I have received this tweet several times in the last couple of weeks. I am curious about your reaction. Do you see it in any way as manipulative?
I would predict that you have not received this tweet. I am guessing I received this specific tweet because I am in Hawaii AND because the source knows that I am not a resident. I see this as manipulative. The focus of the tweet is quite deceptive – It purports that a hurricane is bearing down on Hawaii and this is “local and breaking”. A hurricane would be unlikely at this time and year round residents would know this. I spend time in Hawaii each year and unless I stop and think I might be alarmed and press the button to install something despite the fact that I already have several weather apps on my phone that know exactly where I am and offer weather information relevant to this location.
If you look carefully, you will see in comparatively small print and in more difficult grey the message that this is a sponsored tweet and an ad.
This is a great example of surveillance capitalism. Information about me personally is used to send me an ad intended to shape my behavior in way that would not be immediately obvious to me. This is what future citizens (students) need to learn about technology and this important knowledge has nothing to do with teaching them to code. More and more, this is the way coding skill is applied.
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I have written few recent posts describing tools or tactics for layering. I have identified some tools similar to those identified in my book, but that require the educator to submit content to the service. This approach can be differentiated from the tools I have concentrated on previously in that my previous focus was on services that took as an input a web address for video or text/images. An issue that has always troubled me was a concern that “taking” the content created by someone else even with modifications and then reposting to the web seems iffy by copyright standards (unless protected to limit access to those in a class – TEACH act). This can be differentiated from content that is used offline and the layering methods I have already featured that combine content from the content author with layering additions in a way that still sends the creators content from his/her server. This is not to suggest that most uploads of content into a layering system are violations. I just assume that the possibility is there.
The present example of a layering service is Edji.it. It is a service that first requires the user to upload content (text, pdf, image) and then allows the host (i.e., teacher to display highights/comments or to offer students an assignments based on the shared content).
The social opportunity in Edji is accomplished by sharing a four-letter code that is added to the end of the Edji address (e.g., edji.it/XXXX). The developers think about layering activities a little differently than I do. I automatically assume that student work is done independently and at different times. The developers often use examples in which students are working in a whole class setting and the code is shared via posting to a smartboard. The developers offer some ideas for implementation and they describe some of these ideas as collaborative annotation.
One of the specialized tools that has been built into the service is the option of displaying a heat map of annotations (available in the paid version) showing the most commonly highlighted material. This is not as unusual as it might first seem. A similar opportunity is available with Kindle books and readers can turn on a feature displaying the content that has been most commonly highlighted. The educator sending out the assigned reading can also view the highlights and comments added by individual students and this offers a way to evaluate a requested task.
A free version is available to educators wanting to give Edji a try or who want to use the service for a special project. The “all you can eat” version is $5 per month.
I see Edji as similar to Hypothes.is with the additional opportunity to review the additions of individual users from a convenient control center or to InsertLearning without the additional features of objective questions or embedded discussions. Hypothes.is is free and InsertLearning is $8 a month.
Of the layering apps I review, Hypothes.is seems to get the most online attention. Here is another recent post offering background on the product, providing a basic tutorial, and supplying some suggestions for classroom use. I don’t necessarily consider Hypothes.is the most complete service, but it is free and seems to be the most common from the layering category of services used in higher education.
My list and description of other services within this category can be found at Layering for Learning.
I found this article somewhat outside the bounds of how I would prefer to think about K12 education. It contends that state politicians in some states are attempting to control how teachers present what have become politically charged topics. I agree that climate change has become a politically charged topic, but to require that educators present this specific topic as an open controversy is pretty much equivalent to suggesting that the research of the vast majority of scientists is to be treated in an equivalent manner as the opinions of a few outliers. Taking such a position is equivalent to arguing that science never quite gets to the point at which advances in science should be believed.
I wonder how teachers organizations in these states have reacted. The ethical basis for promoting anti-scientific positions must be questioned.
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This post from DuckDuckGo [https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/] explains their methodology for investigating self-serving bias in Google searches. Simply put, the approach asked different individuals from different locations to execute the same searches. This was done with and without enabling privacy mode. The dependent variable was the top searches returned and these hits were analyzed using a procedure that measured the uniqueness of the hits across participants. I have tried to approximate what I thought such a methodology would be using open and private mode without much finding much difference. The DuckDuckGo results explain why this might be as even private mode showed bias. Another difference was probably the search term used. I used apple (would one see computers or fruit). They used vaccinations, gun control, and immigration.
It would be interesting to duplicate this methodology and add different search engines as an additional variable. This would be a nice project for a college course.
I have read this now in several places. The Brave browser which purports to be a champion of privacy purposefully white lists, i.e., writes in exceptions for, Twitter and Facebook. These popular sites are at the center of the concern over online service companies storing and selling user data.
While it seems that failure to block these sites was the result of scripts which when blocked break the rendering of web content from Twitter and Facebook, failure to make clear to users the accommodation allowed for these services represents a violation of trust and clarity of mission. Clearly, users were informed that blocking scripts could lead to difficulty with some sites and users could turn off blocking if this became a problem. It seems taking this position on the possibility of proper display and then failing to acknowledge that this difficulty was avoided for favored services via white listing is doubly offensive.
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