tech-ed collisions

Facebook governance - have a say!

Well, by now the recent Facebook controversy over ownership of your content is old news so there is no need to regurtitate too much of that. What is news though (for me since I haven't bothered with Facebook for a few days) is the new notice on my homepage from Facebook that says:

Facebook is announcing a new approach that allows users to have a role in determining the policies that govern the site.
Further information is available on the Facebook blog. Following the decision to revert back to the original terms of service, Mark Zuckerberg says he was "excited to see how much people care about Facebook and how willing they are to contribute to the process of governing the site." "Excited" - I'll bet there are a few more words that describe the feelings in the boardrooms and offices of Facebook and its backers when that all 'hit the fan'! Anyway - what was another publicity disaster for them has potentially resulted in something that could be tremendous for Facebook and its users - and a signal to other service providers too. From their blog:
Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.
Not so sure that I am completely sucked in by the open and transparent line but I'll go along with it for the moment.
We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way.
Sounds promising.
We're starting this off by publishing two new documents for your review and comment. The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we'll consider—or the reason we won't consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use.
Now this looks interesting....
With both documents, we tried hard to simplify the language so you have a clear understanding of how Facebook will be run.
Careful now - don't get too condescending - As thousands of Facebook users have demonstrated - we're not dumb!
I believe these steps are unprecedented in promoting understanding and enabling participation on the web. I hope you will take a look at these documents, read them carefully, and share your thoughts.
Now I agree with this - let the community work with the service provider on these really important issues. Mostly, since many of us have been outraged and indignant about the change in terms of service - let's not just complain. Here's an opportunity to join in, contribute and see how it goes. Great move by Facebook.
Facebook is still in the business of introducing new and therefore potentially disruptive technologies. This can mean that our users periodically experience adjustments to new products....
When I first read that I immediately thought here we go again - we can expect future major mishaps from them again as they completely misread market sentiment and implement new 'Beacons' etc however, since there is a great olive branch being handed out here, maybe I should be thinking along the lines of it is great to see a company really pushing the limits to see what benefits disruptive technologies can bring. In our own realm of technologies for education, we operate under so many constraints and it is nice to be able to step out of that area occasionally to see how we can maybe adapt some of these ideas for the benefit of our own communities.

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Filed under  //   Facebook  

a great post from the Google Blog

If any of the following quotes interest you at all, you should really take the time to read this reasonably lengthy, but very compelling post from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management on the Google Blog:

  • we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes
  • Access to information has completed its journey from privileged to ubiquitous
  • All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person
  • More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year
  • Our ongoing challenge is to create the perfect search engine
  • Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs?
  • Everyone can publish, and everyone will
  • 120K blogs are created daily — most of them with an audience of one
  • No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless
  • The Surui tribe in the Amazon rain forest uses Google Earth to mark the boundaries of their land and work with authorities to stop illegal logging
  • the vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
  • the consumer market now gets the greatest innovations first
  • The real potential of cloud computing lies not in taking stuff that used to live on PCs and putting it online, but in doing things online that were previously simply impossible
  • Combining open standards with cloud computing will enable businesses to conduct commerce in brand new ways
  • As more people do more things online computer systems will have the opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans
The post was originally an internal document for Googlers but was encouraged to be made public - Many, many thanks to those who thought this. Anyway, I encourage anyone who is interested at all in any of the above snippets from the post to go and have a read. Despite being orignally an internal document and drawing inspiration from President Barack Obama/Presidents Day in the USA, it has great relevance (excuse the pun) for many of us with an interest in search and related technologies.

Filed under  //   Google  

Facebook terms of service /ownership of your content

Well here's one for those of us that naively think we own the photos etc that we store in social networks and other places on the Web. A short while ago Facebook decided to change its terms of service. cnn.com/technology summarises these changes as:

The company deleted a sentence from the old Terms of Use. That sentence said Facebook could not claim any rights to original content that a user uploaded once the user closed his or her account. It replaced it with: "You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. ... (H)owever, you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content."
PCWorld reports:
the changes were actually made in early February but not widely noticed until Sunday, when The Consumerist's Chris Walters stumbled upon the subtly shifted language. The section in question explains how Facebook has an "irrevocable, perpetual" license to use your "name, likeness, and image" in essentially any way, including within promotions or external advertising.
I first heard about the changes (and the reaction) through Twitter (the value of Twitter really is increasing with its ability to really show what people are thinking about now). At the time I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to it. I understand users of Facebook were notified of the changes via a message on their home page although I don't remember seeing anything - maybe I was half asleep when that one flew by. Following the ensuing fracas and back-down by Facebook, it is again my understanding that users were notified via a message on their homepage that Facebook were reverting to their old terms of service. Now I definitely don't remember seeing that one. Maybe I should look at Facebook when I am more awake. Again, it was Twitter to the rescue and I found out about the back-down through Twitter (Note to Facebook - you really should've tried harder to acquire them!). Anyway, you'd think by now Facebook would be a bit more sensitive to the feelings of their community - Remember the Beacon fiasco? As valued as Facebook is to many of us, we really do need to be aware of concerns over privacy and ownership. Obviously others think so too such as the EU and this from Canada. So, is Facebook alone in its approach to privacy/ownership or is this just a feature of the other large social networks? The afore mentioned PCWorld post seeks to shed some light on this too. Looking at this in a positive way, it is great to see that Facebook did respond to the community reaction about the changes and reverted back to the previous terms of service. I am sure there are many others who could and should learn from this ability and willingness to respond to the community rather than continue on regardless. This whole issue has been a reminder to me that we really do need to develop our awareness and understanding of these issues as we strive to survive and thrive in a 21st Century environment. Digital literacy/citizenship is so much more than knowing how to use technologies effectively - we really need to understand the implications of what we are doing in the short and long-term. Here's another interesting post from ZDNet on 'Facebook and Privacy Chernobyls'. If, like many you are stuck with Facebook whether you like it or not because that's where your network is, here's some advice from Lifehacker on privacy settings you should know. When I first started to consider the whole issue, my first response was something along the lines of .. well, I'm stuck with Facebook because that's the only network I share with a number of important contacts for me but I don't like what they're up to so I will have to store my photos (yes, I still cling to the notion that they are mine) somewhere else and just link to them. Now, if only I could find a trustworthy service that will guarantee that they will remain mine. This gets interesting for me in another area that I am looking at and that is eportfolios. Like a number of people, I have been exploring the notion that an eportfolio model may be a set of services from around the Web that are aggregated together in some fashion for management, presentation etc. Now if you are storing digital artefacts for you eportfolio in any number of places (eg Flickr, Google Docs, YouTube, Slideshare, blogs etc) you really do need to be aware of the terms and conditions associated with those services if you are going to effectively manage and own those artefacts.

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Filed under  //   Facebook  

r u an Internet bully?

Over the last six months or so a couple of students I know have sadly been subjected to bullying and intimidation at school. It's quite distressing to see the effect that this has on them and their families. Bullying and intimidation, it seems, goes on overtly and perhaps subconsciously in all areas of society both in the online and physical world. I refrain from using real and virtual here because more and more the 'virtual' world is the 'real' world for many people. So, what's the point of this post? Well, as it happens, on reflecting on bullying in the school yard I can't help but see comparisons in the behaviour of many Web citizens. Just recently I have heard of someone bragging about how they shamed some other poor person on the Web by exploiting their own Web presence which just happened to be a lot more powerful than their 'victims' (although they didn't call them or think of them as a victim - they were just asserting their 'rightful' position and 'moral' superiority). You can see examples of this behaviour in many, many online forums where so called 'power' users perhaps think they are doing the right thing by ripping apart someone's opinion but are really not giving much thought to their behaviour and its consequences. How many 'power' twitterers or bloggers do you refrain from responding to because you have seen them ride roughshod over less prominent Web users. It is easy for them to use their presence on the Web to wreak havoc with your digital identity. That's intimidation! They may not mean to be negative at all but as their reputation grows, so should their responsibility and their awareness of how they treat others. This is especially the case in those networks where we are trying to encourage and nurture others in their journey to become more digitally literate and empowered.

Filed under  //   Internet  

reflection on AeP2

I have just attended the Australian ePortfolio Symposium 2009 and would like to acknowledge all the hard work and effort put in by the team at QUT who made this such a worthwhile event. On the Sunday I was privileged to be able to participate in a panel session on 'Technical issues and opportunities in eportfolio practice'. Given my interest in this area, the big take away for me was the recognition of the importance of the work by various organisations trying to map out the eportfolio space and create standards for us. Specifications development is hard work when addressing topics like eportfolios that have many layers of complexity. As important as this work is though, more needs to be done in enabling end-user communities exploit their eportfolios as they see fit in a Web 2.0 oriented world. On to the main conference and there was no shortage of really interesting presentations. The scene was really set by a great presentation from Marij Veugelers and Wijnand Aalderlink on the work they have been doing for coming up ten years on the development of sustainable communities of practice. One of the great lines from their very informative and entertaining presentation 'things change at the speed of education'. Without going into detail on each of the presentations given, there was some great coverage on updating us with a number of initiatives in both the Higher Ed and VET sectors and also some really interesting work from international speakers from the UK, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The UK and Netherlands seem to be at the front when it comes to eportfolios and we can learn a lot from their systemic, regional and local approaches. As the organisers of this conference said, learning from these efforts will enable us to fast-track our own progress in this area and hopefully we will have something to contribute back to the international community as well as each other. Developing communities of practice is going to be pivotal in this work. The highlight of the conference for me was listening to the inspirational work that Ruth Wallace is doing with disengaged learners on identity. I look forward to seeing presentations from the conference online. It was great to see that there were some Twitterers at the event and you can probably get some interesting snippets using the #AeP2 hashtag. Cheers, Jerry

Filed under  //   eportfolio  

letting the world know where you are/another nail in the privacy coffin

yet another great service from Google - Google Latitude. Using it, your friends etc can know where you are at any time. You can have your location updated automatically or you can set it manually (great for those who need to be in two places at once!). Of course its all opt-in and Google has paid quite a bit of attention to privacy etc. It runs on your mobile and to a limited extent, on your computer - it seems you can manually set your location in the iGoogle widget. Anyway, here's where I am:

Media_httpblogseducat_pfcoj
Of course Google aren't the only ones that offer this type of service or recognise the privacy challenges and marketing challenges related to that. The ubiquitous nature of Google makes it hard to ignore though. Cheers, Jerry. update: when I installed it on my phone I actually read the terms and conditions - scary stuff! (note - I did the highlighting)
July 4, 2008 Mobile Terms of Service By using Google's mobile products and services ("Services"), you: 1.  Agree to be bound by these terms and a) the YouTube Terms of Use (m.google.com/tos_youtube) for YouTube-related Services, b) the Google Maps Terms and Conditions (m.google.com/tos_maps) for mapping, local and location-based Services, and c) the Google Terms of Service (m.google.com/utos) for all other Services, as updated from time to time. You may use the Services only as set forth in these agreements. Do not use while driving. 2.  Acknowledge and agree that third parties may offer Services, and that you may be subject to third party terms and that third parties may enforce terms against you. Google is not responsible for third party changes to the Services. 3.  Consent to the collection, use, sharing, and onward transfer of your data, including but not limited to voice and location data, as outlined in the Mobile Privacy Policy (m.google.com/privacy). Location data may be from mixed sources and may not be accurate. Use at your own risk. 4.  Acknowledge that certain Services require phone service, data access or text messaging capability. Except as otherwise noted, Google does not charge for the Services, but carrier rates for phone, data and text messaging may apply. The Services may contain third party content.  Any required attribution or notice for the third party content may be found at www.google.com/m/legalnotices.> Still pondering whether or not to accept these terms.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0   privacy  

on predictions

No predictions from me this year or lists of favourites from the year that was. However, TechCrunch just posted a report on this video from 1981 predicting news reporting on the Internet: Cheers, Jerry

Filed under  //   general  

both the old and the new adapting to change

Interesting to see in the news feeds today stories on Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia both facing challenges to improve their accuracy. This article from Techtree reports on Britannica inviting online collaboration from both their expert contributors and the public to keep its reference material updated. More detail can be found at Britannica's blog. At the same time Wikipedia is facing challenges of its own and as this article from Times Online suggests, is considering 'pre-approval of changes' on biographies of living persons following recent problems. The potential for inefficiencies and delays is causing some concern however Wikipedia to ensure it meets its obligations to avoid gossip, defamatory material etc.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0   Wikipedia  

Another twist in defining eportfolios

Great post from Serge Ravet on the EIfEL team blog. After recently commenting on the confusion I feel in this area it's nice to see an expert in the field posting on the subject. Some really interesting ideas are expressed in the post. As mentioned in previous posts I am exploring the notion that everyone (that wants one) should have an eportfolio and the article seems to suggest that perhaps I should be thinking of that in terms of an 'e-self' or digital identity. I think I understand the concept being put forward here and it is an interesting one. The problem I think with this is that it is really difficult to come up with a term that is not value-laden with other meanings.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

100,000 articles on knol - but do you know anyone who uses it?

Bit of a surprise this morning when I read from the Google blog that knol has reached the 100,000 'knols' milestone. It's only been six months since launch and I had forgotten all about it. I am not sure what surprised me most - that it had reached the milestone or that it is still around as it seems to have a low profile. At the time it came out I remember wondering how successful knol might be. Given the numbers that Google works with 100,000 seems like a small number but as this post from mashable points out, it seems to be tracking pretty well in growth (of published articles at least). The mischievous side of me can't help wondering what temptation there is over there to lift 'knols' presence in Google rankings - can't say I remember seeing any in Google searches to date.

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Filed under  //   Google