Social Media

When “Off-the-Record” is suddenly not

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The ‘microphone is always on’ rule has always applied, whether you worked for the media, with the media, or anything in between.

The story unraveling the uber-weird story of ride-share company Uber and an off-the-record meeting, gives us something to chew on. It is a gray area, with journalist Michael Wolff observing (or at least respecting) the rules of engagement in off-the-record agreements, while one of his colleagues Ben Smith does not.

The PR industry makes a better distinction of not just off- and on-the record, but ‘attribution.’ This is worth a read in case you are speaking to anyone, and are tempted to say “don’t quote me on this.”

 

 

 

Sometimes technology is NOT the answer

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

You might be surprised to see me talk about this topic here.

Though I’m a computer and technology advocate, (and teacher) I do make jabs at tech. Technology is meant to serve us, not the other way around. I’ve lately seen how completely ridiculous Instagram has become as pre-teens overrun the space. Classic example: a handful of 11 and 12 year-olds at a party, sending each other status updates. From within the same room!

I thought this was an age thing, until I read this thought-provoking piece titled “Technology is Not The Answer : A Student’s Perspective.” It was published in Education Week in October this year.

By a high-school junior.

He cites cases of why students need to develop personal relationships, and not just on-screen button-pushing skills.

Back to Instagram.  This is how WikiHow recommends how to gain followers.

Like and comment on pictures. Once you start following some people, take some time to Like and comment on their photos. Not only will this make the other person feel good, but other people may see your name or comment and check out your profile. If you stay active, this can lead to a steady stream of new followers.

It’s all about making others feel good?

It may be time for schools to require any student who has a phone in their backpack to  take a digital literacy 101 lesson. Maybe this is harsh, but some parents need this too.

If you don’t believe me:

  • Google the words Instagram, stupid, and people and check out sites such as damn cool pictures.

Screens come under scrutiny – again!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I knew we’d be talking about this sooner or later: Do touch screens reduce how much we absorb, while paradoxically increasing ‘engagement’? Or, are the dumb things that happen in Real Life better teachers than VR, or smart screens?

Researchers have been warning us –from pre-Internet days–  that excessive screen time was having negative effects on children’s attention, learning (cognitive skills, language development), and sleep.

A screen is a two-dimensional (2D) experience that is hard to resist, across all age groups. Yet, a recent report tells us that screens “do not inherently provide (children under 3 with) rich opportunities for whole mind-body learning.”

For instance, it says:

 

“Researchers who study how children learn have concluded, however, that it is easier for young children to comprehend information from real-life experiences with people and objects compared with information delivered via a screen.”  (“Screen Sense. Setting The Record Straight”)

No one is asking us to eliminate screen-time. But we could rethink how creative thinking, problem solving and experimentation could work without pixels.

Communicating with crew on ‘Mars’ – Text-To-Speech

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Those who know me, know I’m a follower of all things in space – from watching the International Space Station fly by, to the latest maneuvers of the latest Mars Rover.

So this week, it was a chance to communicate with Jocelyn Dunn,one of the 6 inhabitants of a Mars simulation mission, going on in Hawaii. The project, is called HI-SEAS (which stands for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation).

The reason: I’m putting together Mars Day a now-annual event at my school. I thought my students would get a kick out of talking to the folks who are paving the way for humans on the red planet. Or, to put it another way, they’ve seen a lot about the bot that got there; now it’s time to communicate with Homo sapiens!

Jocelyn and the rest of the HI-SEAS crew began their ‘analog simulation’ last Friday, inside a 1000-square foot geodesic dome.(Another crew member, Zak Wilson is also blogging the stay.)

HI-SEAS Dome

Image, courtesy hi-seas.org

So what is it like to be practically isolated from the rest of the world? Isolated as in no phone calls. Now they do have access to the Internet (!) so I will be asking her these questions in a few days. Yet, to simulate the real thing, the crew’s email is subject to a 20-minute delay.

The fun part is planning for Jocelyn and her crew to answer questions from my students. After a couple of back-and-forth (time delayed) she came up with a good solution: We would send her the questions via email, and they would record their answers on a video, and send it back to us in time for Mars Day!

It will give new meaning to ‘Text-to-Speech’!

Here are links to other crew members

Hyperventilating about tablets in the classroom

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

You’ve probably read plenty of stories how tablets are shifting the tectonic plates in teaching. And ‘personalized learning.’

I hang around many all-things-digital folk, making rallying for ‘tablets in the classroom! tablets in the classroom!” I also talk to those anxious as desktops give way to touch screens in the class. My daughter’s class now does a math class on Dell tablets. My school has two touch-screen computer hubs.

And though I run a (tablet-free, for now) computer lab, I was a tad irritated by a statement by a fellow computer lab instructor quoted in a TIME article as saying “We don’t care about handwriting.” This was in response to a parent’s concern about screens in a classroom in California.

Not sure who the royal plural ‘we’ referred to, but Matthew Gudenis certainly doesn’t speak for me, or my school’s position. (Read “The Paperless Classroom is Coming” in TIME this week.)

Gudenis should’ve read this wonderful piece by Susan Vechon, “Why Learning To Write by Hand Matters,” (in Education Week) who admits she stumbled on the connection between handwriting and the higher-level thinking after many years of teaching.

I’m not dissing tablets, per se. I would be the first to admit that classrooms need to use more of the technologies that young people encounter once they clamber back on the bus after school. But that does not mean dismissing the value of books and pencils, notebooks and research. If we are not careful how we present them, the tabletized learning environment could unwittingly turn students into consumers of knowledge, not producers of ideas and opinions. Touch screens can turn readers into content snackers. We need to create spaces where students could do some thinking and talking, apart from clicking and scrolling.

Twelve to fifteen years from now, these will be our human resources, our intellectual capital. They will be the ones generating your reports, formulating cogent arguments that impact communities, writing persuasive letters, covering the local news.

To say we don’t care about handwriting because kids today know to type, is like saying we don’t need to care about spelling and grammar, because we have auto-correct and spell-check. So let’s stop hyperventilating about tablets, and get excited about what we can do with them.

 

Update: Just came across this Discussion of Screen Time

 

Plagiarism claims another victim. When will they ever learn?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There is a fine line between adapting some else’s point of view, and adopting it as your own.

The reality of this cut-and-paste culture of information-sharing, is that many people, especially students, think they could pretend to be original in short 140-character bursts, or longer prose.

I was somewhat shocked to hear that a senator from Montana, John. E. Walsh, was stripped of his Masters’ degree this month, when the college found out he had plagiarized parts of his MA thesis. The paper, titled, “The Case for Democracy as a Long-Term National Strategy,” seems to take off on the so-called ‘Bush Doctrine.”

Going by the New York Times‘ analysis, the senator must have been incredibly lazy, or just plain dumb to have resorted to this kind of plagiarism, even using someone else’s ‘conclusions.’

Which brings to my (blatantly unplagiarized) conclusions:

  • If you’re running for office, or already in office, check your paperwork. Even if your work pre-dated search engines
  • Footnote. Footnote. Footnote. It’s not rocket science to add end-notes, and page notes
  • Finally, if you can’t find something original to say…. (you know the rest)

Sidebar:

UPenn Library has a primer on plagiarism, for those unsure. – at Penn Libraries

 

Texting Vs Talking – Another View

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

My son was home for a few days, and his cell phone died.

The world didn’t evaporate into a mushroom cloud. You see, not being connected doesn’t faze him. “My friends all know that I don’t respond to texts immediately,” he replied when I asked him if it found  that not having a phone for a week caused him any problems. It made me wonder if Milennials have reached the turning point of incessant texting.

Just a few years ago, this was what we were hearing about 18 – 24 year olds.

  • 43% of 18-24 year-olds say that texting is just as meaningful as an actual conversation with someone over the phone (2010 eMarketer report)
  • More Millennials (than members of any other generation) use their phone for texting. (Pew Research)

What if people stopped staring at their phones and actually spoke to you? Would that creep you out?

What if people stopped sending you links to stupid cat (or anti-whatever) videos, and actually called you to chat?

Phone calls are cool, once again

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Are phone calls back in business?

After all the texting, WhatsApping and refusing to pick up the phone (because you wanted the caller to not waste your time, when a SMS would suffice), it appears that people are returning to real conversations.

Or am I just being optimistic?

Here’s a shocker: In 2013, Skype carried an estimated 214 billion minutes of international “on-net” calls (that’s defined as calls made from one Skype app to another).

That’s in spite of the rise of Viber and Line, and even Google Hangouts which do the same job, or better. There’s also an emerging standard known as VoLTE, that’s supposedly about to deliver ‘infallible voice service’ that’s different from the VOIP standard. It’s too technical to go into this here. But the big picture is that soon, when voice calls become cheaper, and more high def, it’s going to make us want to return to those conversations.

For my Mum’s 90th birthday, last week, I was able to speak to her, and get some half-decent face-time with cousins, thanks to Skype. To me Skype is the trusty service, in the same way that land-lines were some 20 years ago, never mind the poor quality of the line. I still use these ‘over-the-top (OTT) applications, but whenever I yearn for close encounters, there’s nothing like a phone call!

“Time Bombs of the Mind” – A journalist’s take on science, technology, and a media-saturated world

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The first thing that strikes you when you meet Nalaka Gunawardena is how grounded he is. Someone introduced him as a citizen journalist, but he’s larger than that, with his antennae in many places, covering science, and pop culture, information technology and social media.

Meeting this new generation of media-savvy writers (he’s a blogger and journalist) who are comfortable in both mainstream and new media, makes me optimistic that in a media-saturated environment where one-liners and tweets pass off as news, there is serious journalism underfoot. Nalaka covers such topics as climate change, space science, and road safety, among other areas.

Nalaka’s just published book is, Wanted: Time Bombs of the Mind

 

Full disclosure: I met Nalaka last year in Sri Lanka –we were on a panel discussion related to my book, Chat Republic.

Lessons from Richard Attenborough

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

AttenboroughIt was a grey, nondescript September afternoon in London, when we sat down with recording ‘machines’, and microphones, all agog for our victim to walk in.

The victim was Richard Attenborough, someone well known to our class of foreign students at the BBC (whose motto, most appropriately, was/is “Nations shall speak unto Nation“). It was just seven years since Gandhi had been released.

We had practiced the ins and outs of radio production, from managing the heavy tape machine (about as heavy as a small microwave), to splicing, mixing sound effects etc. None of this would have mattered if we didn’t get our interview right. We would have just five minutes of face time.

Mr. Attenborough – I doubt we addressed him as ‘Sir’ Richard– was  extremely gracious, and disarming. This was not what our trainers had prepped us for: the evasive spokespeople, the rude celebrities, and those who intimidate you etc.

What I recall most were two things. Mr. Attenborough patiently listened to my question (about the making of the Gandhi), at times tilting his head to figure out my accent.  Speaking of which, there were no shortage of versions of English and thick accents in that room at the Capital Radio studios, London that day. Before and after me were budding radio hosts from the Seychelles, Malta, Lesotho, and Fiji.

The other thing was how he punctuated each idea with his sweeping arm movements, barely grazing, but totally ignoring the microphone. This is what interviews are supposed to be structured around – conversations, not hardware.He made that easy for us.

Long after the spool tapes gave way to tiny, and barely digital recording devices, it’s still the conversations that matter.