Sunday, June 9, 2013

Project #4 Comments4Teachers

I was assigned to read Will Richardsons' blog Read. Write. Connect. Learn.. Here is my summary of his post and my comments.

Blog Post May 29, 2013

Who Knew That Learning Was a Problem to Be Solved?

This blog post was over the article: Amplify Announces One of the Largest Tablet Deployments in K-12 Education

This news release from Amplify, a tablet producing company, announces that they will be sending 21,215 tablets to middle schools in Guilford County North Carolina. The tablets were purchased mainly by federal Race to The Top funds and are covered for four years. Along with details on the tablet and their company, the new release has several praise statements about the tablet from the CEO and other important members of their team.

Out of everything that was possible to say in response to this news release, his only writing consisted of sarcastic remarks. While I was highly disappointed in his blogging I had to go through with the assignment. To make my required comment be worthwhile, I went and researched the tablet on the company website. I looked into whether or not these tablets were a good investment, because education at any grade level is an investment. My comment in a nut shell stated that 14 million dollars is a lot of money especially for technology, such as a tablet. They become highly outdated in a short amount time and are not wanted once there is something better on the market. Maybe I sounded a little too crazy with my use of numbers because my post was miraculously gone after ten minutes on his blog.

Blog Post June 7, 2013

Two Options for Being “You” on the Internet

Refers to the article:Privacy tools are a joke

This article talks about the recent news of the government's online snooping and how you should overcome the situation. It shows that privacy on the internet is really nonexistent and the NSA can watch you even with what some think as impossible to track "anonymity-protecting TOR browse" technology. To truly be able to have privacy on the internet you need a fake name on Facebook and start encoding your emails. Besides the unrealistic answers that I enjoyed reading about, the author finally comes around to politics and how we need to change them to protect ourselves. Here is my favorite part,
A civilized society should not permit its government to collect unlimited amounts of data on innocent people. President Obama said something to that effect when campaigning for president in 2007, when he attacked Bush’s surveillance activities as “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.”
I guess I should not say refer to the article above, his blog post was nothing but sharing the article. Super interesting topic, but he did not say anything! Pick a side, take a middle of the road stance, something. Please. My comment just thanked him for sharing the interesting read. I could not think of anything else to say that would not get deleted.

obama

6 comments:

  1. Maggie,

    It sounds like you haven't had quite the kind of C4T you would like! It is good that you are not backing down from sharing your opinion though! Your comment was removed after 10 minutes? From the way you described it, it did not sound that offensive. Privacy on the Internet is certainly something that will be debated more in the future. I just read yesterday that Google has been keeping data about people that it stole through its Street-View service and has been given 35 days to get rid of the information. It is interesting to ponder why they would want to collect the information in the first place and keep it for over two years while "accidentally" forgetting to get rid of it. You should go look up the article!

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  2. You never tell your reader who the blogger was and there were no links to his site. I know, but the rest of your audience does not.

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    Replies
    1. Dr. Strange,

      Please see my first sentence of the post. It seems my links are hard to see, what color would you suggest?

      Maggie

      Delete
    2. Hmmm.... Either I missed them or did not realize they were links. They are fine as is. I'll clean my glasses.

      Sorry.

      Delete
  3. I have now read the post in question. Richardson's post had nothing to do with pricing which apparently was the main point of your comment. His sarcasm was directed entirely at the notion that you can create an electronic "thing" that will package "learning" thereby eliminating the need for educators and apparently any need for effort on the part of learners. There has been a long standing debate in education about whether you can mechanize learning. Separately this same general argument has raged about whether or not you can mechanize instruction. The debate has been heated and has a long history. Your comment (apparently) did not address the issue of Richardson's post. You talked about cost. You argued against the device because it costs too much and it will soon be technologically out of date. My guess is that the post was removed because it did not address Richardson's main concern: learning cannot be packaged and be mechanized and still remain worthwhile. We touched on a small part of that debate in class last Thursday when we started a conversation about whether you need to know how to divide 15 by 7 or whether you just need to know how to find the answer. I broadened the question into telling time. But we did not get into the deep rooted philosophical arguments that surround these issues.

    So... your post was probably removed because Richardson thought it had nothing to do with what he wanted people to think about and respond to. I agree that you totally missed the point of his post although I would have left the post for others to see. You might have been the butt of many jokes as a result, however.

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  4. Two comments about your second post.

    1. A lot of bloggers, especially those with large audiences, post something for others to read in the hopes that people will read and comment.
    2. The question of privacy and spying on citizens and foreigners is a fascinating one. I am reading/listening to a book titled Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson. It concentrates on the debates among Americans, citizens, government officials, and organizations about whether government should spy on their own citizens "in order to protect democracy", how they should determine whose mail gets read, who gets followed, who gets investigated. The central debate of the time was whether the United States should help the Allies against Hitler or stay out of the conflict entirely. Charles Lindberg was a leading advocate of staying out. Roosevelt felt it essential that the USA come to the aid of England and France. J Edgar Hoover expanded Roosevelt's interest in learning all he could about those opposing him concerning our role in the war against Hitler to other people Hoover did not like: communists and labor leaders so they also were spied on. Spying in the 1940's was very different than it is now. Google, the US Government, and almost every retailer collects huge amounts of information about almost everything anyone does using technology of any sort. I contend that privacy does not exist anymore - whether we like it or not. Others say that the collection of data is not personal. We just need to use these data to try and locate those who plot things like 9/11. The debate is the same as in the 1940s. The cast of characters and the tools are different, however.

    The debate is a worthy one. However, those who run the government will always say it is the national interest to spy. Those who are spied upon (or who think they may be spied upon) oppose it vigorously.

    Even though it is a worthy debate. It will never end in a democracy. Democracies are always contentious.

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