Thursday - Mar 22, 2012
If you’re a student or parent of a student, you’re likely to be at least somewhat aware of the push to include technology in education. Whether at middle school or graduate school, the presence of interactive whiteboards, tablets, and online lectures is greater every year. And while there’s still plenty of debate about the effectiveness of education technology in and out of the classroom, the fact remains that education institutions are plowing ahead with their goal to make education more modern.
Yet in the background — at least in the United States — the cries of frustration of those least able to take advantage of the ed-tech revolution are at times drowned out by the voices of those who stand to gain the most from it. In the end, students in low-income households or in situations where Internet access is not available face more challenges, especially when teachers increasingly expect students and parents to be participating in Internet-based activities outside of school.
Students are now assigned online homework like writing blogs, while parents at some schools are expected to complete registration forms or manage student progress reports online. Some schools have talked about adding mandatory online courses for high school students. Even digital textbooks — which may require Internet to access or to further research topics contained within — are making appearances in schools. Those who don’t have readily-available Internet access are at a greater disadvantage.
“The policy of providing digital textbooks is the direction schools should take,” University of Texas professor and social-media researcher Dr. S. Craig Watkins recently told the Orlando Sentinel, “but it is flawed if it assumes all students have equal access to the Internet.”
The voices of those most in favor of ed-tech seemingly make this assumption at times, relegating those students who don’t have Internet access to spend extra time in an often crowded computer lab at the school; use a family member’s, friend’s, or business’ Internet connection (assuming students have an Internet-enabled device); go to a library (many of which are struggling with public demand for their computers); or work with teachers on an alternative. This often has the effect of eating up even more time out of the student’s — and sometimes the parent’s — busy schedule.
This all leads me to the next logical question: how many people in the U.S. are still without Internet access? According to the Orlando Sentinel story, “11 percent of Florida households with school-age children still lack Internet access.” And across the country? According to a U.S. Department of Commerce report (PDF) released in November 2011, 71 percent of Americans had home Internet access in 2010. The report also noted that only about 46 percent of households with annual household incomes less than $25,000 reported having any kind of Internet access at home. According to the Census Bureau, there were 30.5 million households earning less than $25,000 annually, so that means roughly 16 million households were without Internet access. (It’s not clear how many of those had school-age children.) All of this number crunching is to point out that a non-trivial number of low-income households likely don’t have Internet access at home.
Assuming many of those households have students in them, it’s not unrealistic to believe that many of them are getting left behind in primary schools’ push to become more tech-friendly. If educators in this realm continue to expand online requirements for students, it’s clear to me this problem must be addressed, including somehow making Internet access as commonplace as telephony. How common is the phone? Last year the U.N. declared cellular/mobile phones “de facto ubiquitous,” reporting more than 5 billion people globally as having some sort of mobile phone service.
As Internet-connected smartphones continue to replace older phones, it’s worth asking if all this concern about student Internet access is overblown. Despite the increasingly present connection that comes with today’s smartphones, they certainly don’t make for a long-term replacement of a desktop or laptop. Imagine being required to type a grammatically correct 500-word blog post on a smartphone. It doesn’t sound appealing. Eye strain, screen size, slow download speeds, and lack of a mobile application variant also tend to work against students. And while some schools are handing out iPads and laptops like candy — again showing that in many cases the lack of an Internet-connected device isn’t the problem — those devices likely don’t come with home Internet access.
It’s unrealistic to expect educators to back down from tech at this point, so what can be done to make Internet access as common as phone access? The U.S. government has been trying to address that issue, though not without controversy.
“The future of American education undoubtedly includes a laptop on every desk and universal Internet access in every home,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a recent conference in Austin, Texas. “We will do all we can at the federal level to support the use of technology in education,” he added.
The U.S. government has been working on that universal Internet problem, as I talked about last November. Yet despite the government’s attempts to regulate Internet service providers (ISPs), update its funding policies, and promote temporary affordable Internet service to low-income families, concerns of whether or not the federal government should even be involved with the expansion of broadband persist. Some argue such a task should be left up to state and local governments, though such arguments often fail to address who would then handle ISPs’ anti-competitive behavior.
While solutions to universal Internet in the U.S. are difficult to find, it’s not difficult to see that many low-income households with school-age children are at a disadvantage. As teachers continue to adopt technology and create online assignments, the have-nots are left to spend more time finding solutions to a process many of us take for granted: accessing the Internet. This leads me to one conclusion: until Internet access becomes as common as phone service, educators must remain flexible with their integration of technology in the classroom.
Photo via Brad Flickinger, Flickr Creative Commons
Thursday - Mar 8, 2012
This past weekend a ruckus was made over Google’s implemented privacy policy changes, with many critics arguing that the changes will only further crush people’s online privacy rights. Yet seemingly for every critic who protested the changes, someone else expressed how either the changes weren’t so limiting or — even more drastically — how our worries about privacy are a bit ridiculous.
All of the noise being made about Google’s change, as well as a recent announcement by the United States’ Obama Administration of a privacy blueprint for online consumers, has certainly muddied the water. But at the core of the complicated issue of Internet privacy are several viewpoints: one of high expectations for privacy and another of few privacy expectations.
Those with high expectations of privacy argue Internet privacy should be as important as that which we have in our own homes. “Private lives, personal secrets, confidential information – all of it is potentially compromised by the vast network of Internet data sharing,” said Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde recently. That sort of sharing, say privacy advocates, is too much. Users of websites like Facebook and YouTube wish that the companies running the sites would make their data sharing policies more transparent and offer clearer ways to opt out of data sharing schemes. “The consequences of being open with our personal information are dangerous as we further lose more of our personal freedoms,” these privacy advocates say.
Of those who have fewer privacy expectations online, their opinion is typically based on the wealth of free online products and services (like most of Google’s offerings) we help ourselves to on a daily basis. Because they’re free, these people say, our expectation for privacy should be low. “After all, the services are free,” said Forbes contributor Scott Goodson in a recent article about Google, “so surely we should understand they come at a price?” What is the price? Google and other free sites gather as much data as possible about you to better target advertising — a major source of income for such providers — at you. Additionally, this group also points out the information that retailers, credit card companies, utilities, and other businesses collect on us without too much public complaint. “Our privacy has long been in short supply,” they argue, “so why the outcry now?”
Regardless of which side of the argument you take, the realization should be that addressing online privacy is not a black and white issue. While we should have some expectation of privacy, especially with services we pay for, how reasonable is it to lose some of our privacy when using free online services? Where do we draw the line when it comes to how much of our personal data and online history is distributed and used?
That said, here are five ways to better protect your personal data online, or at least limit what gets passed on to others:
1. Make sure you’re not logged in to a Google service before using Google’s search engine. This won’t completely prevent your web surfing and usage habits from being tracked. Rather, Google will track you by your computer’s slightly more anonymous numeric Internet address, often called an IP address.
2. Check the privacy settings on your social media accounts from time to time as policies change frequently. Facebook is notorious for constantly changing not only how your data is displayed, but also how private it remains. As of this writing, you can verify your Facebook privacy settings by clicking the drop-down arrow in the top toolbar and selecting “Privacy Settings.” Other sites like LinkedIn and Twitter have similar ways of checking this.
3. Be careful with the “helpful” password saving features inherent in many browsers, especially when using a public computer or device. Before you use the browser on a public computer, make sure the password saving feature is disabled. Otherwise, you risk making more information than you intend available to others who may use the device.
4. It requires a little effort, but if you’re willing, install a browser extension like Ghostery. Once installed and configured, Ghostery will detect and block those tracking tools you don’t wish website owners to be using on you while you surf the Internet.
5. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and learn about the new technologies that threaten to disrupt your online privacy.
Further reading:
• Key issues about Google’s recent privacy policy changes
• “More privacy” opinion: How to Get Privacy Right
• “Less privacy” opinion: Being Tracked by Google Isn’t Bad—It’s Actually Good
Photo via DonkeyHotey, Flickr Creative Commons
Thursday - Feb 23, 2012
Earlier this month news broke of parent Tommy Jordan and his somewhat unorthodox method of dealing with his daughter’s disobedience in the online realm. Jordan’s daughter, Hannah, reportedly used vulgarity on Facebook to talk poorly about her family. In response, Jordan lectured his daughter and then shot his daughter’s laptop nine times with a pistol. Additionally, he recorded the “lecture” and posted it to his daughter’s Facebook page as part of her punishment.
Jordan has since defended his actions, stating “you raise your children however you want.”
“As long as they turn out well in the end, then our jobs as parents was well done,” he added.
Despite a fair amount of support, there are still many who oppose Jordan’s discipline methods. And from that disagreement comes a few interesting points that apply to parents with kids learning to use the Internet.
1. Compared to their kids, parents need to be as knowledge if not more knowledgeable about technology and social media. If parents know significantly less, they risk not being able to set prudent household policies and being less involved with their kids’ development in utilizing online environments.
Jordan supporter Samantha Radecki hints at this, stating on her opinion blog that parents don’t have the same level of control over their kids due to technological advances.
“Fifteen years ago, when a home telephone was the only way to keep in contact, it was easy for parents to monitor their kid’s activities,” said Radecki. “Parents today have to be up to date on using social media websites, cell phones, email and everything else in order to keep track of their kids like they used to.”
This easily leads into point two, which is…
2. Parents must be less fearful for and more supportive of children who wish to explore and search for information online. If parents are “introducing children to online environments through a len[s] of fear” as author Daniel Donahoo says, their “need to control, interject and govern” what their kids do online will limit the learning development of their children.
That view may seem to oppose the first point Radecki makes about monitoring what kids are doing online, but it truly doesn’t. Rather, a parent who knows how to use social media and other Internet technology not only relates better to their child, but also makes more intelligent household Internet policies, which can be created without the fear factor. That parent can sit down and explain what cyber-bullying is and why passwords shouldn’t be shared, all the while encouraging healthy online search habits. “Children supported to explore and search for information online will actually be better equipped to manage and avoid inappropriate content,” said Donahoo.
Looking at how Tommy Jordan handled the situation with his daughter’s Facebook postings in light of these two points seems extreme. While we don’t know all of the circumstances that led up to him shooting bullets through his daughter’s laptop, it’s easy to wonder if there was a better way to handle it.
When he defended his actions, he said that he didn’t have his daughter close her Facebook account because he’s an avid user himself and can empathize with the thought of losing years of memories. There are additional reasons to believe Jordan isn’t completely tech ignorant, leading me to believe that there was still the opportunity for him to spend productive time with his daughter on how to better use social networking. Instead he chose to shoot bullets through her laptop.
In the end, he’s at least partially right: parents more or less have the right to raise their children how they wish. However, there seems to be enough scientific evidence to show some methods are more productive than others. When it comes to raising a child in a tech-laden world, isn’t it more responsible to understand how that tech works and to spend time with the child creating a healthier, more meaningful view of the Internet and what it offers?
Photo via Oleg1975, Flickr Creative Commons
