For a number of years, college and university general education requirements have , at many institutions, included some sort of mandatory course on computers and technology.  Several decades ago when I met the requirement, I did so by completing a course that was mostly about how to use AppleWorks.  These days, students are more likely to use Microsoft Office and various web applications.  If we are educating our students for citizenry, that’s not good enough anymore.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about what I want my children to know about computers, technology, and the net, and I’ve decided that it’s not MS Office.  It’s not even how to code. Instead what I want them and everyone to learn about is how technology is changing our society.

As a thought exercise, I’m going to set down in writing a sketch of what such a course might look like.  I haven’t done much comparison research, and I’m sure some other institutions have already created such a course.  Nevertheless, here it goes with  a topic list and some suggested readings:

A Brief history of networked, decentralized , and recentralized computing.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – John Perry Barlow
The Web We Lost – Anil Dash (Video)
“Reclaiming the Internet” with Distributed Architectures: An Introduction – Francesca Musiani and Cécile Méadel
The Mission to Decentralize the Internet – Janus Kopfstein

Algorithms

Big Data: It’s Worse than You Thought – Frank Pasquale
Weapons of Math Destruction – Cathy O’ Neil
We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads – Zeynep Tufekci (video)

Blockchain/DHT

The Trust Machine – The Economist

Data Collection and Surveillance

Snowden and the Future – Eben Moglen

Encryption

Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the “Going Dark” Debate – Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University
The Case Against a Golden Key – Patrick Ball

The Control of Technology and the Technology of Control

Lockdown: The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing – Cory Doctorow
Twitter and Tear Gas – Zeynep Tufekci

I recognize that many of my sources here have a leftward lean. Does anyone have suggestions for:

1. Writers who are more politically conservative but have a good understanding of the capabilities and limitations of technologies?
2. Topics and/ or resources I should have included but didnt?

In the wake of recent FCC plans to repeal net neutrality regulations, people are starting to talk about decentralization, both of infrastructure and of the platforms we use to communicate on the Internet.  The latter has moved more quickly than the former, since it’s arguably easier to write code than to lay fiber optic cable.  In the last few months, I’ve experimented with :

• Mastodon
• Beaker Browser
• GNU Ring
• Matrix
• ZeroNet
• RetroShare
• Twister
• Patchwork (SSB)
• Friendica

Note that those indicated in italics are more web replacement than social network platform.

That’s quite a few apps to open regularly.  Wouldn’t it be nice to aggregate this content so you could follow everything from one app. There have been some attempts at this (seesmic/tweetdeck/etc.) aimed at the major commercial social networks, but , since feeding into an aggregator undermines the revenue model of the social network (remember how Twitter used to support RSS?) they were either acquired or left to wither. Since decent platforms don’t have a revenue model to protect, why can’t they be more aggregation friendly? Mike Caulfield suggested that smartphone OS’s were functioning as aggregators via notifications.

There are actually three problems to solve, reading, which is relatively easy,  posting, which is harder, and social graph management, which is quite complex

Reading various streams in an aggregator would be most easily accomplished if various decentralized platforms would support stream output as password protected RSS.  Twitter was on the right track before revenue growth got in the way.  Subscribing to my personal timeline(s) with my favorite RSS reader would bring everything together, especially if I had a reader that listed items chronologically independent of source.  The potentially difficult part is dealing with and indicating private v public messages.

Posting is more challenging.  Not only does the client need to implement correctly the API’s of various platforms and keep track of what options and constraints to present to a user depending on which platforms they were posting to.  It looks as if Withknown has made some progress in this area with syndication plugins.

Managing your social graph is sort of the next level.  One of the disadvantages of centralized social networks is that Twitter/Facebook/etc. maintain your social graph and can therefore mine it for data and monetize it.  Several years ago, VR celebrity Mark Pesce (famous for his invention of VRML) did some development on Plexus, software that he described as “plumbing for the social web.”  The premise here was that your social graph would live on your device.  This would be possible because you would create multiple accounts on each social network, one for each friend/follower relationship.  Highly compartmentalizing your social presence is good for privacy but makes discovery more challenging, as software on your end has to parse your streams and sort out connections on your social graph.

How do we decentralize the web without so decentralizing our own social presence that it becomes unmanageable?

This month, the early adopters are all on mastodon. Mastodon is actually a server implementation for OStatus (which used to be StatusNet, which was originally on identi.ca) the TL;DR of Ostatus is “like twitter, but federated”. As of this morning there are almost 900 active instances. Since the software is open, different instance administrators can set their own policies and users can find an instance whose culture agrees with them.

Mastodon also has an option to operate a single user instance, and this is where it gets less clear. Mastodon is designed to show three different timelines, the users personal timeline, a public timeline for the local server, and a federated timeline. On a single user server the local timeline will show the “toots” (Yes, that’s what they call a status post) of the instance’s one user, and the federated timeline will look very similar to the single user’s personal timeline. In managing your own presence on the network, you simultaneously isolate yourself from it. It’s possible however that this won’t end up mattering very much. I can’t remember the last time I looked at the Twitter public timeline. If OStatus ends up working the same way, it won’t matter how many people are on your instance, because you will interact with the network through the people you follow, even if they are on many different instances. While the local timeline won’t show much , the federated timeline, which is sort of a second degree network (see https://cybre.space/users/nightpool/updates/13933 ) looks as if it may end up, on a single user server, as a very personalized feed.

This ties in to the IndieWeb movement with its idea of POSSE (Publish own site, syndicate elsewhere) and there are already connectors to publish from tools like withknown to mastodon. Withknown is great for publishing, but not very good for aggregating. There is always RSS, and in fact mastodon autogenerates atom feeds per user (site.tld/users/username.atom). This leaves you using one application to read and another one to reply. I really wish something like Mark Pesce’s Plexus (https://github.com/mpesce/Plexus) was still active. How hard would it be to build a personal dashboard that would bring together RSS reading / OStatus / blogs /etc.?

Last week, Mike Caulfield lamented that social media is poorly suited to enhancing human potential. If you think about it, this shouldn’t surprise one too much, since it wasn’t designed for that.  Facebook was, after all, first and foremost a social tool, a virtual version of the paper books new college students resorted to in ages past to figure out who that cute guy/girl in your English class was.

For the task for which they was originally designed, fostering social connections between people, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms work well, but then something happened.  As social platforms moved to the center of our online lives we wanted them to be the hubs not just of our social interactions, but of our information gathering.  This dovetailed nicely with the platform creators quest to grab, quantify and monetize more and more of our attention, but, as Mike points out, was not necessarily good for us.

D’Arcy Norman quoted an old post that touched on the same issue.  In 2008  he wrote about what he recently dubbed real-time toll.

This morning, a college classmate posted a link to this Campus Technology article on blockchain based transcripts.  It turns out the University of Nicosia  is already doing this. Campus Technology used the d- word , disrupt, to describe the potential of this approach.  On the plus side:

• this would allow verification of credentials without contact with the issuing institution.  That would seem to save lots of time and trouble in registrars offices everywhere.
• the permanence of the ledger would mean that it wouldn’t matter if a credential issuing entity ceased to exist
• The lack of having to produce paper trails might make traditional institutions more willing to offer micro credentials

Pitfalls include:

• Security – I’m a blockchain novice, but my understanding is that the ledger is quite secure because so many users are verifying it.  That said, even more important than actual security is the perception thereof.  It may take a long time before credential audiences (education institutions, employers, etc.) trust blockchain credentials.
• Privacy – Blockchain records are permanent and public.  How do you  ensure that only authorized viewers can see the details of a credential (courses and grades)?  What if you don’t want to publicize your attendance at a particular institution?

This morning my feed is full of discussion of the coding for all movement.  Anya Kamenetz asks how long “I’m not a coder” will be a socially acceptable thing to say.  Some, including The Atlantic’s Melinda Anderson are more skeptical.  I’m not sure this is the right question, any more than teaching everyone to repair cars is necessary.  A more important issue is fundamental understanding of how systems work.

Let’s go back to cars.  I don’t know enough to repair my own car. I do on a basic level understand how cars work.  Refined petroleum is ignited by a spark from a battery in a closed cylinder, the resulting explosion moves a piston while creating exhaust gases, the moving pistons turn a drive shaft.  This commonly shared understanding of how cars work and that even providing a modest 12V requires a fairly large battery means that it is commonly understood that creating an inexpensive zero emission vehicle is a hard problem.

Contrast this with the collective understanding of digital encryption, given FBI v Apple and the preceding discussions of encryption backdoors.  I have yet to find an expert on how encryption works who believes that a mechanism which would allow law enforcement to bypass encryption without allowing hostile governments and criminal actors to do the same is technically possible.  See this summary for one example.  However, those with less technical knowledge don’t seem to share this belief.

Perhaps the key is not being able to code per se, but having enough fundamental knowledge of how computers work in order to have a shared understanding of what, for a computer, is possible or impossible, easy or difficult. The broader question when designing education is, “Which systems are important enough that we need  a shared understanding of their fundamental principles in order for society to function well?”