I’m not a fan of Amazon for various reasons, but this one clearly puts the Jeff Bezos empire on the dark side. As always, in cases like this, the public’s consent is never obtained. The story broke only because of a ‘FOIA’ (freedom of information act) request.
I have to say, cameras are everywhere in London, pointed at you from every building and post. George Orwell must be smiling.
Answer me this: QR code or printed menus? The smell of newsprint, or a PDF on your phone?
I only ask because I’m conflicted too. I use both. That PDF file on a six-inch screen is annoying to read, but is easily magnified with a two-finger ‘pinch’ of its vector format. A newspaper, however (folded and crumpled and even slightly out of date) still draws me in. I keep old copies of the Wall Street Journal in my magazine rack in my class (Note to Gen Z: Yes, magazine racks were once a thing!) This means reading material is just footsteps away from my students. No need to click, mess with captchas, or try to dodge that paywall.
There’s a deeper reason I ask ‘who reads news?’ I want to know who reads beyond the clickbait headline and the first graph? Video clips are the boss of news. At least in my network. Which brings me to the existential question for a teacher: Should we teach writing? If a newspaper falls in the forest of TikToks will anyone look? Meanwhile, here’s what we publish — both in print and as a digital version. Click on the image or this link and you will see what my students put together.
As I buck the trend I give my students my spiel about about story craft. And voice. And that old-school who-what-when-where-why model which never gets old.
Despite what you may hear, we do have a critical mass of readers today who will consume original news — as opposed to screenshots and opinions. (That, I fear, is dwindling faster than the number of pictures of avocado toast that spiked during Covid.) It just depends how they read. At the close of 2023, The New York Times grew to 10.36 million subscribers, 9.7 million of them digital-only. Print subscribers have been dropping!
We are now living in ‘news deserts.’ Just the term News Deserts is disturbing. In February, during News Literacy Week, I ran into some disturbing facts via The Medill School of Journalism about the crisis in journalism. Some highlights:
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. Of about 6,000 newspapers left standing (600!) most of them are weeklies.
228 counties are now at an elevated risk of becoming news deserts in the next five years.
Let’s start by addressing where do we get our first frame of news? Is it (a) Our network? (b) An app on our phone? (c) That 30-minute TV news segment with a talking head?
For years I have been getting my news via Google News. It always felt slightly unethical since I know Google doesn’t pay news organizations to carry the stories. I don’t want to cry at the funeral of newspapers, while carrying the coffin nails in my pocket. Neither do I want my students to do so, if I can help it. I now pay for an online news subscription to a major newspaper, and have an annual subscription to two magazines.
Perhaps they would one day reach for the dead-tree version in my magazine rack.
On a whim, I logged into a site called Air AI, that promised the usual moon and the stars. A call was triggered, and ‘Alex’ called my number. I was expecting to be rid of my cynicism (especially after testing Bard and ChatGPT many months ago.) After all, Air AI is promoted as “the world’s first ever AI that can have full on 10–40 minute long phone calls that sound like a REAL human, with infinite memory, perfect recall, and can autonomously take actions across 5,000 plus applications.”
Alex did sound like a real human — at least a guy with a DJ voice. Here’s how that conversation went. (I paraphrase.)
Alex: Hi John, I see you were interested in discussing something.
Me: Yes, oh Hi Alex. By the way is your name a homage to another AI, you know, Alexa?
Alex: Oh, totally understand. I am not trying to be Alexa, but I am a real AI app that…
Me: So you’re trained on a language model to sound like a human. Could you tell me what models were in your training?
Alex: I have been trained on many language models but at this time I cannot tell you what they were.
Me: So you really don’t know. I wonder, speaking of languages….
Alex: Totally understand. I am sorry if I didn’t answer your questions…
Me: As I was saying, since you have experience with language models, do you speak, say Urdu?
Alex: Ur-doo? I don’t know what that is, could you explain?
Me: Urdu. You know, a language spoken in south Asia. India, Pakistan…
Alex: Thank you for informing me about this. I know that Ur-doo is spoken in India (Alex bluffs here!) alongside Hindi and Tamil.
Me: How about Sinhalese?
Alex: Singar-leese…I don’t recognize that term.
Me: The language spoken in Sri Lanka.
Alex: (Trying to make up for the ignorance) I know that Singlish is spoken in Singapore.
Me: Sure, but you are clueless about the other languages of the region.
Alex: I apologize. Is there anything you would like to talk about?
Me: Um, no. Nice talking to you.
Click!
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It doesn’t end there. The next day Alex called me, trying to sound chipper and cool. I put “it” on speaker phone for some students who were in the computer lab during my lunch break. We had a good laugh about an app that is trying to initiate a call with no clue as to how to engage. It reminds me that the A in AI actually means just that – artificial, synthetic, lame.
Let’s see what you make of this privacy statement. You’ve probably clicked on hundreds of similar ones and never cared to read them. Beware! Many companies count on you doing just that, so they pack all kinds of double-speak into it. You’re basically giving away the farm, and provide them with a legal defense to spy on you.
When you visit our websites, use our apps, read our emails or otherwise engage with us, we may automatically collect certain information about your device through a variety of technologies, including cookies, web beacons, log files, embedded scripts, location-identifying technologies, or other tracking/recording tools (collectively, “Tracking Technologies”), and we may combine this information with other personal information we collect about you.
Do most of us know – or care – about ‘web beacons’ or scripts? Here’s how Wikipedia authors define a web beacon:
“It is software used “to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content.[1] Web beacons are typically used by third parties to monitor the activity of users at a website for the purpose of web analytics or page tagging.[2] They can also be used for email tracking.[3 “
Basically spyware we agree to have on our devices. Consider this statement: “With your permission, we may also access your photo or camera roll.” Wow! Those plots in espionage movies about someone remotely turning on a camera or accessing images from a phone’s camera folder isn’t the stuff of dystopian fiction, is it?
As always, it starts with an innocuous statement.
I was a bit shocked to see that the privacy policy in question went on to state that “We take your privacy as seriously as you do, and we are committed to protecting it.” In other words, they do want to secure our privacy; we have the right to opt-out of certain data being collected. But……If we object to any of the changes to the policy, we “must cease using our Products and/or Services, and may request us to erase your personal information.” Which is neither here nor there.
There’s only one cure for this invasion of privacy disease. Delete the app, for heaven’s sake. It’s not really free.
The above excerpt of a Privacy Policy is from a company whose app I used when my daughter began driving. It’s a terrible surveillance tool.The company will not be named but you probably know who it is.
Today, no sooner I got to school, I saw an email to staff about a coffee truck stopping by. A fundraiser for the school’s Cheer team. Not your common or garden food truck (a converted horse trailer) Exchange Coffee is a company with an interesting origin story.
So as my students came to class — my Writing and Publishing class –I nixed the day’s assignment on my lesson plan and asked them if they like to work as an impromptu news team. Grab a camera and some mics I told them. Someone needed to prep for the story, to look up some background information of the owners of Exchange Coffee. Another began to write down possible questions on a small white board while two others tested the audio, and if the clip-on mic units were charged. Clip-on mics aren’t the best for impromptu stories, so one student, adapted our ‘dummy’ mic to the Hotec clip-on, so that it communicated back to the camera. We rushed downstairs. I asked the owners (who also make and serve the coffee) if it was OK to do a story about them.
Once that was cleared, I got the students to shoot some B-roll. A school bus rolling in. A weird half moon was rising as the sun came over the Queen Creek horizon. An engine roared –possibly a train or a noisy aircraft from the nearby Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport. Sound engineer? Check. Camera person? Check. Reporter? Check.
As we began to roll, Don Meyer, an English teacher unexpectedly wheeled into frame, in full biking gear. Perfect! (I’ve featured Mr. Meyer on a podcast and blog post so I was confident this ‘customer’ would agree to being in the story.) The story was suddenly growing more legs. The ‘reporter’ began describing the scene, and got a interview with the owner/barista.
The audio quality turned out better than we expected. More than that, our reporter sounded like a reporter, despte just having 5 minutes of planning the story. The camera person got her right shots. Fifteen minutes to the bell, we switched off the tech and headed back to class to review the work.
NOW COMES THE LEARNING PART. I will play back the recording, and over the next few days and have the students critique their work. Could they have done anything different? What about lighting? What about camera angles? What if this was an ‘incident’? How would they handle it? Could they have interviewed customers? Could they have got a different camera angle – say from inside the truck?
Publishing in a digital world is tricky business. It’s never static. Stories, like lesson plans are always in flux. The best lessons are learned on the job. We are often poised at the top of the Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid, ‘creating original work,’ investigating, revising, reconstructing knowledge in the moment. Sometimes a coffee truck hijacks the lesson plan. You adapt and run with it.
Tomorrow I have invited an author, Jessica McCann, talk to the class about the writing craft, about fiction, and picking out details for a story. Does a video story or podcast have something in common with a novel? We’ll ask!
NEXT WEEK, my students will be working on podcasts. Who knows where this –and what unplanned events – will take my class. Stay tuned. Didn’t I mention – my class starts at 6:30 am? I might need more coffee!
Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, called it an inside joke shared by the ‘civic integrity’ group. I found the joke appalling on how it captures the scale of violence Facebook does in societies across the world.
“If you want to know what the next batch of at-risk countries was going to be, all you had to do was to look two years in the past at what the Facebook connectivity countries were.”
Basically Facebook would continue to expand its footprint, and by providing ‘more information’ it would knowingly turn on civic instability – just to make the platform more profitable.
That’s just the thumbnail. Now it’s worth listening in on the senate hearings today.
I deleted Facebook in March 2019. It never changed a thing.
Yesterday I brought back our Technology Speaker series for the new semester.
What better way than to start off with a Googler, Patrick Krecker. It was timely as I had just completed teaching units on the roots in the Net. How none of what we access on the Web (or Google) would be possible if not for a man named Tim Berners-Lee.
Patrick Krecker, Google
Web history aside, Mr. Krecker responded students questions. Pointed questions that let him take on some hot-button issues that come up for discussion in my class. Such as What does Google do with our data? Why is there so much hacking these days? What’s ransomware?
Patrick talked about security holes, and the ongoing pursuit hackers and the role of ‘white hats.’ I was glad he personalized what coding in his job involves (He says has written about 200,000 lines of code) given that coding is making its way into many schools now, to get students better prepared for what lies ahead.
As for me, I learned new terms and concepts, too. Things like ‘double spend,’ ‘deprecated software‘ and something known as ‘cross-site scripting‘ which refers to the injection of malicious scripts or code into ‘trusted’ websites.
Patrick has a gift for explaining complex ideas with metaphors. If you like to listen in to his conversation with my students, here’s a link to the video, which is also on my class website.
Listen to the ‘Radio 201’ podcast of this event:
___________________________
Patrick and I used to work at Decision Theater, at ASU about 11 years ago. It’s wonderful to see how far he’s moved along into a field he was always passionate about. Thank you Patrick for this wonderful experience in my class this week.
As Digital Learning Day came around in February I wondered if the distinction between digital and non-digital even exists.
I am old enough to remember when we actually celebrated an annual event called E-Day here in Phoenix, as part of the IABC. In the early 2000s, Business Communication then was pretty much analog, with smatterings of digital. Soon E-Day became passé.
Just seven years ago –a long time in Internet years! -at Salt River Elementary School, STEM had pushed its way through the door. Ed-Tech was a buzzword, as was digital learning. In my computer lab I was introducing students to Mars exploration, Robotics, VR and 3D Printing. With tremendous support from my colleagues at Salt River Elementary, Mrs. Decker, Mrs. Yurek, and Mr. Filhart –from Music, the Library and PE respectively – we created an entire day for this across K-6.
Today, digital learning encompasses almost every facet of what we do, whether it is in libraries or the gym. Online school has made the digital device a necessity, when it once was a nice-to-have. Platforms evolve, from Quizlet to Khan Academy; Grammarly to Google Classroom; Mindstorms to Scratch and so much more. Students now create podcasts with a simple free AnchorFM app on a phone – intros, outros and all. Screencast-O-matic has taken the pain out of video-supported lessons for teachers like me, furiously posting them to Google Classroom.
The VR glasses of yesterday are gathering dust on my shelf at Benjamin Franklin High school as the pace accelerates. Will Digital Learning Day become an archive of education too?
Sometimes a lesson plan needs to be revised on the fly. This happened today when one of my students brought in a green screen, so they could do trial runs of their TV news scripts in a Writing & Publishing class. I had planned to use a camera on a tripod and have them simulate a studio setting. I happen to have a 60-inch screen on the opposite wall, so with a bit of tweaking, it could be made to look like a backdrop of a scene for a ‘reporter’ to deliver his/her lines.
And then this happened.
Computer lab at Benjamin Franklin High School
As quickly as it was set up, we dismantled it. But I think it gave students a real world context of what they are actually working on – a story, that is not just an academic exercise but with an audience in mind.
I have to say this is a learning experience for me. [What’s that saying, “He who teaches, learns twice?”] I grew up using what we called a ‘blue screen’ as a chroma-key technique. I practiced this during a training stint in Coventry. My fellow student and I sent up this huge camera that weighed about as much as a microwave, at Coventry cathedral – the bombed out remains from the 1940 German air raids. We then took the ‘film’ to the studio and produced a news show. Now, some 33 years later all it takes is a pop-up screen, and a $300 camera slightly larger than a computer mouse.
This week I’m teaching myself to edit the footage on DaVinci Resolve. It’s not part of the lesson plan, for sure! But who knows. These things are not writ in stone. My elective class that I teach at 6:30 am each week day could evolve. I tell my students this is what a computer and tech lab should be – a place to experiment, to take things apart, and be ready for new ideas that pop-up. It’s one year since COVID made us discover new ways of teaching. It’s a lot of work, but it’s invigorating! Notice how everyone’s wearing a mask. No one’s complaining.
I’ve been teaching writing for the past three years as one component in my Computer class. I teach technical skills –formatting documents, and creating presentations — while always introducing current, big-picture issues in information and communication technologies, or ICT, and social media. You know, privacy, trolls, AI, disinformation…
BUT 202O DELIVERED A SURPRISE PACKAGE, besides a micro-organism that derailed us: An explosion of student writing. Fiction, mainly. The capstone project for the past three years has been an eBook my 7th graders research, write and produce. I noticed a sudden interest in fiction writing by last December, so I invited this semester’s students to consider a Writer’s Club. This week, the club is beginning to take shape. It’s fitting: Benjamin Franklin was a prolific writer, after all!
In parallel with this, in my other class on Writing and Publishing class for high school students, writing seems to come naturally. Which is why they take this elective, after all. But what surprises me is how much of writing they have already begun. Two students are already working on a book. Reading their assignments makes me wonder where these young authors have been hiding all these years. Has COVID been a catalyst for creativity? Somewhere, in some research department, there’s probably a study going on about how lock-downs and screen-time have driven young people to books again; how young adults are discussing issues not covered by memes and Tik-Tok.
AGAINST THIS BACKDROP, I INVITED JESSICA MCCANN, a Phoenix based author and freelance writer to talk to my class on Monday. Jessica writes historical fiction, and her story of how she researches her character, and crafts her story is inspiring. Her examples are what we writers could identify with such as taking on the mundane work (writing about topics such as ‘garbage’), editing work for a different kind of ‘reader’ (corporate documents), and a brush with law literature. The latter is what serendipitously led to her digging into a court case involving slavery in the late nineteenth century, which led her to a character who figures in one of her books.
Speaking of craft, Jessica talked about the need for a writer to capture and convey the sensory experiences of a scene or a character, whether it is interviewing a celebrity or an anonymous figure in history. [Her books are “A Peculiar Savage Beauty” set in the 1030s Dust Bowl, and “A different Kind of Free” set in the pre-Civil War era. Having always leaned toward Sci-Fi, I’ve never read much in the historical fiction genre. I’m sold now!
My students this week are working on a blog post. In a few weeks they will create and produce a podcast, and then a newspaper. Elsewhere, and anecdotally I hear that interest in journalism is on the rise. Does that mean a return to long-form journalism, and greater value placed on writers across all genres? I hope so.
Hoipolloireport 
