#UWinDig

I chose to look at look into Bruce Schneier’s radio talk with CBC called Internet plus: Now everything can be hacked! This talk is about Schneier’s new book Click Here to Kill Everybody. I agree with the article which states that the name of the book is quite terrifying. Just look at the cover.

Bruce being a security guru, subtitles his new book “Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World.” Throughout the talk, he discusses the real risks in the world, since everything is becoming a computer and networked in such ways he calls “internet plus.” Our world is becoming very IT-dependent, even if we don’t think we are using technology.

Schneier brings up examples that our world never had to think about until now. For example; ransomeware attacks on thermostats. People across the world or country can hack into our thermostat and turn it off until you pay a lump some of money. Everything in our world can harm us! In the past, people were able to threaten you by stealing private information from a hospital, for example, and simply embarrass you. But now a days, people are able to change your blood type in the database, which could potentially kill you.

We have lived through some of these threats! They might not be in our backyard but we have definitely heard about them. For example; Russia has taken out power plants in the Ukraine twice.

Schneier brings up another good point about us not paying for security in our everyday tools. When we are looking for a refrigerator, we aren’t looking for the one with the best security measures. We are looking for the best features at the best price. When we shop for anything, security does not seem to be one of the features we look for. But maybe it should become one.

An idea brought forward through this discussion is not limited to the safety of everyone in our world. Since everything around us is becoming more and more technological, I feel that we are relying to much on technology. I think to myself, “What is this world coming to?” Schneier brought up a good example that makes me reflect  on this questions. He reminds us of how Russia took out power plants all the way in the Ukraine without even leaving their country. People around the world are willing to go to further lengths to harm people. because they do not have to leave the comfort of their own home. Again, this is just my point of view.

Before reading this discussion, I knew of the crimes that happen around the world through technology but not necessarily the extent of them. Watching many crime shows, they give us visuals of what is going around in the “real” world. But I have never seen a show where people are attacking thermostats to get an easy pay day. In the future, when I am buying anything technological, I will definitely research to have the proper safety tools.

To connect all the ideas given throughout this talk, I chose to make a mind map. I believe that it is a good way to portray all of Bruce Schneire’s ideas and concepts. He is definitely someone with a lot of insight into the world of security, especially with technology. I hope we can learn from our mistakes and from all the examples shown throughout the world. Safety and security is not something we can just pass by. We need to always make sure our information and our loved ones are always safe. But how far are we going to half to go to accomplish that?

Matt Rosoff’s article examines the decline in the number of users the social media outlet has experienced due to recent sandals. While Facebook has been experiencing a decline, it still manages to have 2.23 billion monthly users. Facebook owns many other social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger which has helped them overcome their recent struggles as seen in Apple’s rankings of most popular free applications. Over the recent

year, Instagram has become a platform that has generated a high income. Instagram has grown 204%  year over year due to the number of advertisements which can be seen while using the application. Sponsored advertisements may have to be incorporated into WhatsApp and Messenger as another source of income in order to help save Facebook.

Looking more in depth at the recent Pew survey which included over 3,400 U.S. Facebook users, it concluded that millennials are either deleting the app, taking a break from it or many are simply adjusting their privacy settings. Facebook users are choosing to adjust their privacy settings due to the recent Cambridge Analytica event which breached users’ personal information. Moreover, Facebook is seeing a decline in users as Russian operatives also used Facebook to spread false news to influence the 2016 presidential elections.

Although there is a continued growth of Facebook users overseas, Facebook is seeing a major stall in North American users which included myself not so long ago. Before I engaged with the text, the Cambridge Analytica and the presidential scandal were not among my reasonings to delete Facebook, but I did find myself among one of the 42% users who needed to take a break. Every so often I choose to delete social media apps from my phone such as Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat which allows me to disconnect and just be present. After reading Rosoff’s article, I may reconsider removing myself from social media more often.  I deleted my Facebook account for over a year but I chose to reactivate my account for a few reasons. Facebook is a great application that allows me to keep in contact with previous teammates, family members and friends living all over the world. Not having a Facebook account often left me on the outside of the team’s Facebook page and multiple group projects as Messenger was the preferred means of communication. I now use the app mainly to keep up with my mom’s blog of her new puppy because I do not have the liberty of watching her grow back home in Montreal. Facebook privacy may have its downfalls, but it allows me to post albums and adjust the privacy settings so only I can see them. I enjoy this feature because iCloud doesn’t have the capacity to hold all of my pictures and I’m too cheap to pay for extra storage in all honesty. The text forced me to be more critical and think about what I am posting on social media because I now know that my photos aren’t only seen by me and that others may have access to them as well. Overall, I still enjoy using Facebook and being able to interact with friends and family through one simple click or like and I will think twice about posting something on Facebook in the future.

For the purpose of this assignment, I chose to create a mind map to summarize Rossoff’s article. I used Canva this time around which is similar to Piktochart which I used for the first multimedia artifact. I found Canva to be more user friendly and easier to navigate. I had access to a mouse and a large computer screen which I believed lessened my frustrations. Having the mouse allowed me to center objects somewhat better than Piktochart which relieved some of my OCD for small details as such. Overall, it was a much more positive experience creating this mind map.

Click to view my mind map! 

For this post I decided to showcase mindomo to present the information of Data-Driven Education by Khurram Virani. The reason I chose to present through Mindomo is because it is a program supported for mindmapping by both the Public AND the Catholic Board here in Windsor (you can trust me, I did the training!). Thus I thought it would be fun to showcase something teachers can use with their students no matter where their placements will be.

The program is fairly intuitive allowing for keyboard shortcuts to add new content bubbles as well as on screen buttons. It also allows for the direct linking of media from youtube or google image search, making customization easy. The app even has an iPad version :O!

The only problem I have with mindomo is that it can be a bit jarring for students who are used to working with mindmaps in the round, as mindomo works in either a linear or tiered model. Linear having farther removed ideas being farther from the center in a line (as shown on the mindmap created below), and tiered making it look something like a tournament bracket rather than an actual mindmap.

You can click here to see the full range of ideas discussed in the video but I believe the biggest take away from this video is that education does not take enough risks. It likes to stay within tried and true methods (much like this blogpost) rather than reaching out and risking failure. I would argue that just as last weeks blog post encouraged students not to fear failure we should also be teaching our teachers the same thing, as failure is how we adapt and innovate. If education fails to do this I fear it will always be just a few steps behind of where the world is today, let alone where it is headed tomorrow.

What ideas/beliefs make you react the way you do

These ideas come from the philosophy that failure is a learning opportunity, not necessarily just a result. It is the way we as humans learn what doesn’t work and, in doing so, continue striving for a better answer.

What were your ideas before

My ideas before related to data driven education were skeptical at first. I had seen many times algorithms fail and send me ads for things I did not care about. Relating it to education, I worried it would be much the same, striking many false positives and derailing a students education with misrepresented ques.

What pieces of new information did you find?

What I found was it is less about collecting all the data available, but selecting which data points are important for education. This would be like if the ad search looked at my open shopping carts on websites for information on what to advertise rather than the one off conversation I had with a friend.  What also resonated with me was the ideas that schools still cannot properly teach their students for the world ahead, let alone what is coming, due to the need to test and retest and confirm before they are willing to push any boundaries.

In reading “No Dark Corner” by Matthew Carney it is hard to not recall the famous novel by George Orwell.

The article explores the rewards based system that China is planning for 2020. It will score individuals based on prior achievement and future choices. There is a pilot project already in place which uses 200 million CCTV cameras to live update citizen’s scores. High achieving individuals receive VIP status at airports and hotels and no down payments on things like car rentals or homes. It is hard to argue that this doesn’t sound appealing. Who wouldn’t want to be rewarded for good behaviour? If you always pay your bills on time and are a model citizen why shouldn’t you receive some perks here and there? Everyone loves a gold star.

However, there is the other side of the coin. Low performing individuals are penalized to the degree of being cast out of their own society. They become unable to purchase travel tickets, or acquire certain jobs. There is a Chinese journalist who has become housebound and fears for the future security of his family. His freedom of speech has been removed and his social media censored. The thought alone of this is terrifying to me, however it is in fact a dystopian future that many people are living.

The idea of this is so jarring to me because I am fortunate to live in a country where I have freedom of speech and am able to make as many (reasonable) life mistakes as I choose without facing severe repercussions.

When I think of this notion of reward and retract in terms of education, I see some scary parallels. I understand that China’s demerit system is the extreme, but rewards based systems have existed in education for years. When these types of reinforcements are used in the classroom we are telling students that their worth is based off of a quantifiable number. Some of this parallel can be observed in Natasha Singer’s “Privacy Concerns for Class Dojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren”.

In reflecting on both articles, I know that I believe that classroom management and creating rules and consequences for students is imperative. I also firmly believe in teaching them transferrable life skills and that teaching those skills are arguably more important than curriculum. However, I don’t believe in tracking behaviour and rewarding certain students while routinely punishing others. I also firmly disagree with the awful component of publicly tracking them. This method simply tells students that we value them solely off of their behaviour and not based on what they have to contribute to the learning environment.

In my classrooms I have tried to the best of my ability to make it part of my practice to welcome all facets of students, positive and negative. I think when we give ourselves a way to keep tabs on student behaviour it can influence the way we think and feel about them. I aspire to get to the point where I am able to leave most of my preconceived notions and conscious and subconscious biases at the door of my room.

For this artifact I chose to complete a Twitter thread because I am more comfortable with writing out my thoughts than representing them visually (although the gif’s do add alot). I tried to post the thread the first time but only the gif’s posted with no written content. PANIC ENSUED. I am not super tech savvy and started to freak. I had lost all of my work with nothing saved. I was restarting at ground zero. I recreated the thread to the best of my memory (the gif’s I had used the first time actually helped me remember my written content – shocking), screen shotted them this time just in case and reposted. Tada, my first successful Twitter thread. I felt complete relief and something akin to pride in my ability to get it to work.

Check out my social media prowess

After reading "No Dark Corner" by Matthew for my Digital Tech and Social Media class I have a few thoughts on rewards based systems themselves and their use in education. #UWinDig pic.twitter.com/4ZU3bMW8Iq

— Miss Poole (@alyellen_ed) October 28, 2018

Still not entirely sure how other people nicely embed photos into their actual posts. I will make that my goal for my next artifact assignment!

The TED Talk by Khurram Vieni on Data-Driven Education was very interesting and contained a lot of content.  His main idea, the importance of Data-Driven Education, was one part of his speech, which I used to create the Infographic, found below.  He is both a technologist and an educator; so naturally, he decided to compare the two, technology and education.  He concluded that both serve industries, move people forward, is about people’s experiences and outcomes, are crafts that are influenced by science and they both come down to finding the best approach.  At first, I did not see the link between the two and was wondering where this video was going.  Upon further reflection and thinking about these key points, I realized he was spot on about the link.  We are using technology more and more in the classroom, sometimes so much so, that we are leaving students at a disadvantage.  Students are learning less and less on how to write and spell, and are creating students to be literate at typing and using spell check.  Technology is advancing at an incredible rate, while education is lagging behind, where the gap between education and the real world of skills needed for future jobs gets bigger.  Education is not changing at the rate of education, and we seem to be getting lost in preparing students for the future, because technology is creating an ever-changing world.  We cannot even guess what jobs will be in need in the next decade- they might not even exist today.  Unfortunately, we are no longer teaching for the future, and we are not even teaching for today!  That is the biggest challenge in teaching, constant change and improving our lessons to meet the needs of all our students.

Teaching technology is beneficial for our schools, but we need to find a balance that allows students to use and learn from technology, while also learning basic skills like writing and arithmetic.  Our students are becoming to reliant on technology and it is scary to see that students cannot spell, do simple math and cursive write (they no longer have a signature!)  That seems crazy to me!  I think we can find the balance necessary to teach students basic skills in writing, math and technology without limiting ourselves to one over the other.  In my two placements, I have seen a classroom too dependent on technology and one that had a good balance.  The one with the balance, used many types of technology, like Kahoot, math-based games and the Google Programs without losing out on the basic writing skills.  For example, they would write and edit (sometimes peer edit) their rough drafts and have the option to type their final draft.  Spelling and computing basic math facts, even in this grade eight class was still very weak.  Therefore, like many things in life, I believe that it is important to find a balance with the use of technology in the classroom.  Students should have the opportunity to learn both technology skills and skills in math and writing that will allow them to choose which system of skills they like best.  Some students felt it was unfair that cursive writing was no longer taught and they spent their indoor recesses practicing themselves.

Data- Driven Education is a method for improving teaching and learning in the classroom, used by teachers.  Although, I have not heard about this technique until listening to the TED talk, I feel that I am always checking in with students to see where they are at in their learning.  Sometimes as teachers we have to be flexible and ensure that students understand concepts, even if we need to teach it in a different way.  It’s all about experimenting and finding the best way to teach our students.  Changing things up and teaching with the needs of your students in mind will help improve teaching and learning.  What works for one class will usually not work for the next class.  It’s all about knowing your students and catering to their needs.

I chose to represent the sequence for Data-Driven Education in an infographic because I thought the information would look best in a poster-like format.  I used Piktochart to create my infographic and being new to the program, I thought it was very user friendly.  I used a step-by-step guide from the website to help me and before starting, I looked around at all the options and tools for the program.  I decided to start the infographic from scratch and did not choose to use a layout.  I could not find one I liked, so I went to work creating my own.  I would definitely use this program in the future and I would have my students create posters and other projects using this website.  It would be easy for me to teach to my students and provide more variety than the common used Google or Microsoft products. Overall, I had a great experience with this infographic and I am glad I had the opportunity to try it out.  I think it turned out great.