Kirsten and I had the opportunity to look into Cloud Memory and present it this week. We quickly made a couple of discoveries. First, cloud memory is actually a vast topic, intertwined in our work, in our personal technology use, and certainly in our future. Second, cloud memory is closely linked to artificial intelligence, and in a way they feed off one another.
As you visit our site HERE, you’ll encounter some of our findings, and many of our questions, and will hopefully engage in the activities and surveys we’ve incorporated. We will seek to provide survey data towards the end of the week.
Please return to this discussion and join us in considering several prompts:
- What is your experience with Cloud Memory? Have they been good? Do you have any concerns, specifically as related to the educational world?
- Can we think of cloud computing as an evolution and extension of existing models? Or is cloud computing a new computing model?
- Do business ventures and educational institutions need to use cloud memory? What are the benefits and/or concerns you deem significant?
- What is the future of cloud memory and AI? Are you optimistic?
Have a great week!
Steve & Kirsten
Congrats on diving into this topic so throughly. Cloud memory remains a mysterious concept for many. I sometimes wonder if the term “cloud” creates a disservice for understanding, in the case of many “old school” educators I would work with. A common theme was “I don’t understand the cloud – it’s not for me”, and so the user education of how to save files for collaboration and backup was rather difficult. I’m currently interested in AlaaS for a project, I agree that this will likely dominate the conversations we will be having far more often, but in a meaningful and purposeful way, not just for AI novelty. I also appreciate the education opportunities you’ve kindly provided in the OER. Cloud services can be an overwhelming topic that seems intimidating for non-IT folks, and everyone would benefit from having a good baseline understating of how their data is stored and accessed. Thank you for your time and effort to deliver this to us!
Thank you, everyone, for participating in our Cloud OER this week! Now that week 9 is coming to an end, I have updated the website showing the mentimetre results for the number of collective connected devices we have, as well as our Word Cloud. Thank you for your effort during these hot summer days!
To close the week, I thought I would post my own thoughts in response to our discussion questions. Overall, the many pros currently outweigh the cons of the Cloud, particularly in relation to teaching and learning. Personalized, accessible, engaging, mobile, collaborative and low-cost education are now a reality for anyone with a mobile 5G connection. My own personal experience with the Cloud, both as a teacher and a learner, has been mixed. While I am certainly not the most prolific producer, my experience with Cloud Memory is 15 years old. Since I have been working exclusively online since 2009, I have had Dropbox and Zoom handles that are just as old. These accounts long provided me with access to effective teaching and learning material online prior to the age of Cloud sharing. A memorable highlight of this digital era was being able to download all of Edward de Bono’s CORT program. I felt like I had a cutting edge over my teaching competition! But holy cow how many times have I duplicated it and sent it since that time? What was once one document has probably become one hundred! Even though I was not a major content creator myself, I felt like a seasoned pro with my adaptations and differentiations of many of the Apps and resources I had been using for a decade once Covid19 hit. What a lot of storage this must take up. Is there a way to permanently delete this information from the Cloud? I am running out of both time and space.
With increased time passing came increased data usage and storage required. I have since lost access to earlier versions of different accounts that I have had and as a result, much content is gone forever. Bummer. I get constant reminders that many of these accounts are maxed out and will soon malfunction and/or be shut down. Total bummer. I can’t see myself paying for something that I am doing inefficiently; instead, I can see myself vastly improving my digital habits. (…or getting offline entirely which would kinda make my MET degree obsolete, I suppose!)
Regarding my concerns about the Cloud in education, I fear students will bypass the first five scaffolds of Bloom’s taxonomy and begin at the top: create. By inverting this pyramid, learners become creators prior to the activation of critical and creative thinking skills. With ample easy to use tools at one’s fingertips and social media as one’s mouthpiece, the dangers of misinformation contamination are real. We need a new shape!
Hi Steve and Kirsten,
Great job on your project this week. I’ve been picking through it over the last couple of days, and before I dig into a couple of your response prompts I wanted to single out some things I thought you did particularly well.
First, I really enjoyed the layout of the individual pages. A mixture of charts, infographics, and text was a great way to present this massive topic without it becoming too overwhelming. It was well-researched and your references showed a variety of sources and perspectives which contributed to the overall effectiveness and usefulness of your product.
Second, the opportunities for feedback and engagement were very well-executed. I think this feedback would be useful for you and provide me (and other users, I assume) with an opportunity to reflect on what we’d been learning or refocus on what you were trying to communicate to us. Well done.
Finally, I appreciated your foray into the fringes of Cloud Memory. I learned several new terms and definitions (thanks in part to your helpful, “up-front” glossary) that have been very helpful in building my understanding of how cloud memory/computing fits into the education space. I am working on a case study that is related to this topic in another course, so the timing was perfect. I anticipate using a number of your references, as well as the increased understanding I built using your product, to help with that other project. Again, thanks.
1. What is your experience with Cloud Memory? Have they been good? Do you have any concerns, specifically as related to the educational world?
My experience with Cloud memory in the educational world have, at face value, been overwhelmingly positive. Sharing, accessing resources, and using up-to-date software and services were a huge issue in my early years as a teacher in the 2010s. Relying on email, flash drives, physical copies, and the limited copies of programs and licenses we had access to were a huge impediment to working with educational technology. The advent of readily available, inexpensive cloud memory services made it much easier to do my job, share and communicate with students and their families, and countless other tasks. However, as you mentioned in great detail, there are drawbacks related to privacy and other concerns that haven’t been broadly considered. The uptake of new platforms and cloud-based tools (especially during COVID lockdowns) was indiscriminate and overwhelming, and large gaps in privacy and security quickly became apparent. I think that it will be impossible to retreat from the level of cloud memory we currently rely on in my school district, but I think that tweaks need to be made and policy decisions need to be informed by the type of information you have presented.
4. What is the future of cloud memory and AI? Are you optimistic?
I was unfamiliar with AIaaS, so spent a good deal of time looking through the information and resources you presented on the topic. You also presented some other interesting opportunities and concerns related to cloud memory and AI, some of which I had not considered. I think that the future of cloud memory and AI are interwoven, but the combination of these two things seems to bear a great risk of magnifying the challenges of each. The nebulous, insecure nature of cloud memory combined with the impersonal, potentially biased nature of AI could combine to create something very hard for an end user/consumer to control or fully understand. I imagine being prompted to use AI to merge data or migrate/share things in a cloud memory space, only to have things change form, get completely reorganized, or jeopardize the ways I had shared or accessed them in the past.
Another huge concern I have is the environmental impact of cloud memory and AI. Recent reading I have done suggests that the energy needs of AI and cloud-based services are massive, and even though AI might help make cloud memory more efficient and streamlined I have little faith that environmental impact will be fully understood or made a priority.
Thanks again for your excellent work this week, and sorry I have run long in my comment.
Sam Paterson
Hi Sam,
Nebulous cloud, indeed! Good one 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to share your generous comments on our content. I compiled the Cloud WordCloud while reading Surianarayaran and Chelliah’s (2023) textbook as well as a Cloud Certification course I took with AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/training/). Surprisingly fascinating stuff!
I had to do this, because, I confess, I was completely overwhelmed and under-enthused at the beginning of this project and had absolutely no idea where to start talking about the Cloud. I now realize that asking a modern human digital users about their experience with the Cloud is like asking a fish about its experience in water. I had underestimated its ubiquity. I have had a massive upward learning curve while constructing this OER so I am glad Steve and I were able to lay it out in a comprehensive and intuitive manner.
Both you and Richard have mentioned doing projects about the Cloud in other courses. Would either of you be willing to share your creations?
References
Surianarayaran, C & Chelliah, P.R. (2023). Essentials of cloud computing: A holistic, cloud-native perspective. 2nd Edition. Springer.
Thank you for the excellent response, Sam. I’m really glad that you found the material to be helpful. I believe that we are quite like-minded regarding this topic based on your response. Truthfully, I also have found my experiences with the cloud and AI to be very positive thus far. The benefits I’ve been able to harness, and the engaging nature of these tools have been exciting and helpful in my educational setting.
I share your concerns about the environmental impact and the energy consumption. I wonder whether this will be an area of development for a more sustainable cloud future, or simply a problem that will grow and require compensation in other areas? I find that often solutions to “problems” simply create new concerns. Is the solution to climate change, for instance, getting everybody to switch to electric vehicles? I fear that creates another massive concern for us to deal with in the future.
Regardless, I’m with you regarding your positive experiences and your concerns..
Thanks again!
Steve
Hi Steve & Kirsten,
Really great OER. I was part of a project presenting on cloud learning earlier in the MET program and I have to say I still learned quite a bit from the approach you’ve taken with this resource. AlaaS is a new term for me but moving forward I’ll be sure to remember this as I imagine it’s going to be utilized a lot in the near future. Here are my responses to a few of your questions.
Do business ventures and educational institutions need to use cloud memory? What are the benefits and/or concerns you deem significant?
Not necessarily. In both business and educational institutional settings, those that are willing to bear the cost of opting for a more traditional data management can save themselves the headache of many of the privacy issues. The example that I often think about regarding student privacy and the risks of the cloud are when I worked in higher education. Our international department was looking for a third-party software that could support the launch of a newly established student mentorship program so students could interact on their studies, but also socially during the pandemic when face to face interactions weren’t possible. The few SaaS companies that we found going through the discovery process led us to companies based in the USA and UK, which prompted a series of long discussions with our IT department and ultimately were not deemed to be feasible due to provincial and federal regulations. The issues came with the location of where student data would be stored, so while this case didn’t pan out as expected, I do think Canadian businesses stand to capitalize in this space to support educational institutions here.
I also think these experiences can potentially throw a wrench into introducing new products or tools at a district wide or organization wide level. Not everyone is as excited about leveraging mobile devices for education, so I can see a scenario where a rocky implementation of a new cloud-based tool or a potential rollback of tools due to a business being bought by a multinational corporation, then this can be enough for some educators to be hesitant in utilizing cloud memory on their mobile devices if they weren’t already avid users.
So in this sense, if an educational institution is comfortable in sacrificing a level of accessibility in favour of privacy, then I think it is possible.
What is the future of cloud memory and AI? Are you optimistic?
Despite what I’ve mentioned above, I am optimistic about the future of the cloud. The more we interact with AI and businesses refine how programs like chatbots are trained, it places cloud computing at the centre of much innovation that is yet to come.
I think the specific use cases of chatbots to expand into roles such as intelligent tutors leverage cloud technology and act as a different way to interact with the cloud. An example SaaS product that I came across in presenting on this topic earlier in the MET program was Synthesis Tutor, an AI tutor that can store progress, save interactions, personalize content and user preferences over time through mobile devices is one future of the cloud and AI where I’m quite excited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjByL3kcI7Y
Hi Richard,
Thanks for your kind comments and directing us to Synthesis Tutor – it looks exciting! It makes me wonder what will be the sociocognitive result of young learners using technology in this way. What will the expectation of AI interacting with the Cloud be for this generation of highly proficient users? If humans are allegedly becoming so dependent on technology now that we cannot think for ourselves, how much more will our brains melt into mush once we can’t do anything without our AI Assistants? I suppose as long as we continue to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to our robot masters we will be useful prompt engineers, though we may lose our status as the most intelligent beings on the planet. (Allegedly!)
Regarding your comments on whether or not education can survive without the Cloud, it seems like you are boiling it down to two major issues: money and privacy. Historically, financial benefits have outpunched individual privacy, hence leaving room for social corruption and bad players. But this tech drama unfolded in an era where the planet had ample ecological resources to spare to create these digital affordances. Since those environmental abuses have resulted in social masses reaching levels of affluence that are prevalent in today’s society, privacy is gaining ground and people are willing to pay more money to retain autonomy and security. This is particularly true as we have discovered that we, our data, is the new currency that has the potential to be bought and traded. I remember I was mind blown the first time I realized ‘if it is free, you are the product.’ That reality has now been normalized to the extend that privacy agreements are rarely read and we, as a result, lose our digital identity leaving space for more nefarious shoes to fill our digital shadows. Will the footprints they leave be deeper than the ones in which we sunk?
Hi Steve and Kirsten,
Thanks for your work on the OER. Cloud storage and services are an interesting topic. I’ve recently been trying to learn more in depth about blockchain technology, which has some very significant overlaps (as well as departures) with conventional cloud computing.
This strikes me as another topic which is coming in waves of variation and public interest. In some ways, the technology is fairly old school; hosting massive and important systems in central locations and using remote computers for input/output only goes back to the 60s at least. This is still in use today; when I worked in finance, most of the critical customer databases were hosted on IBM mainframes with software that still had all the charm and limitations of the original programming from the 60s. Both internally and for customer web/mobile access, cloud connections were used.
This is also becoming fairly standard for consumer applications: my Yahoo email account is cloud based, and I’ve worked with teachers who weren’t even born when I started that account. Not sure how many computers, tablets and phones I’ve gone through in that time, but not having to worry about storing that data means I have a stupidly large inbox. Also any of the social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) are cloud based in nature.
The changes were seeing now are in some ways technical (ChatGPT is too massive to run on a standalone consumer computer) but also driven by business or social reasons. I think decisions in the future are going to be about the trade offs involved: relying on cloud storage for example removes the need for me to maintain my own physical data backups and protects my data in case of equipment failure (like my phone being lost) but opens up new risks of the hosting service going bankrupt or failing. For most people, the first risk is probably more significant that the second, but not always, especially if the data in question was extremely sensitive or valuable.
The other major tradeoff we’re probably going to have to deal with is use of data. Cloud systems bring up a range of potential use of data by third parties, and I think it’s not a simple yes or no on data privacy. My search and watch history on YouTube has value in targeting suggested videos and advertising, so financial value to numerous people. For me, exchanging that data to keep the service free is a reasonable trade off. Scraping my email messages to provide targeted ads I would find excessively intrusive.
The environmental impacts of data centers are going to keep escalating, fed by both cloud services and AI. While definitely a concern, the changes will percolate to other areas as well: online streaming options mean I no longer have an extensive collection of DVDs and CDs; the environmental impact of producing, transporting, storing and disposing of these are thus reduced. I’m not suggesting this gives data centers a free pass on emissions, just that these impacts are going to complex…
Devon
Thanks for taking the time to post a response, Devon! I chuckled when you commented on coworkers younger than your email account – I’m in the same boat. I find I often automatically assume my coworkers are peers, then realize that while we work together we are not of the same generation. It’s weird getting old. And yes, my inbox is massive too.
I feel the same way as you regarding the reasonable tradeoff, and while I’d prefer not to be tracked in any way at all, I’m willing to be part of the system in order to benefit from the technology. I love utilizing Google Classroom and Drive, and accessing my resources and tools from anywhere (I’m in a coffee shop right now!) through the cloud has some significant benefits.
The selling of my data bothers me, and the use of it to determine which ads and information will be presented to me is discomfiting. I ask everything I use not to track me as much as possible, but we all know it is not avoidable if working online and utilizing the cloud.
At the end of the day, I utilize the cloud for pictures, music, my career, financial planning, and more. I valued this process of learning a little bit more about how it all works and what the future prognosis is.
Hi Devon and Steve,
It looks like we, three, share the chuckles of having emails older than colleagues, as well as “stupidly large inbox[es]” (Bobowski, 2024). For the last several years I have been getting warnings that my Gmail is almost full. I have been battling emptying Gmail’s Primary, Promotions, Social, and, most recently added, Updates inboxes. Snoozed, Important, Sent, Draft, Trash and Spam folders are constantly being emptied, hopefully scraping out another few megabytes of memory. Until now, I have refused to pay for extra storage because that feels like I am paying third-party data users to exploit my digital footprint vulnerabilities. What are other people doing to solve this issue?
What this Cloud OER project has made me more mindful about is my Digital Footprint and Digital Shadow. To analyze your digital footprint and shadow, this is a good place to start: https://seon.io/resources/guides/digital-footprint-fraud-prevention/. Different ways to check your passive and active digital footprint can be found here: https://propersky.com/how-to-check-your-digital-footprint/. To read more about digital footprint security from the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity, check here: https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/digital-footprint-itsap00133.
Appreciate you sharing those links, Kirsten. I also struggle with the paradox of paying for extra storage, and don’t have a great solution. Perhaps I could become more organized or discerning with my data, but that feels unlikely at the moment. 🙂
I’m contemplating filing ‘digital bankruptcy’ (is that a term yet?) It means shutting down all my current email and social media accounts and starting fresh with new accounts (imma na get me a new email addy!) No migration, no transfer, no snyc. All fresh. I wonder if there are more benefits or liabilities with taking such a digital reset?
Hi Devon,
Thank you for drawing attention to the relationship between the Cloud and BlockChain technology. The connection between these two technologies was my big ‘A-ha!’ moment while creating this OER. Davies’ (2018) TedX Talk did a good job summarizing the conveniences of the Cloud in exchange for an analysis its dangers, such as not reading the terms of service as evidenced by the Cambridge Analytica’s 120 question quiz ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ scandal that robbed 30 million people of personal data and influenced the 2016 US Presidential election. He then claims that BlockChain is a “method of maintaining consensus on a decentralized, distributed network” (Davies, 2018) which serves to create a trustless transaction that communicates unalterable, verifiable information to users and consumers thereby eliminating the very expensive intermediary transactions expected by stakeholders of the military-industrial complex that uses our personal data against us. In order for privacy and security to be reclaimed, all online users would need to go off grid together and support BlockChain technology. Is the world ready for this transgression?
References
Davies, L. (2018, May 14). The cloud is smoke. Lee Davies: The Cloud is Smoke | TED Talk.
One of the things that really got me curious about blockchain recently was a conversation I watched that mentioned some of the privacy aspects. One of the features of most blockchains is that part of the verification process makes all transactions public. This is a big contrast with the supposed prominence of cryptocurrencies in criminal activities; although individual identities may be obscured, the paper train is very readable. I’m not sure how this is going to be adapted to a more widescale use; it would be like being able to take any email address and see a history of every other party that had sent or received email from that address. That transparency would be a hard stop for most people in situations like normal banking: if the school I worked for paid salaries via blockchain, I’d be able to easily look up all the payments to everyone else, thus gaining a pretty complete picture of my relative pay. Even if account information was anonymous, it wouldn’t be impossible to correlate additional information (say noticing that one account paid into had recently paid a Honda dealership, and knowing who on staff has a new Civic…).
I find the interesting and exciting aspects of new technology like blockchain or AI to be that although we have massive predictions of both positive and negative outcomes, the ways these play out will probably be something unexpected. Get the popcorn out.
Hi Devon,
From my meagre investigations into Blockchain thus far, what is becoming strongly apparent is its innate trust gap in a counter culture of trustlessness. The conspiratorial adage ‘trust no one’ has been digitally realized in our current era, dripping in a crisis of legitimacy, as evidenced by yesterday’s hacking of AT&T (https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/data-breach-at-t-1.7262154). There is no governance layer, making it appealing for criminals, but also presenting a novel mode of social organization and data management as a digital human right.
We are in a crisis of legitimacy where organizations are leveraging the affordances of Blockchain to manufacture trust. But I feel like we are all living in Johari’s Window, that is, we don’t know what we don’t know. The cart is so much before the horse that dinner was ready 10 minutes before the driver got home.
Popcorn is popping, butter is hot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx0KBLFG8qc
Hi Steve and Kirsten,
Thank you for your OER. I have become much more aware of the risks and environmental impacts of cloud storage this year with some previous assignments in another class as well as my role as an Education Technologist for my school district. Reading numerous terms of service agreements and privacy policies has expanded my knowledge and increased my awareness regarding the privacy concerns of cloud memory. Not to mention the increase in data breach announcements that seem to be more, and more common.
I see the benefit of cloud computing/memory for allowing ease of collaboration and convenience. Our school district is very Google-based along with some additional cloud memory services through programs such as PowerSchool and Schoology. There is always a concern, however, with system and data security as well as human error (which concerns me just as much as the data security of a server).
I see the evolution of cloud computing as an evolution versus a new computing model. I remember taking a floppy disc to classes or different computers for my undergrad, slowly transitioning to flash drives and now, it’s easy to log in to Google Chrome to access my content. I wonder how more or less secure floppy discs and flash drives are. I have certainly lost my fair share of them, and what if they had personal and confidential data on them? I suppose if I had password protection, there would be another layer of security but how easy is that to overwrite or hack? So my question is, if not cloud memory then what?
Thank you again for your OER and the thought-provoking questions!
Hi Jeannine,
Collaboration is one of the greatest assets the Cloud provides to modern users (especially if said individuals find time for personal ‘isolation,’ as well!). We are living in an era of friction-reducing sharing economy and culture largely due to the mass mobility provided by our ubiquitously connected, top-of-the-line devices. Returning to David’s introductory post on Sharing Everything (https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec523/2024/05/10/sharing-everything-6/), I re-pose his initial question: “What is the magic Sharing Economy formula by which educators and learners will be able to achieve their separate objectives more easily?” Bringing it back to our OER, how can the Cloud help facilitate this educational concoction?
Looking forward to everyone’s collaborative thoughts!
K
PS. Out of concern for the environment, would it ever be ethical to create a ‘pause’ from trivial oversharing? Would it ever be possible to have a daily quota of data usage based on ecological impact? Or is that too much of an infringement on personal rights and freedom of speech for modern, western, educated society?
Interesting thoughts Kirsten! I’m not sure what you mean or how it would like to pause trivial oversharing, but I’d sure appreciate a pause on some of the over-sharers in my life, ha!
I think anytime limitations are suggested in our society there is major push-back. Our Western sense of individualism and personal rights is extremely strong, and people push back hard when they deem those rights threatened.
Excellent question Kirsten! I agree with Steve regarding the major pushback when limitations are presented but I also would like to see how a pause on trivial oversharing would impact everyone’s overall wellness. Thank you for the thought-provoking response!
Hi Steve and Jeannine,
Thank you both for entertaining my definitely politically incorrect, probably ethically repugnant, possibly dictatorially-laced question of how to pause and stop over-sharers. It is all, of course, hypothetical. Even though I suppose on many levels this is actually happening. We already block, ignore and ghost people as a way to communicate our irritation with their valued trivialities. Black Mirror explores the idea of being Legally Blocked (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/black-mirror-cautionary-tale-reading-your-terms-conditions-1azfe/) and social media sites will limit user privileges or kick them out if collective rules are broken. Since there is no governance, wouldn’t it be more intuitive if users were held algorithmically accountable through intrinsic motivation at the behest of the environment? Or if we cannot all self regulate and if threats to our planet do not stop us from liking, posting and commenting, perhaps a digital footprint warning of how many megabytes are being created to accomplish one’s online task would be a helpful reminder of the ecological resources being squandered. I mean, how many AI generated photos of David Schwimmer as a 1950s wrestler really need to be created? https://neural.love/ai-art-generator/1edd3f7a-0df5-6ab0-aa87-95ee3355905b/1950s-wrestler-david-schwimmer-portrait Do people seriously have nothing else to do with our time? The last time I looked out the window, my husband was still stuck in Gaza (I’m in Canada), it is 43 degrees outside (still in Canada!) and Trump just dodged an assassination attempt (staying in Canada!) While I realize I am sliding down a slippery slope of logical fallacy, the bottom line is that the world is in trouble and the Cloud is not an infinite resource. What education exists to inform people on how to redirect restless online energy to be more socially just and ecologically digital in our Cloud Literacy?
Hello Steve & Kirsten,
Thank you for hosting this week’s OER.
My experience with the cloud has been primarily positive. One of the most significant benefits I’ve found is the ability to sync files across multiple devices easily. I remember the early days of using computers when we had to copy files across floppy disks. Any updates to a file wouldn’t propagate to other computers easily, causing version mismatches if it had been worked without having the latest copy.
In the educational world, data storage and accessibility are significant concerns. In my school district, data storage must be internal. Only approved vendors with local servers can be used for cloud storage. Another significant issue is student security. Many students struggle with remembering passwords and following best security practices. The online accessibility of cloud data is beneficial, but security precautions must be stringent and tailored to students’ understanding of cybersecurity practices.
Hi Joel,
Thank you so much for being the first to respond to our Cloud OER!
I, too, remember the days of bulky external hard drives with easily lost wires and emailing documents back and forth to oneself at home, work, home, work, probably never submitting the intended final document. It was a frustrating time to be dealing with syncing and storage. Would you believe, however, that there are still a lot of people who govern their digital lives in this fashion? (names withheld out of respect, dearest sedentary family members….) While there are still issues with the Cloud, it is certainly the more effective alternative to on-premise computing for the mobile amongst us. However, without a set of standards, norms, rules and expectations for healthy Cloud literacy for the average user, how will we all learn the best Cloud practices? Is it anywhere explicitly taught or will we all be expected to watch DIY Youtube videos until we solve our own overwhelming, unexpected digital issues?
It is relieving to hear your school district’s storage is internal. This is a logical response to the vulnerabilities posed by the Cloud and the Internet. Has your school always followed this practice? Your potential answer may make me think about the evolution of digital data breaching over time and how it may unfold in the future. Will the good people of the world be able to out-hack evil doers seeking to use our personal information in the Cloud against us? Or is it still too early in the life of the Cloud to determine the potential threats and consequences?
Regarding security, I confess that I am one of those students (and teachers! d’oh!) who struggles to retain an effective system of remembering passwords to the myriad of APPs and services. I wonder how much storage space all of my forgetful password resets have taken? Another bad digital habit many of us have is taking (often terrible!) photos. How many millions of pictures do we all take now that we never look at again? How many times do you crop it, filter it, and mark it with an emoji? We do this because we don’t have to preserve the standard roll of 25 mm film which only allowed you to take 24 or 36 pictures. Also, we no longer have to go to the Kodak Store to get the film developed into hardcopy photographs. The consequences of the convenient luxury of this affordance has been overlooked in the same way that cigarette smoking, asbestos and the array of other health disasters caused by pesticides, hard metals, CFCs, PCBS, etc were in the past. There may be major issues with specific data that is being stored that we may not even foresee at this point in our virtual history. Are we storing our data so it won’t ‘rot’?
Right on Joel. I’m with you, and for the most part, my positive experiences and benefits of accessibility and sharing have made cloud memory an excellent advancement.
Security and privacy is huge! Schools are a current target for infiltration and data theft. We’re pretty tight at our school too – everything needs to be under the umbrella of our clouds and systems in order to ensure security. Even access to internet networks is closely monitored, and we’ve had numerous cases of students getting on the staff network and creating scenarios where we have to change security settings.
Interestingly the top source of breaches? Teachers write down those easy-to-forget passwords on sticky notes, leave them in sight, or flat-out share the password when the student network fails. We have to get a little better with that, ha.
My apologies everybody! The site should be accessible now!
Hi Steve & Kirsten,
Just wanted to let you know that when I click the link to your site, I get the following error message: The requested URL was not found on this server.
Oh no! Thank you, checking it now.