRB with a link to the data collection or storage tool’s privacy policies. This policy should also explain who owns data stored on the company’s web servers.
• If data collection occurs via email, the research participant should be notified that many employers monitor email systems they maintain.
• If data being collected is personally identifiable and sensitive, the PI should consider using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol during data collection. An SSL is often used for online purchases and banking. Many popular online data collection sites will offer SSL as an option.
• Principal Investigators should warn study participants, when appropriate, that the participant is responsible for the security of the computer that the participant is using.

i think this is relevant on my blog because all teachers should be concerned about online data security when using online tools, services, or websites that pertain to their students’ data. the United States even has a law to protect student data often referred to as the Buckley Amendment.