Navel gazing. Compliments of Google

Gulliver's Travels was one of the finest pieces of literary work. Not only was it  fantastically creative, it told us profound things about the world. Many parts of that book still apply to situations we have today, although perhaps in surprising ways. Take the Laputians for example. These were brilliant people that were so wrapped up in their own thoughts that they required servants to remind them to speak or to listen.  I find this fascinating since this means that the servant now decides what his master will be exposed to. The servant choses when something is "interesting" or "worth while".

Our online lives resemble those of the Laputians. We too have servants who decide when information is important or relavent to us. They come in the vise of personal ads and personalized search. Don't get me wrong- personalization can be great. After all, if you type in "china" wouldn't it be great if the search engine knew whether you were talking about dishes or a country? Consider the all the advertisement we see as well. I'd rather see ads for stuff I like rather than junk I really don't care about. The problem comes when we are filtered from seeing discenting ideas. Our minds become small and we learn less.

The internet is a sea of information. Much of it agrees with our preconceived notions but just as much is challenging and therefor illuminating. Confirmation bias (our knack for cherry picking facts to fit our beliefs) is hard enough to deal with as it is. If these digital servants are filtering out uncomfortable bits of information, my bias grows worse.

To get around the filters and broaden your search results, you may want to try one or more of the following suggestions.

1) Delete your account.

You could go ahead and start a fresh digital life. Get rid of Facebook, Google and Pinterest. Start brand new accounts or go without those services all together. Extreme, but it’ll work. Mostly. Google still may be filtering based on the machine you use.

2) Use the library.

a) Get onto the public machines. Like I said, Google may filter results based on the particular computer you use. Since so many more people use these machines, chances are higher your results will be far more “natural”.

b) Don’t sign in to Google. They know it’s you and what you look at. They even read your emails. Well... not exactly. The algorithm looks for common phrases and keywords. Still, Google will use what it knows about you to serve up "relevant" content.

3) Toss your cookies.

Make sure you regularly go in and delete cookies. Keep in mind that you’ll have to sign back in to your websites if the cookies are gone. So be careful.

4) Use a different browser

Most computers have at least two browsers on them. Find the one you normally don’t use and wipe it clean. Delete the history and the cookies, clear the cache, remove all the Autofill information, and remove all the website data. Go whole hog. Then use that browser to do your searching.

5) Go incognito

Most browsers allow you to open an “incognito window”. This means that the browser won’t remember anything about the website you just visited. No history is stored, no cookies remain. The websites may remember you, but as far as your computer is concerned, it never happened.  Google also (supposedly) ignores these windows.

6) Set your location to “United States”

Unfortunately, Google is always going to give you local results. To get around this (kind of), you can set your location to a country. I use “United States” to get the broadest results possible.

So, remember the Laputians? They were all caught up in their own thoughts; seeing and hearing the pieces of the world their servants found relevant. Jonathan Swift makes them out to be fools in the end. Lets do what we can to make sure that Google doesn’t make fools of us.

Teachers, stay safe.

There has been an awful lot posted online about how to keep students safe on the Internet. However, I haven't run into very much focusing on teacher safety. Perhaps we tend to think that, as adults we're savvy enough to avoid online blunders. I thought that about myself until I started doing some research. The following list is by no means comprehensive, but it's a pretty good starting point. Please keep these tips in mind whenever getting on the Internet.

1) People lie.

Ya, I know this one is pretty obvious. Be honest, though. Have you ever forgotten a key piece of information for your class and needed to look it up really quickly? The shape of a molecule? An important date? The difference between affect and effect? Be especially careful when you’re in a rush!

2) Plagiarism sets a bad example.*

Forget about the legal ramifications of plagiarism. OK … just for a second forget about it. Have you ever gone online looking for a picture to use for your PowerPoint? Ever cite your sources? Have you ever copy and pasted quiz questions you’ve found online without telling your students where you got them? Your students will find out. (Mine did.)

3) If you don’t want it on the Internet, don’t put it on the Internet.

I have no idea who first said this, but it’s brilliant. Here’s the big point: Everything you put online for someone else to see can stay there forever. In spite of “privacy settings” there are hundreds of ways to transfer what you have online to some other computer. Even if you delete it, there’s no way of getting rid of it. Think twice before mentioning your school or colleagues.

4) Set your filter to “safe”.

Its true that you’ll be missing out on some good things if you do this. However, you’ll be saving yourself from all of the problems that surround pulling up an inappropriate website. If a student is exposed to a single inappropriate image, you are setting yourself up for uncomfortable discussions.

5) Students don’t have privacy on school computers.

This is a bit of a strange issue. Many students get offended by a teacher looking over their shoulder to see what they’re up to. Many educators seem to buy into this attitude thinking that students should allowed to work largely unsupervised. When students know they’ll be monitored, they tend to stay on task.

So what do you think? Did I miss anything? Do you disagree with anything I’ve written here?

*Thanks to Deb Ng inspiring much of this blog post.

An online place for everything

Teachers have a lot of stuff. Never mind all of the posters and popsicle sticks we reuse year after year. I'm thinking more about what we have electronically. From lesson plans to movie clips, there's an awful lot of valuable material on our computers. Should that computer get lost or damaged, all of those wonderful resources will disappear. There is a safe place to keep it all though- or rather safe places. Not every service is right for everyone. You have a lot of material in a lot of different forms so its important to chose your storage service carefully. I want to talk about a few of those services. Full disclosure here- I am a cheap skate so I only use free services.

Google:
Google docs- We cannot have a discussion about cloud storage without bringing up Google Docs. This is a powerhouse of document storage. Anything you have created in Word can be converted to Google Docs format. As long as your files are converted to Google's format, your storage is unlimited and files can be edited and shared online. You can also store a finite number of all other types of files in your account to share and download.

Two other Google services that allow you to store a limited number of files are Gmail and Google sites. With Gmail, you need to attach a file to an email and save it as a draft. Google sites lets you upload files of a limited size as well and store them in a "file cabinate". While this would be a little awkward, it does provide an alternative place to store your materials.

Microsoft Office live: Formatting is typically lost whenever a word document is changed into a Google document. If you are looking to store, share and edit a Microsoft document, presentation or spreadsheet online, this is the way to go. You will maintain all of your original formatting and you can feel safe knowing your document is stored in the cloud. You will also be able to edit a document with your coworkers online.

Zoho: This is another one of Google's competitors. You can store a gigabyte of data here and work with coworkers and collaborators on Zoho friendly documents. One thing that this site does that no other site can do (or will do) are databases. If you need a free program that will work across platforms, try Zoho's database option.

Dropbox: This is a service that is designed to save important files online. A Dropbox folder is placed on your computer. Any file saved in this folder is then copied to the internet. If you need to access the file from elsewhere, just open the Dropbox and grab your file. No worries. It works well and is reliable. You can also share files with whomever you wish.

CX: Nearly identical to Dropbox, it makes file sharing with colleagues a little easier.

Edmodo: This online social service is often overlooked. While it has been primarily designed as a way to keep in contact with students and parents, it also works as a way to store small files. You can upload any file (up to 100 megabytes in size) to your Library. Once those files are there, they can be downloaded by anyone you choose- parent, teacher or student. You can also choose to keep these files private.

Google voice: Teachers need to keep track of who they call and when. Calling logs are great, but they have an inherent weakness. They assume that the person filling them out is honest. Google voice allows you to call parents from you computer for free. It records the time you called (or when the parent called you) and stores that information online. There is also a place for notes. You can keep an accurate record of all parent phone calls for years with this service.

Youtube: If you have video clips, youtube is a good place to keep them. You'll be able to keep them 100% private or you can choose to share with fellow teachers or students. If you decide to download them afterward, simply go to "My Videos", click on one of your movies, and download it.


These are just the services I've grown to love. If you have other online storage ideas, please share!

Holiday cookies

There are lots of things to over indulge in during the holiday season including late nights, fatty food and sweets. Most people don't think twice about the number of internet cookies they get into their system, though. In fact a lot of people don't even know what a cookie is or how it is used. Lets get that part out of the way first.

What is a cookie, anyway?

A cookie is just a small piece of text stored on your computer. It cannot gather data or crash your hard drive. It is just a short bit of text that a website sends to a browser like Firefox or Safari. That browser then stores that little bit of text for later. When you go back to the site, it will ask the browser to look up any cookies they might have sent you. The browser then sends the same text back to that site. So why do browsers do this? Well, look at what a cookie contains. Here's an example- ID=195AY2 www.website.com. In this cookie, the site just wants to be able to know that it's YOU coming back and not Joe Shmoe. That way they can say "Oh, hey Ben! Here are some new books we think you'd really enjoy." It makes the internet far more personal. Internet banking and online shopping depend on also cookies to function.

As with everything, there is an evil side to cookies. You don't necessarily want everyone knowing who you are all the time. You may not want Nike (for example) sharing your ID with Facebook to increase advertising revenue. It really comes down to an invasion of privacy. So what do you do? You may only want to get rid of cookies from a few websites you don't trust. Or you may want to delete all of your cookies and just start fresh.

A word of caution here... Don't delete all of your cookies unless you know the username and password to all of the websites you visit. If you go to a site that "just lets you in" it may use a cookie to do so. Erasing all of your cookies may prompt the site to ask you for your username and password. If you don't know them, you may be in for a few headaches!

Here is a list of three browsers and how you can delete the cookies you may have picked up during the holidays.

	Chrome Click on the little wrench on the upper right hand side of the browser. Go down to "Tools".  Next click on "Clear browser data". You'll be given the option to clear your history, cookies, passwords and the like. You'll also be given the option to erase the information from the last hour, day, week, month or the beginning of time.
	Firefox In the top tool bar, click on "Tools" then "Clear recent history".  From there, choose wich cookies you'd like to delete. Read this excellent tutorial for more.
	Safari This is the easiest browser to delete cookies from. Click on Safari, then go to Preferences. Go to the privacy tab. There you'll see how many cookies you have. Click on the "Details" button. You'll see this window pop up. Notice two things. You have the ability to remove ALL of the cookies if you want. Do this with caution. You'll also see a search bar at top. There, you can search for cookies from specific sites. Here, I've found a cookie from Facebook. To delete it, you could just hit "remove all" or you could choose the cookies you want to get rid of and hit "remove". You'll need to hit "done" when you are finished getting rid of the cookies you don't want.