Blurts

Much has been made of intrusive ads and ad blockers. To some extent. this about the annoyance of pop-ups (actually not that common in my experience with education sites). More importantly, sites can be adding cookies to your browser and collecting information you might not be willing to share.

Ghostery is an extension you can add to your browser to give you information and some control over the information being collected. I am against blocking ads in most cases because I see the use of ads is a decision to be made by the content creator and not the content consumer. I do think it is important that consumers have some awareness of what cookies are operating on their browsers.

The following two images shows Ghostery in action. The first shows the return from my site which does display a Google ad on most pages and collections Google analytics data on the use of my site. The second images shows the Ghostery return when using the popular education resource site hosted by Richard Byrne. I knew this site was funded by the display of many ads and wanted to see the difference.

Scholar Diane Ravitch was one of the most vocal and visible objectors to now Sec of Education DeVos. Here is a nice video (PBS with Tavis Smiley) explaining her positions.

I was once quite interested to the role of technology and study behavior. So many of the topics that have interested me over the years seemed to fall into the category of “technology can make it better because it can make it practical”. I still think this is a good way for researchers interested in application to identify topics to pursue. It has always seemed to me that some productive research topics fizzle out because they failed the test of commercialization. “Commercialization” – is that the word in other fields that describes the effort to take a research finding and make it practical? I think education can have this problem (and it has nothing to do with making money). As an old guy who became interested in the potential of technology when technology became available, I felt I had some advantages because I had experienced a previous life and had some ideas to draw on.

Anyway, I happened to come across a blog post (ProfHacker) describing ideas for digital note taking. In his post, he pointed to the work of another professor and to his own past efforts. Note taking is part of the formal academic experience and many of us continue to take notes as a professional skill. Seldom are strategies for this important skill taught.

My own related interests related to student use of notes were a combination of idealistic notions associated with online technology (group intelligence) and some more classic ideas from note taking research (expert notes). It appears my ideas were quite similar to those of ProfHacker’s ideas. Why note share notes?

At the time I was interested in more formal research, collecting data and generating publication partly because this was what was expected of my academic position. I kind of now see why being sidelined by that pressure was not a good thing. What I ended up publishing were mostly articles about who would involve themselves in voluntary technology-facilitated study activities and who would not. The focus that was rewarded was a shift toward using the data collection features of technology to investigate issues in learner motivation. If you offer learners export notes to enhance their own notes will the student continue to come to class? What are the characteristics of those who will use a digital learning resource as an alternative to class attendance? Why are proficient learners more likely to take advantage of technology-facilitated study tools than students who really need the help? Looking back, the process seemed to drift back toward more basic questions.

Conducting research on student learning in the wild is far more challenging than studying learning in the lab. Anyway, I got off track. Do check out the links I provided at the beginning of this post. I do hope many of these very practical ideas have a second life because of online technology.

I just finished a Kindle book called Layering for Learning. The book concerns opportunities educators have to layer (add) questions, annotations, comments on online content (video, web pages) to create instructional content. My expectation is that this layering would be most commonly applied to content not originally created by the teacher – e.g., a YouTube video that fits with the teacher’s curriculum.

The image above is MoocNote and one of the services I describe. MoocNote is a service you can use to add comments, questions and similar annotations to online video. If you look carefully at the image, you will note my arrow pointing to an ad (oddly as these things go to an ad for an ad blocker). One of the boundary conditions I established for myself in writing this book was that the services I describe used a system that accepted the content to be annotated from the content creator’s server. What this means to me is that in layering content to improve a learning opportunity, the original material and the way it is delivered is not altered. This commitment to the original includes the display of ads.

I understand that ads can be annoying and are kind of off limits to learners under the age of 13. Still, I consider the use of techniques to avoid ads and still display the ad-supported content as a copyright violation (or at least unethical). I assume that when you accept content provided at no cost to you the intentions of the individual creating that content should be honored. If you do not want to view ads, look for another content source. It is only fair.