The horror show

Two days ago Reddit gave me the opportunity of reading a story aout a man that blinded his four year old son. I decided that this was potentially too distressing to read and so passed it by. The following day I saw a link on Twitter and followed it. The story despite the scant information it presented, was the most harrowing I have read in years and left me feeling quite depressed. The internet is a platform for all of life and its most distressing excesses. It can’t give that boy his sight back, nor undo the appalling psychological damage he suffered. But it did have the power to depress me beyond precedent.

 

Eggsperiment Posting for the first time from my new Nokia iPod Killer – the5800. The photo is of my son’s experiment disolving the shell of an egg with vinegar.

 

How to ruin someone’s life online

I was at first amused and later disturbed to read the following story, which I picked up via the social networking / bookmarking site Reddit : http://tinyurl.com/bh57oc.

Amused because anyone foolish enough to drive hundreds of miles to cheat on their wife on the basis of a spurious internet encounter is naïve and maybe deserves everything they get.

On the other hand when you consider that this rather unpleasant set up was a deliberate ‘prank’ brought about as the result of football rivalry, then I believe you have to stop and think about just what is going on here.

Firstly, they had already broken the guy’s ankle, apparently by accident, when on holiday. Most normal people would leave it at that and get on with their lives when they get back to normal life. Not these two characters; instead they set up an elaborate hoax to lure their victim into making a fool of himself, persuade him to part with a picture of himself in the nude, and then record the conversation in which he found out that he’d been had. This information was then posted on the internet and subsequent publicity, deliberately orchestrated or otherwise, ensured that the story went viral and was picked up in the national press along with a photo of the hapless victim. I can’t help feeling that there is a case to be made for an unreasonable level of interference in someone’s personal life having taken place and wonder abouyt the legality of this kind of harrassment. The victim appears to be taking it well, but I can’t help but wonder whether the abuse that he has suffered thus far making him wary of saying anything to further antagonise his tormenters.

I am, incidentally, a Liverpool supporter.

 

I have to admit to having had a moment of quiet satisfaction while walking along the street earlier today. I spotted the police preparing to tow away a car whose owner had decided that it would be okay to illegally park in a disabled parking bay. Let’s face it, it would be difficult to argue that they shouldn’t be doing this (though there would clearly be some position on the extremes of the political spectrum where opposing it would seem reasonable to some).

The point was that it felt good to see it happening as it seemed that justice was being done. Here was an example of the state (or at least the local municiple law makers) intervening in people’s lives for the greater good – there must surely be countless others. What about the smashed bus stop windows I had seen earlier this week in the quiet rural area that I live in? Wouldn’t it be nice if the vandals were made to pay for their actions?

Someone told me about a Spanish friend of theirs that went to live for a while in Basel and decided one day to dump some rubbish in the street – something that the average Madrileño wouldn’t think twice about. She was rounded on by a local member of the public and when she asked ‘what difference does it make to you?’ was given a lesson in civic responsibility, and a reminder that it was everyone else would have to pay for her selfishness.

All of this is fine, and we could produce a long wish list of situations in which the rule of law should prevail no doubt. Nevertheless, at a time of disruptive and threatening actions by ‘terrorists’ and others who are inclined to tire of waiting for the democratic process to produce the results they would like, there is perhaps an overzealous tendency on the part of the state to intervene in the lives of its citizens.

The desire of the British government to create digital databases of all its citizens’ online communications is a case in point. The Australians’ plans to create a stranglehold on the internet for its population by prescribing the sites they can visit is another. Both of these actions should be regarded as intolerable by those that believe in liberal democracy, despite the fact that some feel inclined to argue that supposed threats to liberty somehow justify totalitarian methods that undermine liberty themselves.

 

Caring about sharing

As one of the pioneers in the use of podcasts for English language teaching, I was among the first to become aware of the potential for material that I had produced to be reused around the world – and naturally rather pleased that others were so convinced of its quality, or at least usefulness. I was, however, keen to maintain some sense of authorship of the material. 

I had been made mindful for the potential for reuse to become open abuse after submitting a definitive list of useful websites for common English language coursebook subject areas to a global forum in my organisation. The list was very extensive and had taken some weeks and a great deal of effort to compile. It seemed a positive move to share this around the network so that the maximum number of people could benefit from it, especially as its production had been financed by the organisation in the first place. I did not, however, make loud noises about respecting authorship and crediting my efforts, as I didn’t think it would be an issue. Imagine my surprise when the list began to reappear on this and other forums over a period of months and years, without my name on it at first and eventually with somebody else’s. Indeed, some two years later it was represented on the same forum by somebody completely different, who was then showered with accolades about it being a job well done etc. I pointed this blatant abuse out to someone else, who suggested that I should just regard this as flattery, though I must admit I was also tempted to see it as infringment of intellectual copyright. I considered pointing this out to the forum but decided that there was little to gain by doing so. As I hadn’t built the web sites in question, it was merely a question of the recognition of the effort involved in compiling it.

The reuse of learning objects that you have created yourself, is another matter, and one that needs careful consideration if we are to create useful, understandable and workable guidelines to follow. Within my organisation a department recently repurposed a whole online course as self-study materials for learner support. Naturally, this is not to be made available to our competitors and so is only available online to paying customers. Nobody has complained about this policy as it seems to be in line with people’s expectations. On the other hand, I made a conscious decision when setting up our podcast site to make it open to all – it didn’t seem to be creating any problems to do this, our student were getting the benefit of it and it helped to foster a spirit of sharing resources. My suggested activities – essentially a learning comprehension task – might not suit others’ purposes and so they should be allowed to use it as they saw fit to meet their own particular learning objectives. So that was how it was; the podcasts were made open and freely available (you can access them here http://mylcpodcasts.blogspot.com/) and so they soon started to reappear in other parts of the web. I received requests for their resuse, which I agreed to, and sometimes they appeared without permission. The only factor that would interest me in this situation is that noone else takes the credit for my work, and perhaps where possible that they reference and link it.

At the beginning of this piece of writing, I suggested that there might be some correlation between that popularity of podcasts and their supposed quality. Obviously there can be no quality assurance implied in this, and it is interesting to note that at times I received suggestions about how the quality could be improved. Upon reflection, it would have been better to have included some mechnism for rating the podcasts and more openly encouraged comments on their quality that could be helpful to those seeking to use them as learning objects. The inclusion of the site itself on various directories of podcasts recommended for use in English teaching helps to reassure the potential user of its usefullness and potential quality, but the last word ought to rest with the learning practioners and educators that will be responsible for integrating the material in their teaching. Of course, if you hope to derive advertising revenue from the site, quality assurances can help to build traffic as well.

The availability of the resource will also depend on how easily searchable its content is. When I created the podcasts site, there was little talk of tagging as a means of searching for content, as well as users making sense of it themselves. In the higher education sector the availability of resources and learning objects for sharing, both within and without organisations make this issue and that of quality assurance critical to selling courses and maintaing standards of excellence. In my own context, English language teaching, where the use of resources is on an as-needed and often more ad hoc basis, (see Fox, 2008 for a description of such a process in my teaching centre http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a4.html ) the need for a standardised classification system is not great, as the resources needed to develop them would be difficult to argue for. Over-regulation would be another factor in the poor uptake of a resource sharing system in this context. The most logical system would be a user-based tagging system in my context; users are those that understand the integration of resources with learning objectives in mind and would be well-placed to signpost to others.

Finally, to consider barriers to sharing in an English teaching context, the key factor in getting people to co-operate is nearly always a financial one. People typically resent resources being assimilated by the organisation without any material reward being offered. This is particularly the case when resources have been created in one’s own free time and dates back to the days when resources where typically paper-based and for use in a face-to-face setting. There has been a sizeable shift towards digital resources in recent years with interactive whiteboards (IWBs) and internet links in all classrooms. Equally, the rise of blended learning, particularly in the area of learner support means that this issue has become much less clear. The sharing of digital resources for IWBs on an ad hoc basis is widespread and most teachers now have paid time when they are not teaching when resource production takes place. The time would seem to be right to look at a system of classifying resources where users can tag them and thus reference their potential as learning objects with learning objectives in mind.

 

I wanna be connected(?)

It´s that time again. The thermometor hits 40ºC and suddenly everyone becomes nocturnal around here. It´s true – it´s like someone tripped a switch and everyome moves out into the garden. People drag their TVs outside and go for walks at 3am; that kind of thing.

Just finished watching “The Darjeeling Limited” (but inside – not in the garden) and am reflecting on how much I´d like to go to India.

Also on the perils of connectivity. It took me two days of my holidays and a plea from one of my colleagues to stop logging on to the corporate intranet and to enjoy my vacation to allow me to begin to unwind. My wife has spent the last two days on the laptop catching up with emails via her corporate login – this is, I fear, what we feared. The moment one shows a willingness to engage with working life in one´s own free time is the moment it begins to be exploited, naturally.

Now I need to find the elusive balance between being relaxed and on holiday, and motivated enough to carry on full steam ahead for the last stretch of H806, and ultimately MA ODE.

Connectivity permitting.

 

Well, what do you know?

Privacy is one of those things. You know that it exists but you don’t necessarily believe in it wholeheartedly. I mean, if you did, surely you wouldn’t post your personal details all over the internet for everybody to see – unless you wanted them to, of course.

You don’t have to read very far around this subject to find alarmist stories, from the urban myth that the CIA invented Facebook (or MI5 in a recent version I heard) to persuade us all to place our identities online, to more sober reflections on what privacy means to different people and how online exposure can impact on your life. A friend of mine recently explained how exposure on a social networking site could literally cost them their life as a result of a disturbing past liaison. Most of us are far less concerned about being found and are willing to forgo such concerns in the hope of making new friends and contacts, or finding old ones again. More troubling, however, are the possibilities of building up an identity profile by cross referencing web sites and using photo recognition software (Gross and Acquisiti) and back-door Facebook applications to mine hidden data.

It is tempting to remind ourselves that the chances of someone stealing our indentity are pretty remote. I have to confess to being more nervous of throwing my bank details out with the rubbish than I am to having them stolen online (though I won’t tempt fate by pouring scorn on the idea – remember what happened to Jeremy Clarkson . I also think that it’s unlikely that anyone would want to stalk me, though I recognise that these risks are real enough to others. Of course Mark Zuckerberg has an interesting ‘people want to opt out while we use everyone else’s data to make money with’ spin on the matter, but then he would as he has done rather well out of allowing Facebook to do just that.

As I was writing this, a conversation was struck up between colleagues, one of whom has just discovered the joys of Facebook and had had a live chat with a friend that has gone ot work in China. The wonders of the social network seemed clear enough to her at the time of speaking, but as she did so, another colleague interjected with the declaration that she would never use FB. ‘It’s too creepy’ – someone from the past that she hadn’t invited contact with had got hold of her email address from an online communication between two mutual friends and this had unnerved her slightly. This set me wondering about the number of times I’ve actively tracked down old friends via the web in the past; they’ve always seemed pleased to hear from me, but maybe on occasion they might have found my sudden appearance ‘creepy’. I’ll never know, but at least I can be sure through Facebook that they are inviting contact and that they don’t have to accept my friend request. To this extent at least, Zuckerberg is right, they can opt out of contact if they want, and I won’t be too upset either.

 

White noise ≠ empowerment

Doing some serious social bookmarking (about social bookmarking again), I stumbled across an interesting looking blog. “Tim’s Blog” was immediately interesting for two main reasons: firstly, he has produced and kindly made available an A4 guide to social bookmarking, which I believe will be useful for presenting to any takers for my forthcoming social bookmarking project at my teaching centre. Secondly, on his mission statement page he makes the following bold declaration:

“…we need young people to be empowered, and technologies to help us collaborate – in order to tackle big social issues and to bring about real, positive social change. Because that’s what creative, connected and empowered people do.”

Stirring stuff, which cast my mind back about 20 years to a meeting that I attended with various anarchists, communists and media hacks in attendance, which made something of a fist of discussing the potential of the emerging whisperings of a new way of communicating by interconnected computers in different parts of the world. Of course the word ‘internet’ wasn’t used, but it wasn’t long until a free modem came into my possession and sat proudly next to the Amstrad waiting for me to find out what to do with it (I never did and in any case, there was a severe shortage of ISPs at the time).

But, the point was that there was a great deal of excitement about the potential at that early stage for the social aspect of the web to offer a powerful means of promoting political ideas and perhaps build political movements, rather as the pirate radio movement ‘Free the Airwaves’ had tried to do around that time. This aspect of the web never really materialised, perhaps because a political movement was the antithesis of what the web was all about: i.e. the former was a means of bringing people together with a common political goal (normally someone else’s), or a whole cluster of them, while the web was to be about people coming together on their own terms as and when they wanted for a mind-boggling array of reasons that change faster than you can hope to count them. The political movement is dead, long live the social network (and whatever it morphs into).

It also occurred to me recently that the online social network existed before the web, in a very real sense. If you are old enough to remember, you might recall that in the 80s newspapers and late night TV channels carried endless ads for phone in chat lines that allowed large numbers of people to call a number and be connected to a synchronous spoken chat room. As I recall, for I never participated in this phenomenon being far to busy with my own face-to-face social networking, these were limited to the notion of an online party, with people looking to hook up one way or another. They never really had much to do movements of any sort. Nevertheless, the two ideas were already there: the desire for more power among the politicised via an international, non-controlled communications network, and the burgeoning online social group mindset that was already in full swing and looking for a new and more dynamic (not to mention cheaper) place to hang out. The rest is (recent) history.

Which brings me back to Tim’s Blog. The desire for social change is still there, but I can’t help feeling that the yearned-for communications revolution has brought with it (or coincided with) a feeling of helplessness as the world appears to move inexorably towards global climatic catastrophe and unpopular wars rage around us bringing their consequences to our doors. Has the explosion in communications produced nothing more than a cacophony of white noise from a world of meaningless chatter? Or is the next step in the social networking revolution to be real empowerment?

 

Get away with your biros

So there I was, tagging some new social bookmarking web sites to del.icio.us (and of course actually social bookmarking while I was doing it) when my colleague asks me for a pen. As I hunted around in my rucksack pockets behind the cables and memory sticks to find a biro, she remarked: “You obviously don’t have to use a pen very often these days.”, thereby obviously cocking a snook at my technophilia and general nerdiness. I was vaguely ruminating on the truth of this observation when she jaw-droppingly pointed out the reason for her request: “I need it to write down the address of a web site”.

This provided some encouragement to my plans for a work-based social networking project, but left me wondering how much of an uphill struggle it might be to get it working. She readily agreed to join the project when I explained what it was and the irony of her request, but clearly didn’t have too much of a clue as to what I was going on about. I had a similar experience yesterday when explaining the project to one of our IT Power Users; he has decades of nerdiness under his belt but has thus far singularly failed to embrace the Web 2.0 world.

A presentation next week to staff seems to be the way forward with some clear guidelines and a pathway for the project to follow. You never know it might just work.

Aside from its usefulness in the workplace, as part of my studies on H806 (code for a module on the Open University’s MA in Online & Distance Education), this method of sharing resources seems to have great potential for increasing access to well targetted and useful resources related to ours studies. The system of tagging makes it easier to see the relevance of the resource at a glance and will almost certainly save time in looking for resources, hopefully also creating a synergy of aour efforts as they are combined for the greater good of all in this particular community of interest/practice.

My love affair with Ubuntu has experienced something of a renaissance with the arrival of Hardy Heron, or version 8.04, as my fellow Twitterers may already be aware. As I’ve already remarked elsewhere, this user-friendly version is approaching comparisons with Windows for ease of use but still has some aspects that need work. On the plus side, automatic detection of your router settings make navigating a one-click affair these days, while setting up your mail accounts is as simple as under Windows. File-sharing and CD burning are problem free areas. On the other hand, I was becoming frustrated with the general sluggishness of Firefox under Ubuntu, that is until I came across this rather wonderful hack. It makes all the difference and now Ubuntu seemsevery bit as good, if not better, than Windows (if only I can get my web cam to work in Skype). It’s just a pity that all this messing around with code was necessary – still there’s a certain nerdy appeal to it of course, and that surely makes it all worthwhile.

 

How to get to the taggards

I’ve been thinking about tagging (and why not). I enjoyed John Millner’s blog posting on this and have been reading a fair amount about it – perhaps not surprisingly there isn’t a huge amount about it in my own context (English language teaching) kicking around on the web, and what there is is relatively new obviously. To add to the confusion there is now such a thing as a ‘language tag’ (see langtag.net) to identify the human language of digital resources. That use of the term ‘human’ language caught me up short for a moment, but I like the sound of it. Of course the language of machines is a kind of human language too; perhaps the day will arrive when machines will develop languages that only they can understand.

So, back to tagging, and particularly tagging in the workplace. I had this wacky idea that I might try to persuade a group of teachers to join me in experimenting with such a project here. Asking for collaboration on such matters hasn’t always worked wonders in the past and there’s a feeling that any extra tasks like this should be rewarded financially. I can’t really profess to be the world’s greatest tagger and have resisted the urge to surround myself with clouds of metadat up till now, but I’m coming round to the idea and the social element is the clincher for me. I was an early Twitter registerer too, but didn’t start Tweeting in earnest till everyone else showed up. I suspect this will be the problem with this too – critical mass giving it all some meaning and dynamic.

So which to use? I rather like Connotea, but mainly because it looks more academic and maybe therefore more exclusive. I suspect that Del.icio.us will be the best bet as more people are likely to have heard of it and I could sell people on the more mainstream social appeal (maybe). My one doubt about it is that they may simply not see any value in it and not be interested in participating for that reason more than any other.

If anyone out there has any experience of doing this in their workplace, I’d love to hear about it.