Blurts

“Learning in the age of Google” was the title of an hour long program aired on the library channel University of California San Diego. I thought the information provided would extend what most of us know concerning the capabilities of Google search.

So much attention has been focused on the issue of online data privacy calling out companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. My take on this issue is mixed noting that collecting data that allows targeted advertising is the reason you can use these services for “free”. While important, those interested in data privacy might also complain about the tactics of your ISP, your credit card companies, and other services such as FourSquare. It is the combination of information across these services that is most valuable. For example. an ad campaign gains value by not just counting the number of ads viewed, but by showing that the ads generated additional revenue for the company paying for the ads. Combining evidence of exposure to an ad (one of the social sites) with evidence that you made a purchase an a related establishment (credit card data) or visited a relevant store (FourSquare) is far more valuable than knowing you viewed the ad alone. 

Taking on this entire issue is far too much for one post. I do have one concrete suggestion – use 1.1.1.1.  I have described this service previously as available on computers. 1.1.1.1, sometimes called a dotted quad, is the way computers communicate the address for an online resource. To translate what you enter (learningaloud.com) into a dotted quad, your ISP relies on a domain name server (DNS). You don’t have to make use of the domain name server offered by an ISP and using something else is one way to limit the information the ISP can learn about your online behavior. So substituting 1.1.1.1, a DNS provided by CloudFlare, for the domain server assigned by your ISP, you can limit the data your ISP can collect. Remember, unlike Google or Facebook, you already pay your ISP.

1.1.1.1 (the service provided by CloudFlare and also the DNS identifier) now provides a free app for iOS and Android. It is about as simple to use as it gets. Launch the app – turn to on or turn to off. 

More information from 9to5 Mac. 

Free Flickr is no longer available for photo backup or for large photo archives (accumulating photos over an extended period of time). I am not certain Flickr/SmugMug would accept this second position, but it is factually accurate. Simply put as related to these two positions – Flickr wants you to pay $50 a year for a Pro account. I do because I want redundancy for my archival collection.

If you have been a Flickr member since 2007, you don’t have to be much of a photographer to have more than 1000 images. If Flickr was sincere in claiming they want to prioritize Flickr as a quality social photo site, they could have easily taken a different approach – say limiting storage to your best 200 images a year. The last thing I want is to automatically dump every image I take into Flick and it is ironic that Flickr, as well as other photo services, even makes this possible. I hate having to go into my online accounts to delete photos I have accidentally taken of a finger or my feet. I agree that these are not interesting. Flickr/SmugMug, just say that storage costs money and the company cannot afford to offer free storage for those with many photos to store.

Anyway, if you fall into the category of free user for whatever reason, you must either cull your collection or look for a different provider. Google Photos makes a great alternative and is what I rely on for redundancy as well as some other great services such as search and Google lens (automatically providing information by recognizing what appears in your photos).

MacWorld has just offered a great tutorial on how to move your photo collection from Flickr to Google Photos.

ComputerWorld carried a post identifying new features that “will” be available in the new Chrome OS. The post seemed to indicate that these new features would be coming soon, but I could not help checking to see if they were already available on my Acer Chrome Tablet. The feature I thought might be most useful in the classroom was the opportunity to use speech to text to dictate to any text field. I found that I had access to this feature and could enter text by speaking to a Google doc.

Speech to text is an accessibility feature and must be activated. You will find the necessary setting by locating the accessibility within settings. You will need to find “Keyboard and text input” and then turn on “Enable dictation”.

With speech to text enabled you can both enter text from the keyboard and by using speech to text. When you want to use speech input, you need to toggle the microphone icon which should now appear at the botttom of your Chrome browser window. 

Again, this feature may or may not have rolled out to as of this date and may work a little different on other devices.

The article I have linked explains other new features and you will have your own opinions regarding whether the other features will be valuable to you.

A recent NYTimes article addressed what has long been called the digital divide and offered what to many might be a surprise. The article made reference to research suggesting that greater wealth does not equate to children using online technology more and the opposite may actually be the case. The explanation could be described in various ways. I would suggest the wealthy families are more able to oversee their children’s use of technology and do not use technology as a way to occupy their children.