A friend approached me recently with a question. What do you think it takes to lead change in the field you’re working in? And what specific “fields” do you consider yourself to be a part of? What are the greatest opportunities for change right now? I responded with a shorter version of this post. I thought I would elaborate here. I consider myself involved in the technology industry, and in the startup ecosystem in the Bay Area and in the American Midwest, to a lesser extent in other places through acquaintances and friends.

It’s common to talk about the way we build software in terms of the individual tools we compose together, like command-line utilities and deployment pipelines and containers and services, and most obviously, programming languages. Programming languages seem to get the highest level of scrutiny out of everything that comprises the way we write software. And in the last decade, I think we’ve seen a healthy rejuvenation of innovation in programming languages, driven by languages like Rust, Go, OCaml, Zig, and Swift that bring new ideas to the industrial programming world in practical packages.

Josh Scott, BetaKit, Aug 12, 2020

Josh Scott reports that Canada Learning Code, a non-profit funded under the CanCode initiative, has developed a national computer science education framework "designed to serve students from kindergarten to Grade 12." There aren't really national curricula or education standards in Canada, and while the document makes the case for one, I am not convinced. Anyhow, I read through the Framework (53 page PDF) and found it to be static and fixed on a particular view of computing and code. It is in many ways quite comprehensive, but I have to ask whether every student would need all aspects of this curriculum? And having said that, it seems to me that there is a lot about contemporary computing - ethics, inclusion, network effects, bad actors, context collapse, and so much more - tat are completely absent from the curriculum. It treats computing as a technical subject, not (as perhaps it should be) a social subject. Still, it's worth a look, and I'm sure people will find it useful, especially the lists of resources near the end.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte
On photography. I have been dabbling in photography forever. I have been shy to show my work; there is a lot of tox… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

This modern dream of a home on Bowen Island made me gasp for air. Designed by omb.

I'm on vacation this week, and was catching up on my RSS feed. I read that the Australian government content management system GovCMS has reported record traffic spikes this year due to COVID-19.

This caught my attention because GovCMS is a Drupal distribution — a version of Drupal developed as a cost-effective option for building government websites.

Today, 91 Australian government agencies use GovCMS. At the peak of the pandemic, the platform saw 2 billion hits per month, 100,000 pageviews per minute, and 187,000 concurrent users.

When I read that, I felt proud that Drupal is scalable, secure and accessible. I hope other Drupalists feel that way as well. One of the best ways to get more people to contribute to Drupal is by building software that people can be proud of.

The GovCMS numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. Drupal is not just being used by the Australian government – it's being used by thousands of federal, state and local governments around the world. Many of these government agencies are providing essential health information and other digital services during these trying times.

It's a powerful reminder of Drupal's impact, and why it's non-negotiable that we build Drupal so everyone can use it, and use it reliably.

Stephen Downes, Aug 12, 2020

I've named my list 'personal learning tools' because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a 'student' with those as a 'teacher'. It's a practice that thinks of learning as immersive and ongoing; I work, teach and learn all in the same sweep of the quill.

See also on [Original Location] [This Post]

If you regularly need to move large files between computers or want a travel backup for your laptop, get a speedy portable SSD, or solid-state drive. They’re more expensive than portable hard drives, but because they have no moving parts, they’re inherently faster and more durable. After researching and testing 21 new portable SSDs, we found that the Samsung T7 Shield (1 TB) offers the best mix of affordability, speed, and durability for most people.

Here’s the ugly secret in North America and we all know it is true~the number one priority in transportation policy is to let vehicles go fast.  As Beth Osborne, Director of Transportation for America observes “It has filtered into every level of implementation, down to the way we set speed limits. We raise the speed limit to suit the speeders, as long as there are enough of them and it doesn’t take that many”.

This is where the now antiquated 85th percentile system came from, which is defined as  “the speed at or below which 85 percent of all vehicles are observed to travel under free-flowing conditions past a monitored point.”  Think of that~instead of setting speed limits to what is safe,  decision makers based decisions on how fast drivers travelled  dependent on the visual “feel” of the road.  That’s exactly what we got in the 20th century, roads made for vehicle drivers with an increasing curve of road deaths despite enhanced vehicular safety systems.

Research conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway  clearly shows that alarming increases in pedestrian fatalities needed to be arrested.  And their research suggests a direct, very simple, cost effective approach: “IIHS research demonstrates that lowering city speed limits curbs the most dangerous speeding and can make the roads safer for everyone who drives, walks, or bikes.”

When the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended a “complete overhaul” of how speed is managed in municipalities, NACTO (the National Association of City Transportation Officials) responded. Municipalities base much of their road standards on the NACTO manual. NACTO  threw  out the 85th percentile system and is now embracing  the “safe systems approach” which like Vision Zero is based upon  no road deaths by any type of road user.

NACTO  recognized that their policies  often hindered setting road speeds that promoted  universally safe mobility, and they have issued a new framework to set safer speed limits on municipal streets.

Their document City Limits has a three pronged approach to safe streets. Firstly default speed limits for every street  with the suggestion of 25 mph (35 km/h) for major roads, and 20 mph (30 km/h) for minor streets; Secondly designating “slow zones” in areas that require slower road speeds; and thirdly setting corridor speed limits on higher volume streets using a “safe speed study” which looks at “conflict density and activity level” to set contextually acceptable speeds.

You can download NACTO’s handbook “City Limits” here.

This is a more sophisticated approach that goes beyond the past 85th percentile speed setting standard to take in account other road users, the potential for other street activities, and embraces the potential for conflict density and activity on the street.

And there are direct ways to measure the effectiveness too, by looking at mortality and serious injury rates on roads and highways.

Currently 35,000 people a year die on roads in the United States. In Canada in 2018, the number of  road deaths  was 1,922; up 3.6% from 2017 (1,856). That is the same number as the whole population of Tofino, British Columbia.

We must do better.

Images: Nacto Highwaysindustry.com

 

 

 

 

 

I love that little phrase. It comes from southern Ontario where I live and has been turned into an ongoing joke on one of my favourite shows about rural Ontario culture and friendship, called Letterkenny. The ritual answer to this question is “Notso bad ‘n’you?” or “Good ‘n’you?”

These days though, whew. We need another response.

I haven’t blogged since June. I feel like I’ve been working harder and more intensively than I have at any time during my consulting career. I have clients in different parts of the world so some days I’m up at 4am, or on calls late into the evening. I’m getting jetlagged without leaving my home.

I’m noticed a deep tiredness in my brain not just from the screen time, but from the intensity of maintaining concentration when my conversation partners are small squares in an undifferentiated mass. I think when I’m working with groups I tend to focus on one person at a time, and there is never a time when I am making eye contact with 25 people at once. Mentally, I’m forgetting things. My short term memory is full of holes. As one client said yesterday, I work a whole day online, turn off my computer and can’t remember a single thing I have done. The abrupt nature of the transition between states is jarring. We are not made for this, and I’m not sure we are adjusting, but rather just wearing ourselves down.

Everything takes longer, there is more anxiety about the future, everything feels more high stakes, maybe because no one really knows what to do, what’s going to happen, or how to make it through this moment into whatever is coming next.

Many folks I work with are feeling this same fatigue and anxiety, somehow familiar and also strange. And this isn’t REALLY suffering at all.

I am working. My job has simply moved online. I continue to be paid for my work. I live in a place that has been minimally touched by COVID-19, where it is easy to be outside and to practice physical distancing. I am not sick, I am not out of money, my children are grown adults and look after themselves. I am not suffering.

Increasingly though I am working with folks who are in deep grief. Their lives are continuing and their anxiety is only increasing. They are worried about schooling their kids, they have lost jobs or been forced to take new ones, exposing them to a higher risk of getting sick. Our government benefits programs are expiring and the hope I had at the beginning of the pandemic, for a compassionate public policy leading to a universal basic income seems to have been high jacked by whatever usual suspects make policies that punish the poor and the marginalized and let the rich ride.

People I know have died from COVID. Others have developed chronic health conditions ranging from hair loss to heart problems. Friends are in the streets in different countries protesting injustices, trying to be heard, trying to grasp ahold of enough power to remake their societies in a just and equitable way. The political rhetoric fuelled by rage, wedge political marketing, creeping fascism and bots has made the democratic commons a toxic, angry, anxious laden space of backlash and retribution.

We are losing our minds.

So how’re ya now? What are you doing to hang on? Are you able to think about what comes next? Are you placing your hope on something? What do you need? What can you offer?

At the moment I’m working two days for Outlandish, a fellow member of CoTech. They’re big believers in, and practitioners of, Sociocracy.

When I wrote about Sociocracy in a previous post I neglected to use the word ‘consent’, but I’ve come to realise (partly through reading Many Voices One Song) just how fundamental it is to a harmonious workplace culture.

Consent is the default decision-making method in sociocracy.

[…]

By consent, a group can decide to do anything. We often jokingly say, you want a dictator for your organization? We can decide that by consent. (We recommend that the dictator role have a term end, however!) Groups can decide by consent to vote. Groups decide what their governance system looks like at all times. The only thing one cannot do is ignore reasoned objections.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.25-26

Many of the problems I’ve encountered in my career have been directly related the abuses of power that come with the ‘default operating system’ of hierarchy thoughtlessly adopted by most organisations.

Rather than the politics of the playground, Sociocracy is an grown-up approach to organisational power-sharing based on consent.

The assumption of sociocracy is that sharing power requires a plan. Power is everywhere all the time, and it does not appear or disappear – someone will be holding it. We have to be intentional about how we want to distribute it. Power is like water: it will go somewhere and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate more power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.17

The authors recognise the limits of the water metaphor, but continue with it to help make their point:

One can think of a sociocratic organization as a complicated irrigation system, empowering each team to have the agency and resources they need to flourish and contribute toward the organization’s mission. We avoid large clusters of power, and we make sure there is flow. Water that is allowed to flow will stay fresh and will reach all the places in the garden, nourishing each plant to flourish. Sociocratic organizations nourish and empower each team to have the agency to flourish and contribute toward the organization’s mission.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.17

Consent is a great place to start without having to commit to overhauling your entire organisation overnight. It will improve decision-making and make your workplace environment more harmonious. You can simple as using the following structure in your next meeting:

1. Someone makes a proposal
2. Whoever’s chairing/facilitating the meeting gasks for any clarifying questions (which are then answered by the proposer)
3. The facilitator asks for a show of thumbs (up, down, sideways). If it’s all thumbs up, the proposal is passed, if not…
4. Participants are asked by the facilitator for ‘critical concerns’ (i.e. not just preferences). These are noted down.
5. The group address the critical concerns by trying to find a way that the proposal would be agreeable.
6. A new proposal is made (and the process is repeated through several ’rounds’) until the proposal is accepted, or you run out of time to discuss it.

I will, of course, have simultaneously over-simplified this and made it sound more complex than it is in practice. For that, I apologise. However, it’s definitely worth thinking about consent within the context of your team and organisation.

I’m helping Outlandish with the productisation of their offerings around Sociocracy at the moment, so am probably biased, but you might want to check out their upcoming workshops to find out more if any of this interests you

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This post is Day 29 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Beach Bikeway (no one’s calling it a flow way) is obviously and surprisingly high-volume.  Many cyclists, many different kinds of cyclists, for many hours, in a near-continuous flow.

Dale Bracewell’s tweet was the first time we saw a number.  And it was huge.

But how to translate 12,700 into something we can grasp and compare.  The data is out there.  Can it tell us what 12,700 signifies?

That’s your cue, PT commenters.

Jeff Leigh from HUB, responding to the preceding post – Beach Bikeway Gets a Datapoint: 12,700

 

Jeff: 

Some comparisons from CoV data: Highest single-day bike counts on popular City of Vancouver cycling routes, over the past few years:

Burrard Bridge:                            8,676
Point Grey Rd at Stephens:         5,852
Seawall at David Lam Park:        7,785
Seawall at Science World:           9,428

12,700 on the Beach Avenue Bikeway signifies overwhelming success at encouraging people to cycle.  And recall that this is simply with plastic pylons, temporary signs, no pavement improvements, and so on.  Imagine what we could do with a permanent protected bikeway with better signage and markings, connected at both ends.

The Burrard Bridge bike lanes were regarded as the busiest in the City based on the counter data.  This blows that number out of the water.

And it wasn’t a one time occurrence.

Looking at the recent data along Beach, there were single weekend days in June with over 10,000.   There was a Thursday in June with 9,415.  A Monday with 9,294.  There were seven days in July with over 10,000 bike counts.

At the HUB Cycling tent last weekend there were 9,993 bikes that passed by – per the counter a few metres away (the hose didn’t get cut until the following day).

It is hard to imagine this number of people cycling on the current seawall path, especially past the restaurant under the Burrard Bridge, or in front of the restaurant at the foot of Denman, both of which are congested.

When the seawall is opened up to people on bikes again, the two routes will naturally balance each other, with slower and more leisurely riders on the water, and most using the Beach Avenue Bikeway.

othermaciej @othermaciej
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Unfuck Your Habitat @TeamUfYH
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14 steps that readers can take right now to support diversity in Canadian publishing.

The post How readers can support Black and Indigenous writers appeared first on Leanne Prain.

Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, Aug 13, 2020

In typical CogDog fashion Alan Levine takes an ordinary task and turns it into a deep dive into some aspect of online learning and design. In this case, he looks into where you can find reusable images online. Two things stand out: first, that there are numerous services that simply scrape and repost images from other sites; these sites are ad-supported or include links to for-pay services. The worst of these Levine (quite rightly) classifies as 'slimy'. The second thing that stands out is how these slimy sites can rank at the top of Google search results. "Google tilts the scale away from creators toward slimers," he writes.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An 84 year old cyclist was killed in Bolton when he was hit by a truck and trailer at the intersection of Albion Vaughan and King Vaughan roads. Today we installed a ghost bike in his memory. Given the distance involved and the lack of transit options, the installation was done by car.

Here is Joey approaching the crash site.

A minute of silence.

Thanks as always to Geoffrey for making the ghost bike, and to Joey for good company.

Deepest condolences to the family and friends of the deceased.

We have another ghost bike installation scheduled for tomorrow. That will make 7 in the GTA in the last two months.

Update: the cyclist has been identified as Pasquale Alonzi. His obituary is here.

This is a time of change for the internet and for Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism to protecting individual privacy — one thing is clear: an open and accessible internet is essential to the fight.

Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests. Over the last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not structured properly to create these new things — and to build the better internet we all deserve.

Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and what is needed to overcome them.

As I shared in the internal message sent to our employees today, our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included a great deal of change already: building a better internet by creating new kinds of value in Firefox; investing in innovation and creating new products; and adjusting our finances to ensure stability over the long term.  Economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic have significantly impacted our revenue. As a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable. Though we’ve been talking openly with our employees about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring, it was no easier today when these changes became real. I desperately wish there was some other way to set Mozilla up for long term success in building a better internet.

But to go further, we must be organized to be able to think about a different world. To imagine that technology will become embedded in our world even more than it is, and we want that technology to have different characteristics and values than we experience today.

So going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.

I believe this vision of change will make a difference — that it can allow us to become a Mozilla that excites people and shapes the agenda of the internet. I also realize this vision will feel abstract to many. With this in mind, we have mapped out five specific areas to focus on as we roll out this new structure over the coming months:

1. New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization. That means diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values. To start, that means products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of the problems that people face today. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.
2. New mindset. The internet has become the platform. We love the traits of it — the decentralization, its permissionless innovation, the open source underpinnings of it, and the standards part — we love it all. But to enable these changes, we must shift our collective mindset from a place of defending, protecting, sometimes even huddling up and trying to keep a piece of what we love to one that is proactive, curious, and engaged with people out in the world. We will become the modern organization we aim to be — combining product, technology and advocacy — when we are building new things, making changes within ourselves and seeing how the traits of the past can show up in new ways in the future.
3. New focus on technology. Mozilla is a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement. And we must stay that way. We must provide leadership, test out products, and draw businesses into areas that aren’t traditional web technology. The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too.
4. New focus on community. Mozilla must continue to be part of something larger than ourselves, part of the group of people looking for a better internet. Our open source volunteers today — as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who donate to and participate in Mozilla Foundation’s advocacy work — are a precious and critical part of this. But we also need to go further and think about community in new ways. We must be increasingly open to joining others on their missions, to contribute to the better internet they’re building.
5. New focus on economics. Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges. How can we lead towards business models that honor and protect people while creating opportunities for our business to thrive? How can we, or others who want a better internet, or those who feel like a different balance should exist between social and public benefit and private profit offer an alternative? We need to identify those people and join them. We must learn and expand different ways to support ourselves and build a business that isn’t what we see today.

We’re fortunate that Firefox and Mozilla retain a high degree of trust in the world. Trust and a feeling of authenticity feel unusual in tech today. But there is a sense that people want more from us. They want to work with us, to build with us. The changes we are making today are hard. But with these changes we believe we’ll be ready to meet these people — and the challenges and opportunities facing the future of the internet — head on.

The post Changing World, Changing Mozilla appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

mkalus shared this story from jacktaylor1983's YouTube Videos.

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I just checked my notes and yes, it’s been about three years.

Kind of ironic that I have so little use for maps on the go these days (due to the pandemic, obviously), but good to know Google Maps is coming back to the watch–eventually.

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If you share my interest in the ARM server landscape, this is a pretty comprehensive overview.

Not complete, mind you, but they did dig up a few interesting tidbits I wasn’t aware about chipset integration, and it is refreshingly neutral and hype-free.

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Matthew J. Daniel, Chief Learning Officer, Aug 11, 2020

I have commented often that learning should be a part of our life and work. This article represents a necessary push-back against that sort of view. Here is the argument, in a nutshell: "The incremental delivery of small assets, designed to ensure additive learning, does not include the ability to solve for the wholesale capabilities transformation, which our workforce desperately needs." I think it's a point well-made, but I have a few thoughts. My feeling is that the current crisis represents a systemic failure. Until recently, many employers acted as though "entire roles and job families ... being displaced" was not their problem. I think we now know they can't just focus on retraining existing staff. They need to invest in the network of supports - health care, education, income support - that enables people to prepare themselves for whatever future they face. This means, first, paying their taxes to support these programs. And second, it means supporting learning opportunities in the workplace over and above 'performance support' that allow people to prepare for their next job, and not just their current one.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

It’s back to school time and with so many school districts participating in distance learning, many if not most are relying on computers and technology more than ever before. Wealthier school districts are providing their students with laptops or tablets, but not all schools can afford to provide each student with a computer which means that this summer parents are scrambling to find a device for their child to use for school.

Geoffery Fowler wrote a guide in the Washington Post recently to aid parents in sourcing a computer or tablet for school. Given how rough kids can be with their things, many people are unlikely to give their child an expensive, premium laptop. The guide mostly focuses on incredibly low-cost, almost-disposable computers, so you won’t find a computer in the list that has what I consider a critical feature for privacy in the age of video conferencing: hardware kill switches. Often a guide like this would center on Chromebooks as Google has invested a lot of resources to get low-cost Chromebooks into schools yet I found Mr. Fowler’s guide particularly interesting because of his opinion on Chromebooks in education:

But I’ll be blunt: I don’t love Chromebooks, because Google is increasingly more interested in harvesting our data than in helping us. In February, New Mexico’s attorney general sued Google for child privacy violations. (Tip: Be sure your kid is using his or her school-supplied address to log in to theirs because Google isn’t allowed to track them as much with that account.)

Traditionally tech companies have provided schools with technology both for altruistic reasons, and also so that students learn their technology while they are young in the hopes that brand recognition will continue into adulthood. More recently there has been an even more powerful motivation–harvesting student data for marketing purposes. This is a major revenue source for companies and helps them sell hardware and software at steeper discounts as the product gets subsidized by years of student data.

The Washington Post article links to a few articles that highlight the privacy risks with Google in particular and provides a good tip [emphasis mine]: “Be sure your kid is using his or her school-supplied address to log in to theirs because Google isn’t allowed to track them as much with that account.” The author is referencing privacy laws that attempt to restrict how tech companies can capture and sell student data. Unfortunately there are massive loopholes in these laws and in this article I will highlight a few based on California Education Code 49073.1 because California is at the forefront for privacy legislation in the US and one would expect its legislation to be among the strictest.

Loophole 1: “Pupil Records”

The first loophole has to do with dividing student data into two different categories, each with a different level of restriction. When you read through the privacy legislation, you will see what appear to be strong privacy controls that protect student data:

(1) A statement that pupil records continue to be the property of and under the control of the local educational agency.

(3) A prohibition against the third party using any information in the pupil record for any purpose other than those required or specifically permitted by the contract.

(9) A prohibition against the third party using personally identifiable information in pupil records to engage in targeted advertising.

But upon a closer look you will notice that these protections only apply to a very specific type of student data classified as pupil records. This is defined as:

(i) Any information directly related to a pupil that is maintained by the local educational agency.

(ii) Any information acquired directly from the pupil through the use of instructional software or applications assigned to the pupil by a teacher or other local educational agency employee.

At first glance this seems very comprehensive, at least until you read the next section which defines what information does not qualify as “pupil records” according to the law:

(i) Deidentified information, including aggregated deidentified information, used by the third party to improve educational products, for adaptive learning purposes, and for customizing pupil learning.

(ii) Deidentified information, including aggregated deidentified information, used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the operator’s products in the marketing of those products.

(iii) Deidentified information, including aggregated deidentified information, used for the development and improvement of educational sites, services, or applications.

So the above protections only apply to a small subset of data that explicitly identifies a particular student. What does this mean in practice? That Google can capture all of a student’s web browsing data and all of their activity on the computer and beyond that, they can use this data in targeted advertising and profit from it as long as they “deidentify” it.

There is incredible value in this data even if it isn’t explicitly linked to a student, because it provides demographic data on a demographic (children) that is otherwise difficult (and in some cases illegal) to capture. Many parents would be upset to learn that Hasbro (hypothetically) provided free or heavily-discounted educational products to schools, in exchange for the ability to go on school campuses, put children into focus groups, and conduct market research for new toys under development. Yet schools give tech companies this exact privilege today, in exchange for cheap computers and software.

Loophole 2: Restrictions Limited to School Services

When a school enters a contract with a tech company, the restrictions in the privacy law only apply to the services that company is directly providing the school. As an example, if a school signs a contract with Google to use Chromebooks and Google G Suite for Education, the data privacy restrictions would apply to that suite of cloud tools including docs, email and the other parts of G Suite. The restrictions would not apply to the other properties that Google owns, such as Youtube. So if a student uses their school-provided Chromebook to visit Youtube, whether for a class assignment or outside of school hours, Google is free to capture and use that data without restriction.

Loophole 3: Account Transfers

So it’s clear that tech companies are allowed to capture and use student data in advertising as long as it’s deidentified, but what about pupil records? It turns out there is also a large loophole for it as well, that’s triggered when a student is no longer in school. It starts with the reasonable requirement that a student be able to keep their school projects when they are no longer in school:

(2) Notwithstanding paragraph (1), a description of the means by which pupils may retain possession and control of their own pupil-generated content, if applicable, including options by which a pupil may transfer pupil-generated content to a personal account.

There is even a requirement that tech companies get rid of pupil records when they are no longer in school:

(7) (A) A certification that a pupil’s records shall not be retained or available to the third party upon completion of the terms of the contract and a description of how that certification will be enforced.

Immediately after that paragraph is the loophole:

(B) The requirements provided in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to pupil-generated content if the pupil chooses to establish or maintain an account with the third party for the purpose of storing that content pursuant to paragraph (2).

Remember the tip from the Washington Post article: “Be sure your kid is using his or her school-supplied address to log in to theirs because Google isn’t allowed to track them as much with that account.” If a student graduates and wants to keep essays, pictures, or other school work they can transfer it from their school Google account to a personal Google account. The moment they do that, all protections are gone and Google can use that data how they please. Equally important, those two accounts would then be linked, and there is nothing in the law to prevent Google from migrating years of “deidentified” data including web browsing history and other data to the personal account and “reidentifying” it.

Protecting Student Privacy

Schools are at a disadvantage this summer in having the kind of leverage they would need to push for more privacy protections for students given the short timelines and requirements they have in many cases to provide all students with the ability to participate in distance learning. Yet if they have a choice in their vendors, picking one that doesn’t have a financial interest in capturing student data would be a great start.

Beyond that, most remedies will have to come in the form of legislation. The above loopholes could be closed by putting tight restrictions on what companies could do with “deidentified” data including explicitly prohibiting them from using this data for targeted advertising. Incentives matter and so if you want companies to stop collecting this data you must remove the financial incentive. There should also be an explicit requirement that the company delete all data it has collected on the student once they cancel their school account except for any specific documents the student wants to transfer.

If you are a parent who cares about privacy and is concerned with the amount of personal data school-provided computers are capturing, you can also invest in Purism products and have peace of mind that your child’s data is protected while they access school services over the web, and that they aren’t being watched through their webcams when the school day is done.

 

The post The Massive Privacy Loopholes in School Laptops appeared first on Purism.

Jane Hart has issued her annual call for our top ten e-learning tools, and here's mine. I've named my list 'personal learning tools' because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a 'student' with those as a 'teacher'. It's a practice that thinks of learning as immersive and ongoing; I work, teach and learn all in the same sweep of the quill. It's helpful to refer to my diagram from my previous post, describing the process.

Without further ado, here is my list:

1. Firefox - the web browser has become so ubiquitous many people are simply dropping it from the list, but for me it is central, and more to the point, it is a conscious choice. I don't use Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers (which includes Edge) because I value the ability to block advertisements. I also prefer a privacy-focused browser, but it's the advertising that is the deal-breaker for me. I pay thousands of dollars for computing equipment, software and connectivity, and see no reason why I should suffer advertising on top of that. Firefox is free but I donate from time to time.
   


2. Feedly - yes, I've written my own RSS reader, but who wants the overhead of all that data being input, sorted, stored, etc? So I use Feedly quite a lot; it's the primary source for most of my daily links and keeps me up-to-date on a daily basis. The list of sources, and categories I collect, could make another post in itself (I might do that one of these days). I pay for a Pro+ Feedly subscription, which has just recently added an AI  research assistant called Leo that I haven't tried yet.


3. Pocket - this is another Firefox product. It allows me to store links for future retrieval. I use it as a staging area; I use IFTTT to auto-forward links I 'save for later' to Pocket, as well as a browser plug-in to store links I might find using email or Twitter or LinkedIn. For those who are curious to see what's at the wide end of my funnel, I've used IFTTT to auto-post Pocket posts to a Tumblr blog, which can be found here. Not everything goes into Pocket - sometimes I'll jump to writing a post directly - but most of it does.


4. Email - pretty much all of my work activities are being conducted by email these days, as are most of my personal activities. Email is often the first thing I open in a day. I use three tools (because despite it being The Oldest Technology we still can't make it work seamlessly). So I'll classify email (specifically, SMTP and IMAP) as my technology choice. I use Google mail as a personal inbox, Thunderbird to actually read and write email, and Outlook at work, which used to work with Thunderbird, but is now so locked-down it barely works with itself. I also send my newsletter using email, using MailChimp, which I've set up to automatically formal and mail my RSS feed.


5. Reclaim Hosting - normally I'd put gRSShopper in here, and to be sure I use it every day, but I want to capture the idea of having my own web server in general, and so I'm listing my hosting provider, which is Reclaim. Basically what I have here is static content (including all my posts, slide shows, and publications), a database engine (MySQL), a web server (Apache) and the various functions gRSShopper performs for me (including things like creating my newsletter and hosting MOOCs). I also have a barely used instance of Ghost on Reclaim, and am looking at using their brand new cloud services.


6. PowerPoint - while I've experimented with other services (especially Google Slides) I always find myself returning to PowerPoint because it's an exceptional authoring environment. For me, it's not just a place where I author presentations (though I do, a lot) it's also the place where I create most of my graphics; the 'insert shapes' tool allows me to create pretty much anything I need, without the need for a separate application. The diagram from my previous post was authored on PowerPoint. The finished work, meanwhile, is stored both on my website and on SlideShare (though that may change, as it will be operated by Scribd starting in September).
   


7. Google Search - this is another service that is often overlooked by others but with is an essential part of my online learning. While I do a lot of day-to-day content aggregation, and usually search my own stuff when I need to refer back, it's Google search that I turn to first when I'm doing deeper research. Also noteworthy here are Google's image search and Google Scholar for academic papers (even though it really should have an 'open content only' button).


8. Google Docs - I was going to put MS Word in here, and I do use it a lot, but over the last year I've found Docs to be a lot more useful, if for no other reason than that I can easily share documents in progress. As a result, I've put a lot of my research activities up on Docs and you can see as I putter away at various projects over time. I also do a fair amount of my writing on Blogger (which is where this post was written) and WordPress.


9. Mastodon - again, I could have included any number of microcontent tools here, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Imgur, TikTok, Flickr, Slack and SMS, but I'm listing Mastodon because there's more behind Mastodon that plays a role in my learning, not the least of which is the concept of federated services, and specifications such as ActivityPub. 


10. Zoom - again, the list could include Meet, Skype, Jitsi, BigBlueButton or even Shindig (though as a guest only, as I'm not wealthy), but Zoom is the video conferencing service I've been using most over the last year. And I've been using videoconferencing a lot, a lot more than in previous years. Just to be clear, though, my list does not include WebEx or Adobe Connect - these are the reason it took so long for videoconferencing to become popular, and the reason people took to an upstart like Zoom as soon as it was offered.
    

Twitter is now letting all of its users on iOS, Android and the web to choose who can reply to their tweets and take part in a conversation.

The social media giant notes that people are sometimes more comfortable talking about what’s happening when they can choose who can reply.

Before you tweet, you can now choose who can reply with three new options. You can allow everyone to reply to the tweet or only allow people who you follow to reply. Lastly, you can only allow people you mention in the tweet to reply to it.

Tweets with the latter two settings will be labeled and the reply icon will be grayed out for people who can’t reply. It’s important to note that people who can’t reply will still be able to view, retweet, retweet with comment, share and like these tweets.

Twitter outlines that since it began testing this feature in May with a select number of users, it’s seen people use these settings to have conversations that weren’t possible before.

“These settings help some people feel safer and could lead to more meaningful conversations, while still allowing people to see different points of view,” Twitter outlined in a statement.

The social media giant outlines that these settings help people be more comfortable and protected from spam and abuse. It notes that users have found these settings as a new method to block out noise, since 60 percent of people who used this during the test didn’t use ‘Mute’ or ‘Block.’

Twitter says that with these settings, problematic repliers aren’t finding another way to spread abuse. These settings prevented an average of three potentially abuse replies, while only adding one potential abuse retweet with comment.

It’s also interesting to note that the feature can be used for some light fun, as several Canadian Twitter accounts have depicted.

Interesting new Twitter feature lets you limit who can reply to your tweets.

We always want our community to be part of the convo but may use it to share indisputable facts — like how @Canucks are winning the Cup this year! Reply if you disagree, RT if you agree! #GoCanucksGo

— Vancouver International Airport (YVR) (@yvrairport) August 11, 2020

Reply if you won a series against us

— x-Raptors Uprising GC (@RaptorsGC) August 11, 2020

The new feature is now available to users around the world.

The post Twitter now lets all users choose who can reply to their tweets appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Dyson’s new Pure Humidify+Cool is the tech company’s first triple-function device designed to automatically purify and hygienically humidify an entire room.

As you likely already assumed, in typical Dyson fashion, this isn’t a standard humidifier/fan combination device. The Humidify+Cool utilizes UV-C light to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria in water in its tank.

This technology is coupled with a HEPA filter that captures 99.97 percent of particles as small as 0.3 microns from the air, allowing the device to shoot out air that has been both humidified and purified.

The device, which is the successor to Dyson’s AM10 Humidifier, also features what Dyson is calling a ‘Jet Axis Control,’ where two jets on each side of the Pure Humidify+Cool are independently controlled.

The Dyson Pure Humidify+Cool is now available on DysonCanada.ca for $999 CAD and at Dyson Demo Stores at Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto and Pacific Centre in Vancouver. Colours include ‘white/silver’ and ‘black/nickel.’

Along with the new Pure Humidify+Cool, Dyson’s new V11 Outsize Cordless Vacuum is now available in Canada for $1,099 on DysonCanada.ca and at Dyson Demo Stores at Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto and Pacific Centre in Vancouver.

The post Dyson’s Pure Humidify+Cool now available in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Roland Tanglao 猪肉面 @rtanglao
i have been laid off as well. I will take a week to do nothing and then start the search for roland.nextgig :-) it… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…