Take a deep breath: we're about to plunge back in.

It's mid-August, when a young academic's fancy turns to thoughts of ...

THE FALL SEMESTER.

In my day-job capacity in my college's Center for Academic Technology, I've been here all summer, supporting various programs around campus, from new student orientation to summer sessions to the LEAD Academy. But life gets quite a bit busier as my faculty colleagues start heading back to campus (mentally and physically), prepping for the start of the next academic cycle.

For the first time in quite a while, I myself won't be teaching in Fall 2013 (the seminar I was hoping to do didn't look like it would attract enough registration), so there's a fairly large chunk of time and attention I can now divert to my tech-side work with faculty, particularly in effective use of Canvas for online course support. There've been a large number of changes since people logged out of their courses in May, and one of my major goals is to encourage everyone to pay attention to the changes, rather than assuming things are the same as last year.

(By the way, that's a hard habit to break, since our last LMS notoriously didn't "do" updates, except maybe once per year. People are not yet fully used to the idea of dynamic [dare I use the buzzword "nimble"?] SaaS. Updates and fixes every three weeks? Unheard of! Absurd!)

Another work goal I have for myself is to work more closely with our campus's Freel Library. Our Digital Services librarian Pamela has been doing fantastic work developing and promoting resources at Freel, and I want to do my part to help. It helps that our respective resource-sets naturally overlap, and we have, in fact, already done some mutually-supporting development in the past year. "More of that" is the watchword. Watch-phrase. Whatever.

Anyway, I've got some fun projects in the planning stage too. One involves organizing a campus screening of the brand-new documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply; another is a panel discussion about Henrietta Lacks, hooking in to the college's First-Year Experience reading of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; another is, of course, my ongoing work with Dungeons & Discourse.

In closing, a goofy video I made this past weekend for our faculty, and which caused a little spike in my Twitter traffic yesterday...

A New Thing.

I'm going to be testing out a new idea on Twitter - Zella's TechTips, a regular tweet in which I'll mention a piece of software, or a practice, I'd recommend to my colleagues who teach. Sometimes, I have a small nugget or comment to share, and posting it here at the blog seems like a bit of overkill - so we'll see how the cross-platform thing goes!

By the way, I already posted (just a couple of minutes ago!) my first Zella's TechTip - follow me at @gpetruzella if you want to see how this plays out, or the other random things I tweet. (Btw, I forgot to do this on today's inaugural tweet, but henceforth, I'll be using the #zellastechtip hashtag.)

Augh.

Hmmm... I can just imagine the harrumphing of those who decry the online world - "even writing a blog post is too long-form for today's scholars? O tempora! O mores!"

Yes, I've been too distracted to set myself down and post here for the past two months. I've been doing a fair amount of other things, including micro-blogging (does that count? does anyone actually refer to Twitter that way anymore?) and, you know, actual job-type stuff too.

But in case you are that reader who was actually looking forward to Part 3 of my last posted series... I may yet share my own workflow at some point, but if you're looking for excellent information about, and tools for, managing your own online footprint, may I point you at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)'s Guide to Practical Privacy Tools, a very nice, organized starting-point.

Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness, Part 2.

Well, the hits just keep on coming, don't they?

Yesterday I asked whether the ethical failure of the NSA's actions lies not with the bare fact that they collect (and analyze) information about us which we call 'private', but rather with the imbalance between the level of information they have as contrasted with us - an imbalance of information that translates to an imbalance of power. I proposed that

1. Our aim should be to equalize the power imbalance by equalizing the information imbalance.
2. Equalizing this imbalance could happen in one of two ways:

(a) Government's access to information is reduced, so that they know as little about us as we know about them.

(b) Citizens' access to information is increased, so that we know as much about them as they know about us.

3.  It is unrealistic (and maybe even undesirable for other reasons) to reduce the information available to government and/or other players on the world stage.

The best strategy, then, on my analysis, seemed to flip the usual logic of arguments about privacy - i.e., that we must fight to make the government as ignorant of us as we are of them - proposing, instead, that we should have a "citizens' PRISM", some way of increasing our knowledge rather than restricting theirs.

But this is a ridiculous oversimplification. By its very nature, a government has abilities and resources for analyzing vast quantities of data which are not equally available to any individual citizen. If you handed me full access to Google's servers, I wouldn't have the first clue what to do with it. And even if I did, I don't have the computational resources to perform any robust analytics on the data. A very interesting issue: most of us simply don't realize, or have at best a hazy idea about, the serious difference between having data about an individual and having data about people on a massive scale. If you're a classic science fiction fan, think about Hari Seldon, and his explanation of psychohistory via his two axioms:

• the population whose behaviour is modeled should be sufficiently large
• the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses

This presents a huge problem for my initial, naive conclusion: how can there be any serious parity, or equalizing, between the information (data + analysis) available to a government and that available to an individual? That is, how can we ever make 2(b) true?

At least, one might argue, we know that we have mechanisms which work toward 2(a) - reducing what government knows, relative to us. My next post will take a little tour through my own personal application of some of these mechanisms.

Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness.

The story which The Guardian broke late yesterday reveals that the NSA has been collecting metadata in

bulk - that is, about the general public - from Verizon's records. It's hard to know what sort of commentary would suffice in the face of a revelation like this; the scale is breathtaking.

A question occurs to me, though, that takes me in a different direction than the standard conversations that typically arise in the wake of such revelations. What, precisely, is it that's wrong with the NSA surveillance? Is it the fact that they're collecting information which should be private - or is it actually a different issue altogether?

I ask such a question because I'm trying, basically, to figure out whether two beliefs I hold are consistent:

1. I have a legal (and moral) right to keep information about myself private (i.e., to control the privacy/publicity of my own information).
2. There are good practical (and moral) reasons to prefer that information, in general, be public and openly accessible.

What's objectionable about the NSA's behavior in this case? What if it's not the bare fact that they have my (and your) telephony metadata, but rather, the fact that they have ours but we don't have theirs? Perhaps, at base, the problem here is the imbalance of access to information, rather than the access itself.

Given that we're not likely to gain a comparable degree of access to the NSA's telephony metadata, it's not prudent to expect a Shangri-La of free and open information access anytime soon. And so in practice, the likeliest path to redressing that imbalance (since raising the level of citizens' access to information is unlikely) is to lower the level of government access to information. This amounts to the same things we're used to hearing - that we must be vigilant about restricting the degree of government access to our information.

However, I think it's critical to make a distinction in the conceptual justification for this action, else we end up fetishizing information privacy for its own sake - and in so doing, misidentifying the locus of the ethical problem. And when we start trying to think about issues of information privacy/openness in other contexts, we risk starting from a false premise, and as a consequence not being able to identify consistent grounds to support our intended results.

Thinking Politically.

"If I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good to either you or to myself." - Socrates, Plato's Apology 31d-e

And yet.

I'm sure that somebody somewhere is thinking deeply about what it means to be a private citizen in a globally-connected environment. Has the meaning of the term changed since Socrates' day? Of course. In what ways? What degree of privacy is our cultural baseline, when anyone with a Twitter account and a few well-turned phrases can be a Cleon or an Alcibiades or a Cicero, instantly swaying public opinion and even policy? When applying the lever of social media to traditional actions like protests instantly magnifies a thousandfold the import of a private symbolic statement? Is the distinction between 'private citizen' and 'public figure' as clear as once it was? Do one's own private choices carry a more magnified resonance now than they used to? Does this carry an increased moral responsibility to weigh the potential consequences?

A great many conversations in which I participate these days acknowledge a certain subset of starting-points (depending upon the interlocutors' focus and interests) taken from the basket below:

• American higher education, as a system, is increasingly failing its core purpose: to educate.
• American higher education is increasingly unjust - inequality of access, adjunctification, debt, etc.
• Network technologies [already have/can/might/will] radically change something essential about current and future generations - their expectations, their methods of learning, etc.
• Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] vastly improve American higher education.
• Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] prepare students for fully informed and capable citizenship in an increasingly tech-reliant civilization.
• Done thoughtlessly or naively, introducing network technologies to American higher education is a dangerous entry-point for corporate and/or political interests to increase their influence/control over the system.
• Introducing network technologies to American higher education is a way for policy activists to appear to be fixing education, while actually setting the parameters for the weakening of the public system, in favor of a privatized vision of education.

As a philosopher, I got to thinking about Socrates' well-known quotation when I realized recently that I am starting to make choices, and take actions, which don't trace a clear path through the issues in these conversations about educational technology and public policy. I'm used to treating conceptual clarity and consistency as realizable goals (huzzah for my training in logic and analytic philosophy generally!); to realize that the very magnitude of complexity of this system precludes such purity of analysis, and necessarily entails conceptual compromise, is a hard thing to accept.

I wonder if I'm simply being lazy - it may be perfectly possible (if difficult) to maintain the complete clarity of one's principles in practice. On the other hand, there may be wisdom in Barney Frank's words, and what I'm experiencing may be the recognition that I'd rather not "luxuriate in the purity of [my] irrelevance" ...

No answers here, just muddy questions.

...Aaannd, We're Back.

The end of a semester is always a bit of a hectic time for me. This is hardly true of me alone; but I sometimes feel as though I'm uniquely bad at managing my time. I tend to drop off the map a bit as tasks and obligations pile up - hence the month hiatus from my dear blog.

There were certainly some noteworthy events happening in RL during this past month...

... not least of which was the annual MCLA TechFest, a day-long mini-conference for faculty to present, and attend presentations, about interesting, relevant, and timely topics in technology. My department (Academic Technology) plans and hosts this event, which is a fairly hefty commitment. We've posted some PowerPoints and other informational resources from the presentations - feel free to check it out. As we round up materials from more of the presenters, we'll add them to what's there.

Dungeons & Discourse, my pet edugaming project, caught the interest of the aptly-named Awesome Foundation, which gave it a micro-grant. I'm planning on developing the game over the summer, with the aim of having a playable standalone level to demo in the fall... who knows where it'll go next?

Oh yeah, my book was published too! Durable Goods, my treatment of the problem of external goods in ancient Greek ethics, is now out there on the open market ... watch out, David Baldacci!

Looking forward to two conference presentations this month - one in Park City, UT, and one in Memphis, TN. Also doing a webinar, sponsored by Inside Higher Ed and Faculty eCommons, on game-based learning. I will be blogging in the near future about this last.

I guess that's all the news that's fit to print right now. I hope all my New England friends find a way to stay cool this weekend!