Blog – Latest stories tagged 'education'

As the latest sales figures for the Christmas shopping frenzy begin being released, it’s no surprise that technological gadgets are leading the charge.

It is reported that Microsoft sold 364,000 Xbox Ones while Sony sold 530,000 PS4s in the UK in the lead up to Christmas. The sale of digital games (which includes mobile gaming, PC and console downloads) is said to have grown by 16.4% taking it to a value of £1.18 billion and video games have also grown in the UK by 6.6% overall in 2013.

However, it is the ‘tablet revolution’ which makes the most striking impact on our engagement with the online world. Post Christmas sales figures estimate that 12-13 million units were sold in the UK which means that now over half of the UK population now owns or has access to a tablet. This huge leap has been fuelled by the emergence of retailer branded tablets (from the likes of Argos and Tesco) which are available at a much cheaper price than the market leading iPad – making tablets more financially accessible to more people.

The BBC recently reported that over the Christmas period, viewing of their iPlayer service saw mobile devices overtake computers for the first time - with access to the internet now so readily available it’s easy to understand why.

So where does e-safety come into all of this?

I spoke to colleagues, family and friends in the lead up to Christmas and found that the youngest request for a tablet came from 7 year olds – and some of them were getting their wish. Of course iPhones, laptops and consoles were also popular across all ages too.

So Christmas morning comes and the excited child (or indeed adult!) opens up the tiny box sitting under the tree to reveal the shiny new tablet and they are away - with full access to the internet. But how many of the parents set up filters, or activated parental controls before they wrapped the gift? I suspect far fewer than were prepared to admit.

It is this freedom to roam the internet, warts-n-all, that adds weight to the argument for education over prohibition when it comes to e-safety. It’s all very well having filters on school systems and parental controls on PCs at home, but with so many more children now having the world at their fingertips they not only have the ability to access the wealth of information available online but also can potentially become susceptible to the dangers that the environment offers too.

From a sociology perspective, the word technology is defined as the tools and practices enabled by the total knowledge and skills available within a society.

However, a definition that most readily sums up the way technology gets discussed in the public domain is that coined by computer scientist Alan Kay:

“Technology is anything invented after you were born.”

New technologies have always brought with them blind evangelisation and doom laden fear mongering in equal measure.

You can bet your rocket boots that as our early ancestors entered an age of controlled fire there were running arguments between those espousing the benefits of setting light to everything in sight and the placard wavers from the league for the protection of the dark, damp and cold.

Technology has always been in public debate.

In the early days of rail travel it was maintained by some that at the high speeds (a blistering 15 to 20 mph) that the locomotives could reach, the passengers would die of asphyxiation or damage their eyes as they tried to adjust to the strain of looking at the scenery rushing by.

These are fears based on lack of knowledge and understanding.

However, fear of technology can also be born not from ignorance but the complete opposite, a genuine understanding. It is easy to paint the 19th Century Luddite movement as irrational and reactionary, but at the heart of the cause was not a fear of technology but in fact a resistance to the profound effect that the application of that technology would have on the equality of society.

For good or for ill there is no doubt that the post industrial revolution death of the artisan culture has had a massive impact of power, freedom and self determination within our society.

Public discourse on technology as with all other aspects of society and organisation is imperative.

However, as a society adopts new technologies, be it with open arms or begrudging acceptance it can not adequately debate or critique the benefits or dangers without proper knowledge and understanding. In short - Education.

Although electronic computers had been around for some time, most notably embodied by the war time code cracking machines at Bletchley Park, it was not really until the 1950’s that they entered the public consciousness.

And when they did, it was in the form of ...

ROBOTS!

It is well understood that a society deals with it's anxieties through the stories it develops. An abstraction of a concept to a simplified metaphor provides a safe framework in which to examine, consider and debate a shared concern.

In Western culture in the 1950s, these stories manifested as books, magazines and above all movies.

Even the most amateur film theorists will be able to draw the parallels between the Science Fiction B movies about Alien invasion and the genuine cold war fears.

There was, I believe also something else starting to emerge. An underlying concern as to the role of electronics and computing within society was being embodied within the terrifying form of the Killer Robot.

It is not surprising that within an industrial society where manual labour was still a major aspect of working life, that an automaton in human form was considered most threatening. These machines were demonstrably stealing jobs and livelihoods.

The earliest incarnations of the fearful variant of the robot species were often defined by their great strength, robustness and the emotionless simplistic logic of their prefigured algorithmic decision making. Later evolutions developed sentience, though still mostly applied a cold rationalism.

The robot was an identifiable and understandable concept and thus the implications both positive and negative could be debated in the public consciousness.

The scientist and writer Issac Azimov famously encapsulated the notion of ethics or safe guarding into the technology when he defined the 'Three Laws of Robotics' in his 1942 story 'Runaround':

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

In his later books, the first law was expanded to safeguard humanity as a whole with the introduction of the 'zeroth law': A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

These ideas may have their origins in science fiction writing but they powerfully encapsulate the notions and needs for an ethical structure within robotics and are still a valuable touchstone for robotics researchers and a useful structure for the public at large.

We have in recent times moved from an industrial economy to a digital knowledge economy and as such the notion of the Robot has become less obvious as a threat to our jobs.

The Robot, is still with us however and in fact is changing our society in more radical ways than anyone ever imagined.

The Robot has shunned it's clumsy physical form and become virtual, in the shape of the artificial intelligence or complex logic based algorithms.

In the information economy, the 'robot' is no longer manipulating the physical environment but instead is concerning itself with the manipulation of data which has a real impact on our lives.

For instance, we have high-speed trading on the stock-market, essentially consisting of algorithms negotiating between themselves.

I have of course emphasized the negatives or fears for the sake of debate, but the key point is that in order for a society to have control over it's technology and put it to the most efficient, beneficial and ethical use it must understand it. To understand it, it must learn about it.

Is it really sensible, acceptable or useful in a society so dependent on data processing structures to still maintain the notions that computers are some how nerdy topics of interest. Despite the current fashion trend of 'Geek chic', the mainstream perception of Technology and Computing is still that it is the dull, overly complex preserve of nerdy boys.

In reality the best research is being done by multidisciplinary teams of men and woman with backgrounds as diverse as engineering, biology, humanities, arts, philosophy and social sciences. It's not all about 1's and 0's any more. Working in technology is not solely the preserve of mathematicians and computer scientists, people from all backgrounds can and should bring their experience and the expertise of their discipline to bear.

E-safety is best tackled by education and this education forms the bedrock upon which the future technological structures, practices and indeed ethics of our society will be built.

For large swathes of the global population, the notion of whether a person is considered ‘Online’ is somewhat of a redundant question.

The relatively rapid migration from dial-up Internet connection, to perpetually connected broadband and mobile wireless high speed data access has had a radical impact on what it means to be ‘online’.

In the not too distant past, the phrase “Are you online?” was a euphemistic enquiry as to whether or not one had entered in to some kind of contract with an Internet Service Provider.

More recently the same phrase could be a question asking whether a person was actually logged in or connected to any given service at that point in time.

Recently I have seen a trend which has confused things further. It seems that the term ‘Online’ is being used to refer to something that happens through a Web browser as if somehow other platforms interacting with remote services over the Internet are in some way not ‘online’.

For instance, it is now quite common for a TV advert to end with a phrase such as “Order online, or use our smartphone app”. This is quite meaningless. Strictly speaking it is the phone itself that is online i.e. the point of connection, but regardless of this arguably pedantic point, neither the advertiser’s Web site or their App can be used for ordering without being ‘online’.

Does the lack of precision on the use of the term ‘online’ here confuse? Do people think that they are not ‘online’ if they are using an app? Does it matter? Possibly not and maybe the less technical term of being ‘connected’ will suffice.

However, there is a very interesting question about perception exposed here. For instance, although a Web page open within a browser may refresh with updated information from time to time or even in real time while it is open (most in fact do not), closing the browser or navigating away from that site severs the communication.

This is not true of an App. Although not all apps will need to exploit the mechanism, a modern smart phone app once opened is often still 'running' and processing in the background even when you switch your attention to another app. Further, modern smart phones tend to have features within the operating system which allow the phone itself to interact with some parts of the app’s online data source even if the app is not currently running. This is the mechanism which for instance provides alert notifications from Facebook or ebay.

This is all further complicated by the fact that many people, whether they realise it or not still have an online presence even if they were in the middle of a forest, out of range of any cell connectivity with all their devices switched off, batteries removed and placed in a lead lined box and buried in a field.

This is because many of the utilities and services with which we engage on a daily basis, are still working on our behalf even when we are not connected to them. For instance, our Facebook profiles are still available for people to read and to post to, your online photo albums are still accessible, your blog posts can still attract comments. ‘You’ can be invited to events, and listed with others on an ‘attendees’ list. Depending on your profile setting you may instantly friend or follow back anyone that requests to connect with you. Recommendation engines from online shops, music on demand services or movie streaming services are churning data preparing lists of content they think you’ll be interested in - they may even automatically send you an email about their findings.

In short, the online ghost of your data and meta-data still reflects your presence and represents your likes, activities and habitual interactions for people and software alike to engage with. When you post a reply to someone’s comment on Facebook, the feeling is more akin to a direct contact with them than for instance sending an email, even if your ‘friend’ isn’t currently logged in to Facebook. This is because the context of the interface personifies your ‘friend’ through their trail of activities. Of course you have a great deal of control over these things if you take a bit of care over your service settings.

Additionally, so much of what happens in the physical world is driven by online data and decisions made online, that the notion of being in a position where you are unaffected by things ‘online’ is fallacy.

From an E-safety perspective it is important that people understand the nature of perpetual connectivity and the fact that direct engagement with a service is no longer the only driver of activity.

Putting up an umbrella may shelter you from the rain but it does not stop it raining, nor does it protect you from the effects of the river about to burst it’s banks a mile away. Likewise, switching off a device does not terminate your online activity, or your involvement in the activity of others.

A recent naive post I saw on twitter suggested that the poster had no “sympathy for those moaning about cyber bullying” because they should “just turn off their computer.” Logging off of a social network does not curtail cyber bullying or neutralise the waves that it causes in the physical world. Like many aspects of E-safety, problems are best tackled by action and education in the real world.

These are tough concepts, but digital communications technology is such a useful tool and has such positive potential that it is worth the effort to understand and to ensure that the first principles are taught to our children so that they can apply the understanding as technology continues to evolve.

Media studies was once derided by many as a ‘Mickey Mouse subject’. However, in a society where mass media has such a profound influence on our perceptions, understanding and opinions, can any rational person really argue against the value of educating people to critically evaluate the messages, meaning, contextualisation and veracity of the information we receive and the motivations of those presenting it?

Likewise, in a world where so much of our interaction and engagement is mediated by communications technology, how can we not recognise the importance of teaching the fundamental underpinnings and the modes and models of the interaction?

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