iSean

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.

i’ve been “Waving” for about a month or so now. i gave invites to my colleagues and 2 of us actually use Wave for a research project we’re doing together that involves evaluating 1-to-1 laptop programs in our area (see my presentation at the SITE Conference in late March/early April on this topic). we share files and interview questions and responses and all sorts of data. we develop thoughts together and we even try and go beyond the very basics of Wave. it’s nice to have everything in 1 place as i have trouble with filing things well on my computer. that being said, the 1 thing that i really didn’t like about Wave is that i don’t have enough other people using Wave to make it something that i remember to check. you have to physically log into Wave to see new messages (so, it’s behind email in this regard). and it’s pretty crummy to get an email telling me to check Wave as that sort of defeats the purpose. well, i use Firefox as my main browser and just came across an extension that solves my biggest issue with Wave (and i have many other issues). it’s the Google Wave add-on for Firefox. now, if Google can just increase the speed of the service and give me a lot more invites then i could consider using it more full time.

T.H.E Journal has a recent article (or the 3 page version here) that notes the top 10 Web 2.0 tools for young learners based on a presentation by Gail Lovely at a recent conference. not surprisingly, i recognized less than 1/2 of the list. color me unimpressed with this list. as a person who spends hours a week in an elementary school, i don’t think some of the stuff on this list is very practical and certainly isn’t worthy of being “top 10″ over stuff like Google Docs, which isn’t even on the list. Lovely lists some apps (and 1 that isn’t even a web 2.0 app), but she also mentions some generic tools (e.g., #2 on her list is blogs, and #1 is wikis). i think i’ll release a better list next week to put this one to shame. stay tuned . . .

i have been a strong proponent of having schools switch to open source over using Macs or PCs. the money saved on operating systems for each computer in a building would be significant and then add the software like Open Office versus MS Office. switch the whole district and our tax dollars can start going towards other academic pursuits. i started writing a letter to the editor of our local newspaper about this very topic today when i realized that i’ve only fiddled with Ubuntu from time to time, but i’ve never really made it my working operating system. i thought i should be able to speak from experience. so tomorrow i am switching to Ubuntu and using it for a whole month on my Macbook (via Parallels). i am already exploring some extra apps to add to Ubuntu to make my experience more enjoyable. once i use it for a month then i’ll feel much more confident in making the recommendation to area schools . . . even though i know of schools that have done it successfully already.

i can’t expect anyone to be reading this, but if you come across it and have experimented with wikis, i’d like some advice on the best wiki to use when writing a textbook. i am fiddling with dokuwiki, but i am not sure it’s best. i read it was good for writing technical manuals, which isn’t the same thing as an ed tech textbook, but at least it’s something. i am probably going to fiddle with some other options this week and even look at some non wiki options (e.g., Drupal book module). hmmm.

i am on sabbatical until January. i have to do a lot of writing. i may or may not find time to post to this blog until then. sorry (to the 2 of you who may actually check here . . . on accident).

i am always on the lookout for tools that I can use in my teaching. i recently had a colleague make a very neat YouTube style video using Sony Vegas. . . but it’s only for PC users. technically I have a PC on my Mac, but I’d have to start up and select the XP partition. that’s fine and my Mac literally becomes a PC. unfortunately, i have all of the files and websites on my Mac side that I’d want to use. so, I’d have to transfer everything over and then restart into the PC just to make a screencast. yuck.

well i just came across a neat new app for Mac user called ScreenFlow. wow! this is a terrific application for screen and podcasting. i can run a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation and have it recorded while recording myself talking about the presentation content. Later I can show the presentation and the video of me at the same time or switch back and forth or only use the audio, etc. — there’s much more it can do and many neat editing features. It only works in the latest version of the Mac OS because it takes advantage of the features built into the OS including Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Data, etc. Using the OS allows the app to be very lightweight and still very powerful. i am going to try and make something for this semester and perhaps i can post a sample here just for kicks. stay tuned.

so a few years ago i decided to spend a little of my professional development funds on SurveyMonkey. Surveymonkey.com is a site that provides a tool for making surveys. pretty simple stuff really, but they do the job they claim and they do it well. i first subscribed because i was tired of the end of semester evaluations that students complete getting turned in and then not getting the results until a month after the next semester started. if there were any changes recommended to improve my teaching and my classes then I would not get that feedback until well into the next semester. so i wanted to take matters into my own hands. i used my professional development money and subscribed to surveymonkey.com and have been using it ever since.

now that i am realizing the benefits of more instant feedback, particularly as compared to the typical end of semester evaluation, i am going overboard with surveys. i now use surveymonkey to conduct key formative assessments each week and my students complete for participation points. so every week i send out a survey of about 20 questions that range from the time my students spent on various components of the class to questions about the content that was taught that week to questions about how people are accessing my online sessions (e.g. dial-up, cable) to the kinds of equipment people are using and whether they are traveling, etc. — I try and get a nice profile of students, but I also ask about satisfaction levels with parts of the class. and i have open-ended questions about how they’d improve the session/class, etc. they are going to be future teachers so i like putting them in my shoes from time to time. a great thing about surveying my students at the end of the week and through the weekend is that i am now able to change my course and teaching nearly instantly instead of waiting for January. and next semester when i go to teach a particular lesson i can look back at the feedback my students made this past semester.

a nice thing about surveymonkey is that you can use it for free, right now. anyone can create an account and use the service for as long as you need for free as long as you are not getting more than 100 responses per survey (most of us don’t teach more than 30 or so in any given class). unfortunately, the free version only allows up to 10 questions per survey. but free is free. the professional and unlimited version is $200/year. i now have years of data collected in surveymonkey to compare and some of it is quite fascinating — e.g., i used to have nearly everyone on dial-up and now very few people have stuck with dial-up. i can’t reveal the specifics of my data because that would be considered publishing it and i haven’t gone through our institutional review board for human subjects review. i am actually on the IRB committee at my university so i need to be particularly careful.

so i survey my students each week through the semester. i pose questions about the previous week’s work (e.g., how difficult, how long did it take) and i ask about the technology students use as well as what they liked and didn’t like. i even get a few questions in that get to the heart of the previous week’s objectives (sort of like a quiz that isn’t graded). well, on my last survey i asked how my students viewed me politically. i try and teach from a Devil’s advocate-type perspective and make sure many sides of various issues are discussed/debated, etc. here’s the results:

if that’s all it was i might draw certain conclusions and not know whether my conclusions are accurate or not. so, my next question asks, “Was there anything specific that lead you to respond the way you did on that last question?” and most students left this blank. however, the most commonly cited reason for choosing “liberal” was that i am an education professor and that i use a Macintosh computer. even those these results are skewed, nobody really had anything substantive for why they chose the response they did. i think most students selected the option that represents their own thinking. i also noted that nobody chose “strongly liberal” or “strongly conservative.”

i guess that means i do a good job of staying neutral. my question to myself is this . . . is that a good thing? should i stay neutral or should i come out with a position and say that i try and teach from a neutral perspective, but my actual position on issues may seep into discussions from time to time? i know i have colleagues who tell their students right up front. hmmm.

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