You are Never Alone

I had a chance today to listen to the ABC Radio National Background Briefing which I referred to yesterday. I used both the transcript which the above link gives you, but also listened to the podcast stored at Mediafly.

The main concern about cloud computing seems to centre around the storage of personal sensitive data. Cloud computing brings with it the fact that most of our creations, stuff that we would regard as our personal intellectual property, will be stored at mega-data centres stored around the world.

The attraction for most of us will be the simplicity, the fact that we don’t have to install software. We’ve seen the beginnings of cloud computing in Australian education with the NSW Department of Education outsourcing emails for students for Google through gmail. They access their email through a browser. It wasn’t so long ago that our education systems banned the access of gmail and hotmail accounts, and that is probably still the case in many educational institutions.

Another example can be see locally here at education.au through edna Groups, and me.edu.au, our social networking site for Australian educators. Access to personalised spaces in these places is through a browser, using our locally created Single Sign On process. None of the data that people access in either in these places is stored on the user’s local computer. What gets stored on your local computer is a cookie that makes the login process easier. What users like is the fact they don’t actually need to worry about the software that provides these services.

Some of the other concerns that have been raised

• Reliability of the service - if your service goes down for whatever reason what can you do? How do you access your documents stored in the cloud then?
• What about if the data centre where your data is stored collapses or disappears?
• What if you want to move your content from one data center to another? Is there interoperability?
• Storage concerns. Is storage finite? The world needs more and more storage, demand doubles every 18 months. the Petabyte Age. A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes. It’s reputed that Google processes 20 petabyes of information a day.
• Data centres mean server farms, using vast amounts of energy. They cost enormous amounts to build and need uninterrupted power supplies. They generate significant amounts of heat. Most of the buildings are actually air conditioning units.
• Legal and contractual obligations of the service provider.

I had a look at a couple of other documents today too, that you might find interesting.

The Privacy Rights Clearing House published an alert on The Privacy Implications of Cloud Computing. In case you think you have not yet got any links to cloud computing look at the examples the article gives:

All you need is an Internet-capable device. It doesn’t even need to be a computer.
Other examples of cloud computing include:

• Web-based email services such as Yahoo and Microsoft Hotmail
• Photo storing services such as Google’s Picassa
• Spreadsheet applications such as Zoho
• Online computer backup services such as Mozy
• File transfer services such as YouSendIt
• Online medical records storage such as Microsoft’s HealthVault
• Applications associated with social networking sites such as Facebook.

Some of the other major players in cloud computing include:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Amazon
• Salesforce
• Sun Microsystems
• Oracle
• EMC

This article led me to another:
Ann Cavoukian, Privacy in the Clouds — A White Paper on Privacy and Digital Identity: Implications for the Internet (Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario), www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/privacyintheclouds.pdf .

The White Paper looks at some of the issues, including 21st century privacy challenges, some cases, the need for development of a user-centric identity management infrastructure, open standards, interoperabilty, and audit tools. It is an article worth reading too.
What is significant is that we need to recognise that the internet has entered a new phase. We’ve been calling it’s forerunners web 2.0, but as saying goes, we’ve only just begun.

This year in our edna workshops we’ve been trying to make people aware of their “digital footprint”, but in her White Paper Ann Cavoukian uses a term that I like better - that of “digital bread crumbs” throughout cyberspace. “Digital footprint” seems to imply something organised about what we do, whereas “digital bread crumbs” invokes a sort of Hansel and Gretel image. We drop the crumbs wherever we go in cyberspace and quite often we don’t realise we are doing it.

hmm. another topic for another blog posting I think.

The other day, in conversation, I realised that I really didn’t understand the term “cloud computing”. I thought I knew what it meant, nodded in what I hoped was a sage and knowledgeable way, but today I did some research to try to fill in some of the gaps in my understanding.

There’s a lot of pretty detailed information on Wikipedia, and these are the pointers I gleaned.

• Cloud computing is internet based - the cloud is a metaphor for the internet
• The user accesses technology-enabled services from the internet with minimal installation required on the computer itself.
• The service/application is usually accessed, but not always, via a browser
• The service/application is often, but not always, free
• Accessing the service/application often requires login/authentication for authoring, but not always for read-only access
• Examples include Google Docs, Google/Ig, Blogger (and similar blogging platforms), WikiSpaces (and other Wiki places)
• Often there is no storage required on local computer, all storage exists on the internet (cloud computing provider)
• providers build and manage data centers.
• Many of the services/applications can “talk” to each other by sharing login information (my Google login lets me into a number of places), or they build on what each other can provide (e.g. they may mash applications up together like Google maps and street images, or Library Thing and Amazon Books.)

I’ve known this has been happening around me but haven’t had a term to give to it.

It seems to me that it has significant implications for education.

• We will move from a situation where we use locally installed software to having only basic things on our computers. The sophisticated software we access via the web.
  e.g. we have only some text creator like Notepad on our computer where we can draft our original document, or collect our base data, and then we move online to incorporate that in our blog, or online document.
• In educational institutions that should mean the end of big licence fees to use the software we currently install institution wide, but will it. Will it mean our institutions will then be paying “seat licences” for using online sites.
• Some of the current conversations are focussing on trust,online privacy and security. You might like to think for example about, when you have the opportunity to establish you own user name and password, do you use the same email address all the time, or the same user name, or the same password?

I know I have only scratched the surface here, just begun thinking in fact - what are your thoughts?

Other Links
ABC Radio National Background Briefing
Contains a transcript of a broadcast by Stan Correy from 14 September2008.
Included in the discussion are Nicholas Carr, Brian Prentice, Michael Manos, Mark Andrejevic and others.

For the mp3 file (49 minutes approx) go to Mediafly - seems to work better in IE7 than in Firefox

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is being observed world wide today,  October 17.

Here at education.au we are making colleagues aware of the day by participating in STAND UP 2008 to break the Guinness World Record of over 43 million participants.

STAND UP 2008 and MAKE POVERTY HISTORY are part of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), a coalition involving about 80 countries that aims to end the injustice of poverty. It is the largest anti-poverty movement in history calling for action against poverty and inequality and for the Millennium Development Goals (a global plan to halve poverty by 2015) to be honoured. The campaign seeks to raise a powerful voice for - and with – people living in impoverished communities around the world.

The MDGs of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives,agreed to by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. For each goal one or more targets have been set, most for 2015, using 1990 as a benchmark. The first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Rich countries have pledged to increase foreign aid, and poor countries have pledged to improve their policies and institutions, to try to reach the MDGs, and together create and support partnerships to fight poverty and provide advice, advocacy and resources to empower the poor.

However, at the halfway point to the 2015 deadline for the achievement of the Goals, we have seen some progress, but much more needs to be done. Urgent action must be taken by nations if they are to fulfill their promise to achieve the MDGs. Since agreeing to make the MDGs a key framework for international action and cooperation to reduce poverty, much progress has been made.

But despite the gains, no region in the world is on-track to achieve all of the Goals, and some regions are off-track on many of them. Urgent action is needed to implement sound policies to achieve the Goals set in 2000, and deliver on the promise made to the world’s poor in the Millennium Declaration.Here are the 8 MDGs - drawn from the actions and targets contained in the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 191 member countries of the United Nations,during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.
The eight MDGs break down into 21 quantifiable targets that are measured by 60 indicators.

1. eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. achieve universal primary education
3. promote gender equality and empower women
4. reduce child mortality
5. improve maternal health
6. combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases
7. ensure environmental sustainability
8. develop a global partnership for development

2008 Progress Reports

The Millennium Development Goals Report (2008)
Achieving the Goals is feasible, the report says, but it will require a greater financial commitment, including delivery by the developed countries of the increased foreign aid that they have promised in the past few years. The Report is also available in other UN official languages.

MDG Gap Task Force Report 2008
The main message of the present report is that while there has been progress on several counts, important gaps remain in delivering on the global commitments in the areas of aid, trade, debt relief, and access to new technologies and affordable essential medicines.

What are you doing to end poverty?

I’d like to hear what you did today.

Blogs are usually chronological documents often compared to a diary or journal, written daily, or at least regularly. Once you have posted to the blog you make only minor amendments.
When you want to blog on a new topic you create a new posting which is typically of the same format as your previous one. You determine how many postings are visible on the home page on your blog, the rest are available by an archiving system or by searching. Blogs are fairly typically written by individuals although they may be created by a team.  The blog may be kept in draft form (invisible) until the final bit is written and then it is published. Once the blog is published then the postings are available by RSS feed.

Wikis are often favoured by teachers because they can be much more collaborative. They basically build up an online booklet. It is not so much about individual entries, but documents that everybody can add to and edit. They can lend themselves to branching documents (like Wikipedia). Individuals can work on an individual page in a wiki and then link it to a page created by someone else.
Changes in a wiki can be monitored in a number of ways, although each person with editing rights to the wiki can overwrite data created by others.

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/3doug/550379161/

Reasons for blogging

• Reflection, defining who you are
• Clarification of ideas, impetus for research, and then presentation of findings
• Information for a wider audience, communication with a target community
• The beginning of a conversation: often a blogger leaves the initial posting open ended, encouraging readers to make comments on the ideas presented.
• Creating a semi-permanent document to stand as published with minimal modification.
• Bloggers often become part of a blogging community, people who comment on each other’s ideas and share knowledge and links to other ideas. Bloggers monitor the RSS feeds of like minds. Blogging Community in edna Groups – bloggers learning from each other.
• Professional development.
• Blog postings can have embedded photos or videos, hyperlinks
• Many people have more than one blog – targeted at different audiences, created for different purposes.

Ways of using a blog

• Personal reflective journal
  - this was the original concept but web 2.0 has taken it far beyond that as most blogging tools have interactive capability
• Developing a sense of community among teachers - catharsis
• Publish a school or class newsletter
• Class blog accessible to parents
• Individual Teacher blog
• Class “group” – small number of students – several of these in one class – collaborative
• Individual student blogs
• Book review blog for the library
• Blogs could be accessible only to a defined group or to a wider community

Where can you set up a blog? – there are over 40 free blogging tools

• Moodle (in your own organisation)
• – currently does not have a comment attached to the blog, although there will be one in Moodle 2.0;
• Open University have released a plugin with moderation and commenting
• Me.edu.au has a blogging tool for educators
• Edublogs: currently have nearly 230,000 blogs
• There is a commercial Edublogs campus
• Blogger (blogspot)
• Wordpress
• Live Journal
• Typepad

Where can you set up a wiki?

• Moodle has a wiki tool- a bit clunky - might be better to look for a plug in to use with students
• Wikispaces: 1,500,000 members, 600,000 wikis
• Wikis for education – K-12 Plus, ad-free
• PBWiki: has a PBwiki for Classrooms

Some of the problems teachers have raised

• Even when a blog or a wiki is set for “literacy” activities: the problem of assessment, particularly in the wiki
• Blocking of blog sites by systems
• Duty of care: monitoring what students write about themselves in blogs, and the comments that they write on the blogs of others.

A Scattering of Blogs – just a  sample list.

• Hey Jude: http://heyjude.wordpress.com/
• Teaching Generation Z: Graham Wegner: http://gwegner.edublogs.org/
• The Edublogger: Sue Waters: http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/
• The Bamboo Project: Michele Martin: http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/
• The Global Teacher: WEB 2.0 Community and Research Project: http://globalteacher.org.au/
• Danah Boyd: http://www.danah.org blog: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
• Christopher. D. Sessums: http://eduspaces.net/csessums/bloglog
• Future Lab: http://flux.futurelab.org.uk/
• The Great Beyond: a blog about science. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/
• My Other Blog: John Pearce: http://johnp.wordpress.com/
• Betchablog: http://betch.edublogs.org/
• Room22: http://pamthompson.edublogs.org
• Sue Wyatt’s Tas Teach: http://tasteach.edublogs.org/

As I’ve remarked before one of the good things about conferences is that you get a chance to hear new people speak, as well as network with people.
The keynote speaker on the second day at the MoodleMoot that I attended last week was Erica McWilliam from the QUT Centre of Excellence. She is an Associate Fellow of the Carrick Institute.

Erica is a vibrant and interesting speaker who has written a book called THE CREATIVE WORKFORCE
Her topic was “Today’s Kids, Tomorrow’s Cre-8-tives”
There is an abstract that summarises some of her ideas here.

She was basically talking about the role of creativity as a key economic driver. We have solved many of the “easy” global problems. What we have left are the “intractables” that will only be solved by creativity.
Learning communities are the crux where creativity is not about the brilliance of individuals, it is team based, but in the teams the role/responsibility of each person to pursue a particular activity is paramount.

Erica says one of the worries we have is how far the learning technologies encourage teachers to be passive, to assume a passive role in the classroom, because they think the technologies have, or have the potential to, replace(d) them. Teachers are unsure of their role in utilising learning technologies in the classroom. Do they have, for example, the right to “interrupt” the flow of a learning object?
Erica says teachers must help people/students to meaningfully edit their world, understand what their role is in teaching for learner self-management. Teachers need to be smart with technology for pedagogical purposes.

She talked about “flocking intelligence” and how we see that demonstrated in the pelaton in the Tour de France and the flocking of birds. The flock or pelaton can move faster than the individual bird/rider.
She talks about the need to avoid “group think” – where we all agree with each other, or agree with the leader/dominant thinker  – that it doesn’t necessarily add value to the collaboration/conversation.

Here is a similar presentation Erica gave at the recent 2008 Fourth International Middle Years Schooling Conference.

Browsing the internet I have also found the following:
Griffith University Twilight Lecture Series - Professor Erica McWilliam. (11/04/2006)
Recent educational scholarship draws attention to problems that arise for young people when performance goals are pursued to the exclusion of learning goals. This flies in the face of the idea that learning and performing are a neat complementary set. Erica McWilliam’s presentation will explore the links between learning, ‘unlearning’ and performance, using ideas about pedagogy that are in many respects counterintuitive. This includes challenging the idea that good teachers provide clear explanations, minimise errors and pay close personal attention to their students.

This lecture was given as part of a series of Griffith University music faculty lectures.
The sound files seem to be a bit patchy, but perhaps that was just my system doing a catch up.

• UnlearningPerformance_part1.mp3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio, 7.2 MB)
• UnlearningPerformance_part2.mp3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio, 7.2 MB)
• UnlearningPerformance_part3.mp3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio, 7.2 MB)
• UnlearningPerformance_part4.mp3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio, 6.6 MB)

See also No longer tuned in to master’s voice
Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning write Erica McWilliam and Norman Jackson

This YouTube video was created at the Learning, Literacy and Leadership Conference

You may also like to watch this one: