tech-ed collisions

They are TV!

Following on from Garry's post, 'We watched TV ... they make TV', this isn't exactly about remixing and publishing content, its about publishing yourself. Interesting post from Greg Sterlings Screenwerk blog looks at the diminished view of privacy that is emerging in today's web generation. Shameless promotion or just emergent behaviour? Make your own mind up.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0   general   privacy  

Google Street View: Where can it go from here?

Google Street view recently arrived in Australia and is already encountering interesting opinions on privacy in particular. Google Earth and Google Maps are great services already but it certainly does add an extra dimension when you are able to look at a location (360 degrees too) from street level. Of course at street level is where you will find all sorts of people engaged in all sorts of activity who may or may not want to be photographed. This is where privacy advocates are concerned. Do a Google search on Google Street View and you can find a number of articles discussing examples of where,how or when you might not want to be photographed for the world to see. What interests me though is not so much the discussion (interesting as it is) of Google Street View now but what it may look like and how it could be used in the future. Photos are a natural precursor to video so how long is it before Street View or something like it starts using video. There are countless numbers of webcams and video surveillance in our cities now. If you really want a street view to add an extra dimension to Google Earth/Maps why not integrate these into the service. What could you use such a service for? Obviously its great for real estate services, previewing where you might go on holidays etc and could be a great educational resource. How about some other uses? There should be some great mashup opportunities here. Since privacy has been raised as a concern where could this go? Well, a number of social networking services I use have presence awareness so they know when I am online. I can probably be tracked down to a general area using an IP address. So, if you know my identity, that I am online and where I am online at, if there is a webcam or some sort of accessible video surveillance nearby, theoretically it may be possible for you to do a search on me and then click to some sort of video where you can see me, without me knowing it or giving any sort of permission to do so. Is this a good or a bad thing? What if I am not online? I may be carrying my mobile phone with me. Mobiles can supposedly be located easily enough so its probably theoretically possible to track me down to a location using that technology. Of course there are other ways that I can be tracked down which I discussed briefly here. Its interesting to speculate just what sort of services could be available in the next 5 or 10 years and just how powerful and accessible technology is becoming. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Google  

Biometrics in Schools

Since this blog has just been renamed it may be interesting to comment about a real technology/education collision and that is the use of biometrics in schools. In the last 24 hours there has been a couple of articles in the mainstream press on the use of biometrics. Last night on the news Japan hit the headlines with its adoption of biometrics for processing foreigners entering the country. This follows on from the lead in the USA although in the US I think everyone is fingerprinted and photographed. The justification for doing this is of course the struggle against terrorism. To date I think there has been a mixed reaction to this. Some feel that initiatives such as this are ok if it improves their safety, others have major concerns over privacy and the uses that such information could be put to. This morning on the radio there was a piece on a supermarket chain in Germany using biometrics as a way of paying for your groceries. Using your fingerprint to authorise payment of your groceries brings a whole new meaning to the term 'finger food' (not my joke). The article was aired on ABC radio but I haven't found a link to it yet. I am sure privacy groups would have concerns here. Imagine the uses such information could be put to. Say for example, your health insurance company had proof that your diet was a major risk for certain medical conditions, what would they do with that? Of course if you are paying by credit card or any other payment method that identifies you, the same information would be potentially available. You could try to argue that just because you bought the food doesn't mean you ate it! So what is the purpose of this rant? I wonder whether we may gradually be becoming more accustomed to the use of these technologies and will look back one day and ask 'how did that happen?'. Back in the day when PDA's were nearly a useful thing I used to have one that had biometric authentication. It was a Compaq iPaq with fingerprint identification on it. Walking around the office today I noticed that there is at least one laptop in the organisation that also has fingerprint authentication built in. Is this stuff starting to become more prevalent? What about in schools? I did a quick Google search and there is a stack of information on the use of biometrics in schools being put to use in areas such as lunch purchases, borrowing from the library, attendance etc. Obviously there are major concerns about the use of these technologies from privacy groups, parents etc and there seems to be far more articles about these concerns than the use of the technologies themselves. Some technologies just get snapped up and adopted by the community without much thought while others strike fear into our hearts. Do we pay enough attention to the adoption of new technologies - should we pay more or less attention to specific types of technologies and are we truly aware of all the implications of adopting different types of them. Do we really understand the potentials (good and bad) of those that we accept or reject. Access and authentication is always a challenge and biometrics offer very interesting solutions in this area. In security terms I believe there are three types of authentication that you may be able to offer. These are: something you know (your userid/password. PIN etc), something you have (an access card, key), and something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan etc). There is a line of thought that the presence of two of these types provides reasonably strong authentication. They are all being used to provide the same service yet one of them seems to induce fear rather than comfort in being secure. Its an interesting area and one that I am sure will generate much discussion going into the future.

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Filed under  //   emerging technology   gadgets  

a building block for ePortfolios

In an earlier post I asked whether Google could be my ePortfolio. While I can find out quite a bit about me and other people who share my name using a Google search, its not really an ePortfolio application (then again, what is?). As a participant in a number of social networking services, I have content about me in potentially many of them that would be useful for inclusion into some form of ePortfolio. One of the frustrations that I have is how to combine content from a number of places that I would find useful into some sort of personal portfolio platform. Many services have their own interfaces that are inconsistent with others. Each service that I want to interact with is accessed in a different manner. Now along comes OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial specifies a common set of interfaces for accessing social networking applications. The number of services that are listed as committed to it is impressive. Services such as LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, imeem, slide, MySpace to name a few are all in there. Each of these services could provide an interesting component of my ePortfolio. Having a common set of interfaces should simplify the task of developing an aggregate platform for ePortfolios. Combining this with institutional or systemic ePortfolio implementations would be really useful.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

on Innovation

An interesting article on incubators, proof of concepts, innovation and 'laying eggs' on the 'process of innovation' blog has me thinking about innovating, incubating etc. I have had a couple of conversations with Mike (author of the article) recently in relation to what incubators etc are all about. Mike uses the analogy of the egg incubator. The end product in this case is the chicken, which I suppose could be considered the 'end product' or something that you could take to the market. Mike talks about understanding what your end product really is, be it the chook or maybe a piece of software. Do you want to sell the software or could you 'open source' it and leverage the expertise you have gained in developing it through implementation and support services. How about keeping the 'chook', let it lay more eggs and get some re-use going? An important concept for me with innovating is the discovery process. You may find out along the way that lots of people have the ability to incubate 'chooks' and the end product may be one of many in a very fierce, competitive marketplace. However, you may have some differentiators that are worth exploring. It could turn out that you build very good 'hen houses' or hatcheries that provide a safe, warm incubating environment or your management processes are leading practice. By examining your incubating environment it may turn out that you discover you have many more interesting and valuable assets that you could take to your market. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   innovation  

Desert update

Heading into the great Red Centre. Don't expect to hear from me for a few weeks. Cheers. Jerry

ADL - SIFA Partnership

Some more news on standards. For those interested in SCORM, ADL and SIFA have just announced a partnership that will be looking at how to integrate SCORM into school applications that are using the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). A new version of SCORM that is '100% based on open standards' (called Core SCORM) will be developed. More information can be found here and here. I look forward to more information as it becomes available.

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Filed under  //   standards  

Standards and Web 2.0 - On a collision course?

Interesting post from Tim Hand got me to thinking about this one. From Tim's perspective, the standards arena seems to have stalled a bit (if I'm reading correctly). When compared to what's happening in Web 2.0 with new services and technologies just powering ahead. Try to keep up with what's happening in the world of mashups alone and it's staggering. There is interoperability (of a kind) everywhere. Developers are connecting up all sorts of apps, data sources etc to deliver new, innovative services. In doing this they are not dependent on cumbersome, complex standards. We recently did some research on standards in the area of ePortfolios and one of the major findings from that was the impact that Web 2.0 was having in that area. It was hard to find ePortfolio implementations (other than vendor software) that were using standards such as IMS ePortfolio but many of the implementers were interested in using RSS and other lightweight specifications in their implementations. They could easily consume content from other sources and also publish/syndicate their content very easily. Simple specs and simple services enable them to include functions from other sites into their ePortfolios (eg using Flickr to hold images of your work). Students also saw services such as myspace and Facebook as better places for them to have their ePortfolio (there were some interesting variations on this though). So what does this mean for the formal world of standards and specifications. The very nature of the standards process is a slow one. A great deal of work goes into the development of a standard/specification which involves development work, collaboration, reviews, (public) comment, ratification and so on, all of which takes time. Time unfortunately is not 'Standards' best friend in the frenetic, fast pace of the Web 2.0 world. As the rate of change increases in both speed and sheer number of new services, it seems to me that the slow paced standards process faces a real challenge to keep up.

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Filed under  //   standards  

on YouTube

YouTube has been around for quite a while now and there is obviously some great content on it. In education there seems to be continual debate on it however. Many of our school systems ban it and have all manner of reasons for doing so but this morning I was really struck by the change in attitude to it in the broader environment. Over the last couple of months or so it has been interesting, some would say amusing to see how our politicians are using it to reach potential voters in an upcoming federal election. We have seen how traditional media and content owners have challenged YouTube on content and have derided it etc. This morning though, it was interesting to listen to an excerpt from a YouTube video played on one of our major radio broadcasters of the Prime Minister delivering a message about APEC. What struck me was just how important YouTube is becoming to media and politics. Here we have the Prime Minister of a country (not the first by any means) using it to deliver a serious message and traditional media picking up that content for its own news coverage. Not too long ago, the service would have really been seen as a way to parody or send up politicians and traditional media would have been more concerned with scouring the content to find breaches of its IP rights rather than seeing it as a news source. YouTube is so much more than a platform for anyone to publish - it is a very serious part of our communications infrastructure. The challenge is how to successfully exploit this within education while maintaining all the integrity of our systems, duty of care etc.

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Filed under  //   Youtube  

the 'vast machine'

Well this is sort of a culmination of a few interesting things I have read recently that's worth some sort of reflection and perhaps commentary. Anyway, one of the ways that I like to relax is reading fiction and I recently picked up and read 'The Traveller' by John Twelve Hawks. I tend to like fiction that has some element of non-fiction in it, be it science, history or whatever but stories based on non-fiction do seem to provide an amount of colour that makes interesting reading. Back to The Traveller, its sort of a conspiracy theory/science/fantasy novel which involves a secret society whose aim is generally to control the population at large and uses the concept of a 'virtual panopticon' (do a search on panopticon / Jeremy Bentham if you want to find out more) which roughly speaking, uses the idea that by thinking you are always being watched, you will adjust your behavior accordingly. Anyway, there are a couple of groups of people that are threats to this and these are harlequins and travellers. It turns out in this novel, that there is a good chance that you are always being watched. What really makes the novel interesting, and definitely lets you know where the author is coming from, is the postscript to the book, where 'Twelve Hawks' discusses his? views on society and how we are being tracked with technology (CCTV, RFID, GPS, and many other technologies and digital sources). So Jen, perhaps it is more than the Web that is watching us and Kerrie, I am sure we are 'never alone'. Here are a few things to think about though - how many times today were you under some sort of surveillance (cameras etc) on the way to work, what sort of digital trail did you leave at work, at the shops, via your mobile (who did you talk to and what was your location...) all in the one day. The vast machine is a term used in the novel and John Twelve Hawks (a real name?) according to the novel and a couple of websites, supposedly 'lives off the grid'. The book was released in 2005 but, despite being a 'best seller' has only recently found its way to my local bookshop and there is already a sequel out in other parts of the world so apologies if this is all old news. There is some interesting marketing around the book on the Web. Check its official website out to see an interesting way of promoting it and have a look for some of the other websites that have been built up around characters/places in the book - great marketing. The novel does however highlight just how intrusive technology can become though. My family is considering going overseas next year. The kids will need their own passports now and their first ones must have photos of a quality that enables digital facial recognition and the passports themselves will have chips embedded in them. Anywhere they go they will be monitored quite closely which would seem to be a far cry from my first passport and overseas adventure (not really all that long ago but what a different experience it will be for them as they are finger printed, photo'd and subjected to all sorts of security procedures that are a necessary part of travel in some places now). The ever present CCTV and embedded RFID in The Traveller seems pretty 'every day'. And if you can't get enough of conspiracies and are a fan of Facebook, check this article out from the NZ Herald.

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Filed under  //   privacy