Motives

Should I care about your motives? What if I’m a teacher and you are offering me a service? Should I care then?

Teachers are consider parents in the eyes of the law. Teachers can act “in loco parentis” (in place of the parent). This means that teachers are making decisions for parents.

Teachers want to take advantage of popular tools. Teachers want to provide students with as many powerful opportunities as possible. These days, many of those opportunities are offered online. What if we don’t understand why that tool is being offered?

Privacy

Facebook has been in the news many times of the past several years. Facebook offers a “free” service. That is, Facebook doesn’t charge users for an account. Yet, Facebook is worth billions of dollars. Obviously, they are making money somehow. Do we, as consumers, understand what that means? Do we understand the power of information that Facebook has? Do we understand what Facebook is doing with that information?

Examples

Facebook has been in the news many times for privacy issues. Here are a couple of examples:

It turns out that Facebook has manipulated the emotions of their users (successfully) by changing the information that users saw. The Atlantic has a nice write up.

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.

Facebook also shared private messages of users with some companies as well. Those messages were shared with more than 150 companies.

These are but just a coule in many privacy issues that revolve around Facebook. It’s turning out that your data is pretty powerful when it can be tied directly to you.

Facebook is just an example that most people are familiar with. Lots of companies are tracking and/or collecting data. The question is how do we understand this change. One thing that we can understand is that TV has always been free ¹. TV was free because advertisers paid for the content. Those advertisers did research which kind of told them who the market was, but not individuals.

Services

So, let’s say that I offer a teacher a service. This is a great service that offers to help with classroom discipline. I offer it to all teachers for free. Why is it free? Should teachers know or care?

There are costs associted with all services. There are server costs, development costs, bandwidth costs, etc.

How does the company pay for those services? Generally, there are three broad categories of programs that are offered to teachers (and others). (I’ve written about this previously in Free vs Free vs Paid.

• Passion project
• Open Source
• For profit

Passion projects

These are sites/applications that are paid for and shared by an individual (or group of individual) who do so as a hobby. Generally, they want to share with the world. This blog is an example. So is Middle School Matters, the Middle School Matters Podcast, and a few other projects that I’m involved in. I pay for the domain names and hosting because it’s my hobby. I’m certainly not alone in this.

Open Source

Open source projects are similar to passion projects. Really similar. Many open source projects start or exist as a passion project. The difference is that open source allows individuals (or companies) to change, enhance, or develop the project as well.

For profit

You pay to access or use a service. Here the model is pretty straight forward. You are paying so that someone can make a living.

Free

Teachers need to be aware that not all free sites are equal. Some are passion projects. Most are not. Many are not. Many are funded by Venture Capitalists. What does a Venture Capitalist do? A Venture Capitalist invests in a product with the intent of making money. How do these companies make money? Frequently, it is by selling the information that they collect.

Summary

So, should teachers care about the motives of those providing a service? I believe that we should. I believe that we should be making intentional choices. Gone are the days when advertisers marketed to a vast group of people. Now, we stil are not sure where and how the information being collected about us will be used. Now, I’m not in the “tin hat crowd”. However, I do think that we should be discussing and making thoughtful decisions about the services that we are offering.

1: At least until cable TV came in and we started paying for TV. Cable provided additional channels. Importantly for this discussion, that was a revenue model that allowed those channels to exist – even though they also showed advertisements.