Serendipity35

Predictions can be interesting, but people rarely look back at ones to see if they were correct. I wrote a post titled "In 4 Years Your Phone Will Be Smarter Than You (and the rise of cognizant computing)"  It has more than 969,000 views since I posted it in November 2013. Next year will be 10 years since that prediction. Is your phone smarter than you yrt?

That was not my prediction but it was an analysis from the market research firm Gartner. They weren't as concerned with hardware as with data and cloud computational ability. I said then that phones will appear smarter than you IF you equate smarts with being able to recall information and make inferences. Surely, those two things are part of being "smart" but not all of it.

"Smart" is also defined sometimes as being knowledgeable of something especially through personal experience, mindful, even cognizant of the potential dangers. Cognizant is a synonym for awareness. I have bee reading a lot about artificial intelligence lately. While cognizant computing does use algorithms to anticipate users' needs, dpong so doesn't approach actual "consciousness."

If an app has my browsing history, purchase records, financial information, and whatever is available somewhere on the cloud (known or unbeknownst to me) it can be pretty good at predicting somethings about me.

Cognitive computing isn't the same thing, though so much of all this seems to overlap. Cognitive computing (part of cognitive science) and attempts to simulate the human thought process.

As I said, these things overlap, at least to someone like myself who isn't really working in these fields. Maybe it makes a kind of sense that AI, cognitive and cognizant computing, signal processing, machine learning, natural language processing, speech and vision recognition, human-computer interaction and probably a dozen I'm forgetting. I suspect that all these things will converge at some point in the future to create the ultimate AI.

I don't see as many mentions these days to the Internet of things (IoT) as I did a decade ago. Internet-enabled objects exist in my home as "appliances." This morning I was checking my Ecobee app which is my wireless home energy monitor. I assume that it is already and will in the future be better at a kind of cognizant device that monitors my home environmental conditions and make adjustments based on my settings and the three sensors that monitor our activity. It knows that no one is upstairs and so drops the temperature there - though no lower than what I have told it. It also suggests changes to my settings and reminds me to change the filter every three months. I always di that on the solstices and equinoxes anyway but if I miss that date by a day or two, it adjust the next change accordingly. Quite a fussy and OCD device. It could connect to my Alexa devices but I haven't allowed that yet. Maybe one day it will just do it on its own and tell me "It's for your own good, Kenneth."

This past summer for the first time ever, streaming services captured more viewers than cable or broadcast TV, according to new data from Nielsen. Streaming has outperformed broadcast before, but never broadcast and cable in the same month. It's a close race though.
In the U.S., streaming captured 34.8% of viewership in July, while cable accounted for 34.4% and broadcast came in third at 21.6%.

When I read an article such as "Reasons Why Video Streaming Is The Future Of Education In 2022," the reasons are really the reasons why we should be offering online learning. Streaming is just a newer delivery method.

The history of distance learning goes from correspondence (snail mail) to broadcast and ITV, to videotapes, CDs and DVDs, the Internet (the earlier and slower version), and now streaming. When video first appeared in classrooms as broadcast, ITV and even on tapes it was sometimes considered controversial. Did it have educational value? Was it a lazy way to teach? Didn't students get enough video at home? But that is no longer true in almost every instance. Video is effective for learning. Online video has been shown to enhance comprehension and retention of information, support multi-modal learning, can help develop digital literacies when it is taught rather than just consumed. It can also be a more cost-effective learning solution, and can be repurposed in multiple ways.

Frequently, video is a supplement to make additional material available to students online. Some movements, like the flipped classroom, used online videos to swap lectures and classroom time. And this is true beyond traditional classrooms and schools as video became a training model for employees and customers.

When you use a streaming service (Netflix, Apple+ et al) you are almost always watching recorded videos. But the newer use of streaming is live streaming. Teachers are live streaming lectures and lessons to fully online students and also to students when you can’t meet in person. The real-time nature of live video allows a virtual classroom to be interactive in ways similar to in-person lessons.

Educational live streaming goes beyond lectures. There are also discussion panels, debates, guest speakers, presentations, virtual field trips, laboratory exercises, tutorials on demand and workshops.

Live streaming almost alw and "interact" sometimes ays ends up being recorded video later. Many presentations I register for that are live are later offered as a recording. That's great but it does make me feel less of an obligation sometimes to watch it live. Yes, I can sometimes ask questions in the live sessions, but I've gotten so used to recording TV programs and watching them later that it has carried over to "educational" applications.

As the new school year begins for all students this week, a series titled "Parental Control" appears from Mozilla (Firefox) about ways to empower parents for some technology challenges. That sounds like a good thing, but particularly when it applies to schools, parental control has cons along with pros.

Many digital platforms offer parental control settings. The most common and most popular allows parents to shield young people from “inappropriate” content. Restricting "mature content" and what is "inappropriate" takes us into a controversial area. Who defines what should be restricted? Mozilla says that "the way platforms identify what that means is far from perfect."

YouTube has apologized after its family-friendly “Restricted Mode” recently blocked videos by gay, bisexual and transgender creators, sparking complaints from users. Restricted Mode is an optional parental-control feature that users can activate to avoid content that’s been flagged by an algorithm.

That example takes me back to the earliest days of the Internet in K-12 schools when filters would block searches for things like "breast cancer" because "breast" was on the list of blocked words.

Limiting screen time is another strategy and is within a parent's control but is certainly controversial within a family. Kids don't like their screen time to be limited.

Mozilla actually had questions for itself about what to call the series. They quote Jenny Radesky, an MD and Associate Professor of Pediatrics-Developmental/Behavioral at the University of Michigan, as saying that “Parental mediation is [a better] term, parental engagement is another – and probably better because it implies meaningful discussion or involvement to help kids navigate media, rather than using controlling or restricting approaches.” She pointed to research that suggests letting children manage their own media consumption may be more effective than parental control settings offered by apps.

The internet has risks, but so do parental controls. Many kids in the LGBTQI+ community can be made vulnerable by tech monitoring tools.

Sensitive information about young people can be exposed to teachers and campus administrators through the school devices they use.

As parents and eductaors, we want to protect students, especially the youngest ones. We als want to, as a society, instill in younger generations why privacy matters.

RESOURCES

Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/search/site/parents

Mozilla https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/deep-dives/parental-controls-internet-safety-for-kids/