Tag: internet

Shared Search – Sign Up to Help Out

Google, Shared SearchPublished onUpdated on8 Comments on Shared Search – Sign Up to Help Out

I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.

Elevator Pitch

  • A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
  • The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
  • A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
  • Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
  • Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
  • The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
  • The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
  • The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.

So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.

The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.

If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.

Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.

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My Dad Doesn’t Google

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We have been spending some time with my Dad who has been visiting us from Australia. During his stay with us I realised, more than usual, how the internet makes no impact on his life. It led me to think through the behaviours that many of us have grown accustomed to.

I kind of get the impression that members of his generation either made a choice to have a computer and so eventually to use the internet, or indeed let it pass them by. My Dad worked in insolvency for many years, times of tape dictaphones and typists. His business offices were all about paper information and it was physically organised. I remember book keeping – spreadsheets must have been a sight for sore eyes.

4888492505 a6302cba05 mDad lives in South Australia for most of the year now and enjoys writing letters to us about all of his adventures. His penmanship is fantastic and I always enjoy reading them. It almost feels strange to hold a personal message for me, handwritten with a fountain pen. Usually his missives are two or three pages of A4. We may have learned to communicate via 140 characters (or less) but what has that restriction done to old fashioned letter writing? What have we given up?

I was lucky enough to have Google Voice Search demonstrated to me by the mobile Product Manager at the Teacher Academy in London. It works really well and with the new Froyo 2.2 update will allow you to control much of your phone with just your voice. I showed Dad and tried it with the search term “Best restaurants in Adelaide”. As the phone recognised what I had said and immediately displayed a map with the eateries he was pretty impressed. Then he went through the list and said, “Eaten there, yes and that one, and that one, enjoyed the starters there…” He hadn’t done such a search but had probably visited these places in his own journey to find out the restaurants he enjoys. Perhaps they were recommended, but I can safely say he wasn’t swayed by a single online review. What experiences he must have enjoyed exploring those places. His opinion probably contradicted that of some reviews – good that he hadn’t run that search after all, perhaps he would have missed out. How much do we truly make up our own mind these days?

4888615095 1d74ebb759If we so choose, we can control a deluge of information and news to come to us, on our mobiles, on our televisions. A constant feed or stream. Every day Dad heads to the shops to buy the newspaper. That is his way of gathering the daily news, from the printed press. The obvious criticism is of course that it is from one source, but what must he gain everyday from his journey to gather it? Would you walk somewhere to pick up a blog update? The physical act of collecting it is an investment, everything is a click away for us, we don’t invest in the gathering of information in the same way – we can pick it up and drop it just as quickly. It is the impact of this on the information sources themselves that is the most intriguing.

Every evening/morning he listens to the radio, well he calls it the “wireless” – my “wireless” is no less important to me.

The crossword he does is the cryptic one, you know the really tricky one. He doesn’t jump on Google at the first sign of trouble but puts it to one side and gets a cup of tea. He lets the information brew as well and slowly he forms connections with something he read here, a past crossword clue there or a fact he knew. It might take a few moments or a few hours but suddenly he would let out a victorious serendipitous yelp as he figures it out. Not a search query in sight other than his own synaptic workout. Sometimes he finished the puzzle, sometimes not, but he has probably on average 18-24 moments of serendipitous victory a day. That can only be good for your brain.

—

It has been interesting to make these comparisons in internet and non-internet use, however I wouldn’t change the way I interact with it now. It offers me a great perspective on my self and my work. It allows me to connect to others both near and far. I can find out stuff without really trying, I don’t even need to type.

But my behaviours raise questions too – do we have a stronger sense of self nowadays or are we too reliant on our networks, connections to others and “you may also like”? Can we form genuinely unbiased opinions of products and services, restaurants and experiences with the internet? Do we need to? Will the good in life always rise to the top of the web? There are things we don’t consider important anymore because we can Google it – surely the journey to the papershop can be just as important as what we collect.

Thanks Dad for causing me to think this through.

I say more yelps of serendipity please.

Blocked For Me, Open For You

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pay heed by most uncool
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Children in my class cannot use YouTube at school, but as soon as they leave at the end of the day, they will.

Since the exponential growth of the online video giant I have never once used a video directly from YouTube in my classroom. It is exempt from my teaching routine. On reflection I find this fairly incredible.

In England each local authority can choose which sites are open to use in the classroom. YouTube is blocked by many due to inappropriate content, which includes the comments accompanying the footage. However I have never been shown, read or offered an explanation by my local authority about their reasoning.

At the end of school children will go home and use the website, open to the inappropriate content we block in school. Not only is YouTube exempt from my teaching, I am exempt from helping children better understand, process and find value amidst a mass of video content. I am exempt from demonstrating and educating the children in my class to appreciate the power of such an information source. Apparently that is a good thing.

In my opinion it comes down to some hard decisions. The longer, more protracted path of educating young primary school children in dealing with open content on the web (including YouTube) is too hard a path for some to consider. The easy route is to block it. And that is what has happened.

It is hard to fully appreciate the effect this will have on years and years of children not being given guidance about open content, from the very people who are best placed to provide it.

I consider YouTube an unprecedented source of information in the form of videos. Does the blocking of access to this information infringe on our rights? According to Kimberley Curtis,

Article 19(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights holds that freedom of expression includes the right to information.  Specifically, it states that

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

It goes on to admit that governments can place certain restrictions on these rights, but only if necessary.  This has long been understood to cover access to government information, such as rights covered by the Freedom of Information Act in the US.  But increasingly some are starting to include access to knowledge, particularly in regards to the internet, in this rubric as well.

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I take it then that governments have given school’s local authorities the freedom to choose what to block “if necessary” and YouTube falls into this category and the easy short-term decision is easy. So what would I want to see? What would I do with an unblocked, unfiltered web? I would invest the money from filtering in high quality guidance, training and materials to provide teachers the ability to properly guide young learners in the web they use at home anyway. Bringing some parts of our teaching force up to speed with the internet their students are using, and equip them with the basic principles for teaching and using an open web.

Having complete access to knowledge will after all benefit an economy in the long run, right? The Every Child Matters aims and objectives state that whatever their background or their circumstances, every child should have the support they need to:

  • be healthy
  • stay safe
  • enjoy and achieve
  • make a positive contribution
  • achieve economic well-being.

With a filtered version of the internet are we providing children the best possible chances to feel they can make a positive contribution to society? Is their protracted exclusion from a growing information source such as YouTube  actually detrimental to their chances of achieving economic well-being? Would an unfiltered web make children more or less safe?

Jack Balkin from Yale University explains,

Access to knowledge means that the right policies for information and knowledge production can increase both the total production of information and knowledge goods, and can distribute them in a more equitable fashion. The goal is first, promoting economic efficiency and development, and second, widespread distribution of those knowledge and informational goods necessary to human flourishing in our particular historical moment– the global networked information economy.

I repeat: It’s not just a trade off between equity and efficiency. We are not simply fighting about how to divide up a pie. Access to knowledge is about making a larger pie and distributing it more fairly. Or, at the risk of extending this pie metaphor well beyond its appropriate scope, access to knowledge means giving everyone the skills to make their own pies and share them widely with others.

Durham

(“How to make a pie” returned 23,500 results on YouTube.)

Beyond the filtering of YouTube there is massive inconsistency across UK schools about which sites are blocked and which are open. I work in Nottinghamshire, for some reason many of the sites that I use for educational purposes are open to me in school. For many of my colleagues across the UK it is different. Would my development of learning technology use have been completely different if I was 30 miles further North,  South, East or West? Of course it would.

Similarly children in one school will be able to use different learning tools in the classroom than another. As someone said to me recently this is a sort of “learning technology postcode lottery.” Inevitably those teachers that consider certain web based tools crucial to their teaching will think twice about a post in those local authorities most effected.

I want to hold a lens up to the inconsistency between local authorities in England. I have started a Google Spreadsheet with a list of 80+ web based tools used in the classroom and the opportunity to state OPEN or BLOCKED for your local authority.

Web Tools in English Schools > Blocked or Open?

Ollie Bray has been working on something similar for Scottish authorities – perhaps when both documents have reached a critical mass they could be amalgamated to create a full picture of web filtering in schools in the UK.

I would be grateful if you would complete the spreadsheet for your own location (unless Google Docs is blocked of course!) and help encourage others to do the same, this way we will build up a complete picture.

Five things I am hopeful for:

  1. This will continue to keep the issue of open web access on educator’s agenda.
  2. Local authorities will look at the list and question their own decisions. “Why has Nottinghamshire left Wordle open and we have not?”
  3. I would like to see teachers who are using these tools become part of the process of deciding upon filtering.
  4. Explanations why sites are blocked are provided to teachers and not some random category. We have reasons we want to use them in a positive way, LAs ostensibly have reasons why they are blocking them – that debate needs to be had.
  5. More consistency for what the web looks like for teachers and for students.