Monthly Archives: March 2016

My Vision

Computer Science, Education reform, Teaching, Technology & Culture

MY VISION

by Richard White

2016-03-24

You almost certainly heard that a couple of months ago, President Obama called for “Computer Science for All” in a program of the same name. From the Fact Sheet for that initiative:

Providing access to CS is a critical step for ensuring that our nation remains competitive in the global economy and strengthens its cybersecurity.

We’ll set aside (for the moment) Obama’s more recent call to weaken that cybersecurity that he’s such a fan of. In the larger perspective, Obama is correct: we need to provide more opportunities for students to learn Computer Science.

I think he gets this just right. This statement doesn’t say students must take CS classes. This is not necessarily a requirement. But the vast majority of students probably should take one or two CS classes, and certainly everybody should have the opportunity to take CS classes.

When people ask me about it now—the Vision question—this is part of my thinking:

I don’t think every student should be required to take Computer Science. But every student should take Computer Science.

They should recognize that computers, technology, the internet, social networks, online advertising, and cybersecurity have an enormous influence on how they live their daily lives.

It’s certainly possible for a student to educate themselves, but we shouldn’t expect them to take that on alone any more than we expect students to teach themselves calculus or how to write a research paper. Schools offer instruction in these areas because well-educated citizens need to know about these things, or at least need to have been exposed to them in a structured setting.

What do you think? Should schools require students to take a CS course, or should they just offer the curriculum and see who shows up?

OS Agnostic

Computers, Microsoft

OS Agnostic

by Richard White

2016-03-19

I try to be OS agnostic. I really do. I started out programming DOS PCs back in the day, made the switch to Apple’s Mac in the early 90s, and Apple’s OS X—based on Unix—was my gateway to Linux in 2005. I now have a number of Macs, three machines that run Ubuntu Linux, and two machines with a Windows installation on them.

I try to keep in touch with Windows. I have a few students who run it on their computers, and I try to pretend I support their OS.

It’s getting increasingly difficult for me to do so, given how annoying that OS is.

You Windows people, you know what I”m talking about.

i_hate_windows

Privacy, Security, and Encryption

Apple, Security, Technology & Culture

Privacy, Security, and Encryption

by Richard White

2016-03-12

There are a number of conversations going on right now related to the ideas of privacy, security, and encryption. Three contexts:

  • Do government representatives (NSA, FBI, local police, etc.) have the right to access your personal information–metadata, phone calls, emails, etc.–without a warrant?
  • Does the FBI have the right to compel Apple to create software that will provide government agencies with access to information stored on Apple-manufactured hardware?
  • Was Edward Snowden wrong to make copies of secret documents and share them with journalists, with the intent of exposing what he viewed as government corruption?

All of these conversations are fundamentally concerned with the question of whether or not people have a right to privacy, and how hard the government has to work to “invade” that privacy.

There’s much to be explored here, more certainly than can be covered in a brief blog post. My talking points regarding the subject–my “elevator talk” when the occasion arises–include these:

Just about everyone agrees that people need privacy, and have a right to privacy. This is a documented psychological need–people need time alone, and act differently when they are alone. The United States of America, in its Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, includes federal prohibitions against “unreasonable search,” which has been interpreted to include a wide variety of forms of surveillance.

This need for privacy is not just psychological. Most people feel that financial transactions, including the ones that we all conduct with our own banks, should be protected. Indeed, financial transactions on the Internet *must* be private; if not, the communication structure of the Internet allows for those transactions to be viewed by others, “good guys” and “bad guys” alike.

Our world is digital now, and the means of ensuring digital privacy is encryption. Encryption is simply “math applied to information,” in a way that ensures the information can be accessed only by the intended recipient. Encryption is a means of making sure that things–my bank information, my personal information, my business transactions, my diary–can be private.

Some government representatives, including the FBI and most recently President Obama, are calling for mandated “backdoors” in certain systems that will allow the “smallest number of people possible” access to anyone’s private information.

This point of view is flawed, for two simple reasons:

  1. Exchanging private information is possible, and has been done for years, without computers and/or phones. Requiring a company to place a backdoor in an operating system doesn’t change the fact that any of us can freely exchange messages via that phone that have been encrypted by another means. Encryption is math, and you can’t outlaw math. Ultimately, backdooring doesn’t “protect us from terrorists.” It just violates our rights to unreasonable surveillance.
  2. Providing backdoors in technology fundamentally means that one is building in a means by which normal security mechanisms can be avoided. This system, by its design, also allows untrusted agents to avoid the normal security mechanisms once they’ve obtained the means to do so. There is no way to allow only good guys to bypass security. Bad guys get to use the same bypass.

    (One easy example: The federal government Transportation Security Administration suggests locking your luggage with TSA-approved locks: Your luggage remains secure, but allows them to access your luggage for inspection without having to destroy the lock. Only the TSA has the keys that will open these locks… until they don’t. Now your baggage lock has a backdoor that the bad buys know how to defeat.)

If you’re concerned about the consequences of giving child pornographers, Chinese dissidents, and the Russian mafia access to this same encryption, there’s no way around that. (Or maybe you DO want to protect the Chinese dissidents? You’re going to have to make up your mind.) Those people will need to be dealt with the same way they always have been: legal warrants for wiretaps, legal warrants for reasonable search and seizure. At the end of the day, weakening encryption doesn’t stop the bad guys–it only makes it easier for them to victimize good guys like you and me.

Decipher this secret message and I’ll give you $100.

U2FsdGVkX1+Z8Wx61sOSQghi2ANM0QfXVXJzM7tP5eo=

Other interesting articles on this topic:

Looking Back

Computers, Technology & Culture, Website

Looking Back

by Richard White

2016-03-05

Those of us who use technology, who teach with technology, and who think about technology and its influence on society, enjoy thinking about what’s coming, what might happen in the future.

It’s interesting to take a look back every once in a while to see where we’ve come from. I’ve got a Motorola RAZR sitting in the bottom of a drawer in my utility closet. I’ve got a 1990 Macintosh Classic sitting in the attic, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4 in my utility closet, and a 2004 PowerMac G5 Dual Processor sitting underneath my desk at school, all currently unused. (I’ve had many other machines over the years, but these were iconic, and I keep them around for sentimental reasons.)

powermacg5_2cpus_open-100043320-orig

I’ve got a box of floppies with files of mine that I can’t use anymore, EXCEPT on that Classic, because the software companies that created those files, market leaders at the time, went out of business a long, long time ago.

designing_web_usability

I also recently stumbled upon a book of mine from 1999, Jakob Nielsen’s seminal Designing Web Usability. As a fledgling designer at the time—some might consider me still a fledgling designer—I devoured that book as gospel.

designing_web_usability_notes

I found some marginalia for that book that I’d jotted down on a Post-it. At the time, a 17-inch monitor was considered an outrageous extravagance, but Nielsen considered it an investment in one’s productivity, and I made a note to myself to get one. Cascading Style Sheets were new to me, and I jotted down a reminder to create a .css file for the websites I was developing.

It’s almost cute!

Things have changed since then, of course, to the extent that I sometimes question whether or not something as quaint as a printed book can usefully advise on something as dynamic as the World Wide Web. Since Designing Web Usability came out, the number of people using the web has (obviously) exploded: approximately 41% of Americans used the Internet in 1999, compared with 87% in 2014 (Pew Research Center). In 1999, the primary means of accessing the Internet now (smartphones), didn’t even exist. Since the book was published, advertising has changed the way we surf twice, with the appearance of Google’s “AdSense” in 2000, and with the increasing popularity of adblockers in 2015.

The fact that this book is no longer useful is in no way a criticism of its content. At the time it was perfectly relevant, and the web was evolving at a relatively slow rate.

And now? Now, our browser software is updated more frequently than most websites, and books about the current state of the our technological culture, for good or for bad, are in danger of becoming outdated between the time they’re written and the time they’re published. Books produced in smaller batches by smaller, digital-based publishers (see TakeControlBooks.com, for instance) have stepped in to fill some people’s need for printed matter.

But the logical conclusion to all of this seems to be consuming content on the machine or in the browser itself, no? From man pages in the Terminal to FAQ pages on websites, increasingly we learn about how to do thing from the very device that we’re working on. That seems reasonably clear at this point.

Just as with my old computers, I feel affection for my old books. There’s a texture to the pages, and a smell, and an experience, that a monitor, touchscreen or smartphone will never replace. (I gave a candle with the scent of “old books” to a friend for Christmas this year.)

And yet, the vast majority of those old books now occupy the same space in my life as the old technology: I think of them fondly, and take them out to look at once in awhile, but mostly I store them tucked away in a space in my life where they sit, remembered but unused.

Networking, and Staying Social

Staff Development, Teaching, Uncategorized

Networking, and Staying Social

by Richard White

2016-03-01

I’m fortunate to work at a school where the faculty are very collegial. Even where there is occasional departmental or teacher-teacher friction, we tend, by and large, to get along. You might chalk it up to our “Welcome Back” and end-of-year dinner parties… or maybe it’s the post-faculty meeting margaritas that they serve us occasionally. Whatever the reason, I see a lot of personal and professional cross-pollination going on.

This kind of networking requires both time and an individual willingness to be open: to people, experiences, and possibilities. I often find myself locked up with lessons to create, labs and projects I want to design, and always, always, a pile of papers to grade. Finding the space for interactions with others necessarily means setting some of my work aside, at least for a little while.

This past August, for example, I should have been deep into prepping for the coming school year, but two of my English department colleagues had put together a weekend workshop on Transformative Teaching and Learning, to be offered at an open workspace in downtown Los Angeles. It was a great weekend with a diverse group of teachers, and if none of what we did was completely germane to my own subject area, I had the opportunity to reflect on other aspects of my teaching.

Oh, and did I mention the fact that I got to network with some of my colleagues in a stress-free environment? :)

One of my favorite things about networking—in addition to the inherent pleasure of socializing—is the fact that unexpected opportunities often arise as a result. A few months into the school year, one of the English teachers with whom I’d connected at the summer workshop approached me. “Hey, I’ve been asked by the school to write an article about language, and I wanted to talk to you about that.”

Insert confused looks here from the Physics/Computer Science teacher.

“Language?” he said. “As in computer languages?” You’re a Computer Science guy, and I want to talk about language from a very global perspective!”

Huh. I’d never thought of that.

Next thing you know, I’m minding his infant daughter at a nearby pub while he grabs a couple of beers for us, and before long we’ve launched into a conversation on the role of language in various contexts.

And a month or two later, I found myself mentioned in his feature article in the school’s semi-annual publication:

Lighting up about language: Authoring across the curriculum

by Nathan Stogdill, in the Oak Tree Times, Fall-Winter, 2015

… Richard White sees a similar form of authorship in his AP Computer Science classes, where students create their own programs through syntax and conventions of coding languages. Like seventh-graders writing haiku or ninth grade math students telling the story of their solutions, his students have an outcome in mind and must work within the constraints of a specific language or instruction set to achieve that outcome. But there is creativity within those constraints, and the outcome is not assumed. Sometimes when the program is run, it does the unexpected. These surprises are exciting moments for White and his students: Like authors discovering new meanings through the process of writing, they find that they have created new things that they never intended, and they are able to learn from them.

Nathan makes me sound a lot smarter than I am, but I never turn down free publicity…!

Teachers tend to get pretty busy, and it’s easy to find one’s self spending a lot of time alone, frantically trying to keep up with our obligations. We take our jobs seriously, and we have high expectations, of our students and ourselves.

I believe that taking a little time off, however, benefits us in important and unexpected ways. Take a moment today or tomorrow to put your grading down, get out of your classroom or office, and stop in for a chat with someone. Go visit someone’s classroom for a few minutes. Check in with one of your admins.

You never know what might happen as a result!