I’m now one week into exploring the freelance writing community at Ehow.com. You will note my recent post was quite positive about the quick welcome from other Ehow members. I continue to find many great aspects of the Ehow community of writers. However, at the end of the first week, I’m starting to experience the corporate interest/strategies that inform how Ehow runs. Those initial feelings of grass roots community have temporarily dwindled as I’ve immersed myself in reading forum posts, terms of service, and FAQs. Scanning the community forums, I am coming across writers who are frustrated about various Ehow practices regarding the removal of their articles, articles that were sometimes bringing in decent revenue for the author(s). I can see how writers would be frustrated, but this led me to more carefully review Ehow terms of use and various policies. Ehow makes it quite clear that that get significant rights to author content (although author’s retain rights to it) when it is posted, including deciding how much or whether not to pay someone for their articles. If I understand the terms of service correctly, it appears that Ehow can even re-use author content, re-write it, re-publish it, re-work it, etc.

As an effort to dive into the community and try to offer what I consider to be genuinely good web content, I have submitted close to a dozen articles during this first week (three are still under review). And as of today, I have earned $0.00. This is the first week, after all, and my first goal is not to make money as much as it is to better understand this freelance writing community. However, I must confess that I am already a bit hesitant to submit more articles. In many cases, I am sharing knowledge in my Ehow articles that has come from years of study, analysis and synthesis; and I’ll need to develop more trust in people at Ehow before I go much further. I plan to dive into the community aspects of the site for a month, hold off on writing more articles, and see what happens with what I have written. If you are interested, stay tuned for more reflections and updates.

I am compelled to post once more about the fact that the Apple iPad doesn’t seem to have Flash support. This blogger called for critics of Apple’s decision to “get over it.” Let me expand upon one educator’s perspective on this issue.

I don’t think the “no Flash support” criticisms from educational bloggers come from a desire to take a shot at Apple. I’m convinced that it genuinely comes from a disappointment that this could have been one of the most transformational educational technologies since the personal computer. I honestly believe that. And in due time, this iPad groundbreaking may still be that significant.

From the early days of Apple, their products were touted as having potential to transform education, and some wonderful things have been done with Apple products in learning environments. Apple is now involved with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. They are not just suggesting that their products might be useful for education, but they are involved in a group that seeks to transform the “what” is taught in (not just how) schools. Given that context, you will notice that many of the strongest critics about no Flash support are educational bloggers. A huge number of the more exciting and potentially beneficial educational applications that are free and being used in schools around the globe are written in Flash. So, for Apple to claim that they really have the best interest of education in mind with their products and then leave out Flash support, seems to send a mixed message. This decision limits the product’s immediate usefulness in the classroom, although I’m open to the possibility that the Flash issue may not be significant in the long term.

I suspect that many of the criticisms comes from frustration that this could be an amazing educational technology that could benefit learners right now…if only they would add Flash support. Most of us in education are not developing our own apps, so we depend upon the quality of what is on the market right now. As an educator, it feels like Apple missed an educational grand slam by inches. I’ve been waiting for a product like this. It could replace many traditional texts and paper-based resources, support just-in-time differentiated instruction and assessments, provide powerful opportunities for augmented reality learning environments, replace expensive polling devices, allow for dynamic forms of digital collaborative…and the list goes on. But, no flash support…so a smaller base of immediate applications and educational app developers.

Apple has clearly demonstrated a commitment to excellence, innovation, and thinking outside of the box. As an educator committed to 21st century learning and one who is aware that the entire structure of schooling must change, I see Apple as a friend. So, even with this criticism, I am far from giving up on Apple. I will be one of the first to purchase an iPad, and I am already exploring dozens of potential ways to use such a device to improve student learning, improve student engagement, and to design highly interactive digital age learning experiences.

But Apple, please give us Flash support, or provide a public and compelling argument why the decision not to include Flash support is in the best interest of education.

I recently started to explore the world of freelance writing on the web (beyond blogging). Up to this point, most of my writing has come in the form of blogging, so I thought it was time to start exploring some of the “write for pay” communities. My interest is less in making significant money than it is in better understanding this part of the digital world.

So, I created an account at three of the more popular options: ehow.com, associatedcontent.com, and textbroker.com. I’ll spend some time browsing and getting to know the dynamics of each community, but here are some of my initial thoughts:

Associated Content – Users are able to post unique articles or to submit work that they have published elsewhere. In addition, one can get a flat fee from some writing (if what they write is accepted). I’ve read several articles about how people are trying to make a living at this, but it seems difficult. Based upon the articles that I’ve read so far, those boasting of making a living at Associated Content are talking about an annual income of less than $30,000 a year by putting in 6-8 hours a day. Given that you have to pay for your own health insurance and benefits, I’m not sure that this would work for many. Nonetheless, it seems like a great way to contribute solid content on the web, refine your writing amid an online community, and to even make a little extra money. I don’t have a good sense of the social dynamics yet, but I hope to learn and post more over the next year.

Textbroker.com – The registration process for this one felt more like you were applying for a job. You even submit a brief writing sample that gets reviewed. Based upon the review, you get an initial rating, somewhere between one and four stars. They reserve five stars for the “professionals” although I’m not yet sure how they define “professional.” Your rating impacts the writing projects for which you are eligible. Then, like with Associated Content, you can review a list of writing projects for hire. Most of the ones that I saw were offering payment of under $5 for what would probably take me 30 minutes to 1 hour to write. So, in terms of income, we are probably talking about reasonable shooting for $3-10 / hour at the most. Again, I’m new to this community, so I hope to get a better sense of how the social networking plays out.

Ehow.com – I’ve read Ehow articles in the past when I came across them in a Google search. The content has ranged from great to mediocre. Until two days ago, I didn’t have an account. The moment that I created one, I started getting a litany of invitations to be friends (think Facebook-like interface but far more friendly to newcomers and strangers). This is clearly a way that writers network and help each other out. You can help others by rating their articles, posting comments on their articles, and subscribing to a feed of their work. Among the three, this is the most social. Yes, people are there to make money, but there seems to be some genuine human interaction taking place also. Given the immediate human interactions, I’m most excited about further exploring this community. I even jumped right in with posting a few articles. If you are interested, you can follow me here.

Or, you might want to go straight to my first two articles:

How to Teach in a Way That Others Learn

How to Get a Job as an Online Adjunct Professor

How to be a Good Digital Citizen

I’ll write more as I learn more .

Yesterday I received an email from the National Institute of Family and the Media, announcing that it will be closing at the end of this year. They point to the current economic climate as the cause. The NIFM is known for things like their annual report card on video games, providing information about things like which video games exhibit varying degrees of violence or which ones contain sexually-explicit images. Other programs run by the institute include:

Switch – A program intended to help parents, schools, and communities encourage youth to manage their couch and screen time. It is focused upon promoting healthy and active lifestyles.

Through-U Families Become MediaWise – A program intended to help parents and others address poor media habits among children. For example, they point to statistics about the dangers of too much screen time for children and how it may impact their academic success.

Say Yes to No – A program based upon David Walsh’s book of the same name, designed to help parents discover the secrets to “raising happy self-reliant kids.”

A review of comments on the NIFM blog include a number of lamentations about the decision to close the doors of the NIFM. Ann Ricketts wrote, “I was so saddened to hear about the Board’s decision. The work you and the Institute have done through the years has changed the lives of many.” The tone of comments and announcements about the news elsewhere on the web indicate a different reaction. For example, Matt Snyders started his article about the closing this way: “The National Institute of Family and the Media, a Minneapolis-based collection of busybodies obsessed with video game violence, has decided to shut its doors.”

And yet, Dr. David Walsh notes that the formal closing of the institute does not mean the end of the institute’s efforts. “As a result, the Institute’s board of directors made the decision to close the Institute, effective December 31, 2009 and to begin transitioning the programs to other organizations who share our mission and values.” Time will tell what this transitioning will constitute, which programs will remain vibrant, and which will fade into the history of digital culture.

As a concluding editorial comment, I consider the work of the NIFM and similar organizations to be an important element of balancing views and conversations about life in the digital world. Digital culture is rich with diverse perspectives, but it it is also steeped in the drive of digital fashion, corporate influence, consumerism, propaganda, and unprecedented marketing campaigns intended to shape the habits and attitudes of their intended audiences. In such a world, one can’t underestimate the importance of critics and others who are committed to to asking difficult questions and urging parents, teachers, communities, and youth to avoid living the unexamined digital life.

There are still quite a few people who have an outdated view of how the Internet is impacting society. It just isn’t as black and white as some suggest. While some studies are indicating that Internet use is deteriorating family time and other face-to-face social interactions, that isn’t the full story. The other side of that story is that people are using mobile technologies to be more active in trying effect positive change in the physical world, in connecting with others in meaningful ways. Toward that end, Linton Weeks wrote an excellent article at npr.org on The Extraordinaries: Will Microvolunteering Work? Weeks writes, “Shazzam! Charity meets brevity. Crowdsourcing for the common good. Turning ADD into AID.”

This article highlights the side of mobile technologies and the digital culture that is actually grounding us even more in the physical world around us, not to mention the physical world half a planet away. The fact is that many of us have, in the words of John Muir (although I’m admittedly re-purposing the quote) lived “on the world but not in the world” for quite some time. The full quote is, ““Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate”” Even when we are AWK, wandering the physical sidewalks, we often walk right past the hurting and the problems all around us. While I’m the last person to propose that mobile technologies or any other invention will improve what I consider to be a fundamentally flawed human nature, it is fascinating to see how some are making use of these mobile devices to get back into the world, reach out, help out, speak up, get up, chip in, and live in their local communities…even if it is just via a text message or a quick cell phone photo sent to public works in order to fix a pothole. Or, thanks to services like kiva.org, donorschoose, and globalgiving; we get a very different picture of what is taking place when we see that person sitting on the subway typing on a two inch keypad, seemingly oblivious to the people around. Who knows, that person might be the in the middle of giving a no interest loan to a needy and aspiring low income entrepreneur on the other side of the world.

Thanks to Linton Weeks for reporting on a wonderful and fascinating side to this new digital world.

The American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner, William Inge, once wrote, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”

When it comes to the digital world, there is much that is, “the spirit of the age.” As a student of digital culture, I recognize the fact that I am often studying digital sand castles. Each technology and educational trend will soon be washed away, assimilated into, or used as a foundational idea for the next. Or maybe another metaphor works better. It is like I am a student of digital clouds. The clouds come and go, take new shapes each day, and sometimes disappear in what seems like minutes or hours. So it is with the digital world. At times, I’ve become caught up with this study of digital clouds so much that, upon remembering the fluid nature of it, I fall into small moments of despair. What is the point? All of this is fleeting? Cloud shapes are nice, but there comes a time when we crave something solid, something stable.

Solid and stable ideas are not popular today. Sand castle and cloud metaphors for truth, life, reality, and the digital world are much more in vogue. However, the more I look at the digital world and each time I reach those tiny moments of despair, I find comfort in discovering that not all in the digital world is shifting sands or clouds. People are at the heart of digital culture. Studying people in the digital world often leads to revisiting the fundamental truths and yearnings of humanity.

1) Humans are social creatures. From our beginnings, it was evident that it was not good for us to be alone.

2) Humans are constantly seeking new ways to connect with others…and at the same time seeking new ways for self-autonomy.

3) We are drawn to things that give us pleasure and avoid that which is painful…and yet there are other things at play in the human experience that sometimes leads us to disregard reject the pleasure/pain principle.

4) We yearn for unfailing love an acceptance.

5) We are continually seeking to build the next Tower of Babel. And when we manage to do so, it very often amplifies the worst in us.

6) We seem to be born with a craving for something that will last forever.

7) As a general rule, we are drawn to things that are similar to us, and we create personal worlds that reinforce our existing beliefs and ideas about the world.

There are many others that we can list, items that some would consider both positive and negative. But as I think about the digital world, these are the types of truths that I find myself rediscovering and revisiting. It is not as much about technology or digital environments as it is about digital spaces full of people with yearnings and traits that go far beyond the spirit of the age. I suggest that this is an important perspective for the educator and educational technologist of this age. When educators ignore this, and marry the spirit of the age, education becomes a lever for pedaling the next technology or product. We turn our schools into advertising agencies; “educational research” becomes synonymous with market research; and lesson or courses become commercials for programs, products, fads, and fashions.

We study, live in, prepare for, educate amid, and seek to serve as active citizens in the digital world; but we do so aware that much may wash away with the next tide. And so we ground our thoughts and ideas on those truths which stands firm across high and low tides…truths about humanity, the world, and (if you are able to tolerate such a notion in this day and age) divine reality.

Which of the following best describes your view of the Internet?

1) It is basically a good thing.
2) It is basically a bad thing.
3) It is neutral…neither good nor bad.
4) It all depends upon how you use it.

OR

5) It is, in the words of Neil Postman, a Faustian bargain…a mixed bag, and it is often hard to determine whether it is good or bad until after the fact.

If you read this blog long enough, you’ll find that I’m a #5. And I’ll be honest that I read #5 into pretty much everything. I’m skeptical of complaints that the digital world is making us the dumbest generation ever, and I’m equally skeptical that it is the solution to all of our problems. It is a mixed bag. To illustrate the point, allow me to direct our attention to a report published this week by the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, Family Time Decreases with Internet Use. Here is a quote from the first line of the article:

“More and more of America’s Internet-connected households report erosion of face-to-face family time, increased feelings of being ignored by family members using the Web, and growing concerns that children are spending too much time online.”

I’m pretty sure that this was not the intended outcome for most families and Internet users. I doubt that the typical husband or wife sat down at the computer one day and declared, “I would like to spend less time with my family and more time browsing the web for random information.” Yet, that is what took places in some of our homes. I’m sure that you’ve heard the story of a researcher who explained how to boil a live frog. From the great digital author Wi Ki Pedia,

“The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to important changes that occur gradually.”

It doesn’t really work, but it is a nice story that helps us to think about a phenomenon that is real. It is called “creeping normalcy.” It is the idea that a group or individual learns to tolerate or even embrace something if it is introduced gradually. If one had tried to introduce the same thing right up front, it would have been rejected. Is this part of what has taken place in some of our families? Imagine a modern day household that has been changed by increased Internet use. The husband is sitting in the living room, scanning the last few hours of tweets. The wife is in the next room doing some late night work online. One kid is on yet another computer, touching base with friends on Facebook. The other kid is playing a video game with a dozen people around the world. Keep the camera rolling for a few hours, days, weeks, and we see a similar evening cycle. Is that really something that most families would have embraced overnight?

So, is the Internet 1) good, 2) bad, 3) neutral, 4) all depends upon how you use it, or 5) a mixed bag? The most common answer that I get to this question is #4. However, doesn’t #4 assume that we first recognize the good and bad and then make a careful conscious choice about how to use it? Is it really that simple to recognize the good and bad? Is that really how family time decreases with Internet usage?