Tag Archive for 'comets'

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IT consumerization & higher ed: legal and educational problems

Published on July 17, 2008 in Education, Mass Communication Law and Technology. 0 Comments

An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.

Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?

A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]

Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.

Quicksilver Labeling

Published on July 9, 2008 in Hacks, Personal and Technology. 1 Comment

I use OS X’s colored labels and smart folders to keep track of articles to read and things to do. Using the menus can be kind of a pain, and surprisingly, Quicksilver doesn’t have the ability to label built in.

These Applescripts can be used to quickly label an item in the Finder. Simply select the item, invoke Quicksilver, and type the name of the label. Don’t forget to have QS index the directory where you keep the scripts (mine are in ~/Library/scripts).

Enjoy!

Why privacy and copyright make small providers nervous

Published on July 9, 2008 in Copyright, Education, Mass Communication Law and Media / Sociology. 0 Comments

Another response to my assertion that FERPA has some scared tells me deserves a bit of clarification.

The trouble (and in some respects, benefit) of laws like copyright and privacy, which only become certain after long and expensive litigation, is that they are not completely explicit. Borderline cases leave small providers wondering whether they might be liable if they were sued–and this uncertainty leads some to steer clear of anything that pushes the boundaries.

My own theory is that FERPA was written in a protectionist paradigm, rather than a control paradigm. This means that certain categories of data are completely locked down, rather than giving the student or instructor the options to contol the data how they see fit. With fine-grained facebook-like privacy controls, it should be technically possible to let students control what is publicly released (indeed many do it anyway by doing things like posting a course video project to YouTube). The nervousness creates a situation where law (rightly or even by misinterpretation) limits what people might do with technology.

Professor: Web 2.0 an awkward fit for the academic world

Published on June 20, 2008 in Education, Mass Communication Law and Technology. 2 Comments

Martin Weller wrote a piece for On the Horizon about a challenge higher education is facing:

When learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?

A good question–and one that applies to instructors as well! Ars did a great write-up, and you’ll find a summary written by the author over at Michael Feldstein’s blog (he was the editor of the journal issue). Weller is a good writer, and makes his point much better than I could:

The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students [and instructors] will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.

This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this. If we add to the technological experience, the user participation one they will have had through social tools such as Flickr, YouTube, blogging, wikis, etc and compare this with the top-down, pre-filtered experience they have in courses and selected resources, it becomes obvious that this is about more than just technology, it is a social change.

I can think of two possible reasons behind this phenomenon.

The first is momentum. A university that runs an e-mail service, a web hosting service, a streaming video service, etc. sees all of these tools and wonders where to start and where to find the time and resources. Should they let something go, or try to do everything for everybody?

Second, FERPA has everybody scared. The purpose of the law was to protect student’s personal and grade information from things like the grade list on the door and prying parents. Yet fear over having students work on external commercial systems, which are largely secure from hacking and violate privacy only on the aggregate level of data, causes hesitation from using Web 2.0 systems or attempting to form partnerships with their owners.

I’m curious if anyone has written a recent history of educational technology. What did universities do when e-mail was the new thing? My guess is that they just bought a VAX system. If that “buy an X system” model is breaking down, how can institutions affordably buy or build an open platform that has the flexibility to work with existing apps, develop new programs, and protect user security–all at once?

Gaming civics – (almost) a Madison connection

Published on June 5, 2008 in Education, Mass Communication Law and Technology. 2 Comments

I was preparing to teach next week’s “Quizzing and Gradebook” workshops on our course managment system, Learn@UW. Being a law geek, I thought a short quiz on civics would be an easy way to show off all of the quiz question types–until I saw this:

“Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government,” [Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor said, “but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol.”

Hopefully my quiz won’t be too difficult for the participants, but the surprise in this story is the Madison connection.  Justice O’Connor is heading a project to develop a game called “Our Courts” to help seventh and eight graders learn about our judicial system, and she tapped Madison’s own James Gee (formerly of UW-Madison) to do it.

The game “lets students engage in real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said. It will allow them to “step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive — teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives.”

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the “Bong Hits For Jesus” case.

I love it! Having students step into existing problems is the best way to learn how the courts work–it’s exactly what we do in Intro to Mass Communication Law courses. Maybe the students who have played this game will do better on our hypothetical questions :)