Are you bringing your browser history to school?

I love the convenience and security of the cloud. Any online app, any file in GoogleDrive, DropBox, or Evernote, and the history of any website I've looked at anywhere or at anytime.

Oh, wait. My browser history? That will show up on my school computer, too?

Many web browsers, including my favorites Chrome and Firefox, have the option of creating an account that syncs one's preferences, one's bookmarks, one's helper applications, and other convenient bits of information among the computers one uses. Add that bookmark at home and when you log into your browser at work, the bookmark is there. Nice.

However, by default (in Chrome, anyway), these browsers also sync one's history.

What this means is that if last night in the privacy of your own home and from your own computer, you were visiting some potentially embarrassing websites (porn, stalk-your-ex.com, Sarah Palin fansites, WebMD's "What that weird rash might be", or whatever), a record of this activity will appear on your school computer when you access your browser the next morning.

Unless :

1. You create separate browser accounts for school and personal use.
2. You specifically tell your browser not to sync history settings.
3. You always use the private or incognito mode in the browser that never tracks history.
4. You always remember to delete your history each time you log out.
5. You lead an online life completely free of any potential embarrassment. Like me ;-)

Since most school AUPs give employees a "limited right to privacy," one's chance of having one's browser history viewed is possible and legal. Happily unless one's activity is illegal or one is using a school computer, activity outside school and school hours is more embarrassing than job-threatening.

But who needs any more embarrassing moments in their lives?

and

Father's, I mean, Graduation Day

Yesterday was Father's Day. At least for me. My son Brady graduated, with honors, from Mankato State University, Mankato with his bachelor's degree in Graphic Design. 

Whew.

Unlike his sister, pictured at her college graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1995, Brady was not what I would call a "natural" student.  So completing this degree was perhaps a greater accomplishment for him than for his more naturally academic sister. 

Yesterday, I feel, marked the end of my formal responsibility as a dad. Both my children are now through school and the decisions they make, the lives they choose, and their successes and failures are their and theirs alone. I will, of course, help when asked, when I can, but I have done what I can do.

I've often commented that it is ironic that the mark of successful parents is children who no longer need them. Why does this make me happy and a little tearful at the same time?

BFTP: A folder mindset in a tagging world

Johnson's Law of Searching: 
It's always easier to find something than to find it again.

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. - Wikipedia

Doug Jamison at Geezer's online wrote about the impact of search engines on traditional organizational structures in his Front Page for Everything entry:

The personal computer and online databases started the erosion, then Gopher, Archie, BBS's, usenet, and the web. But the search engine was the giant killer. It made all previous information-organizing structures seem cumbersome and restrictive.

The entry struck a nerve with me - and not just because I too am a geezer. I am in the process of shifting from using the folder and subfolder organizational struture of Outlook/Entourage to the tagging system of Gmail for tracking my saved e-mails.

And I am nervous.

I'm not sure why I should be other than the fact that for many I have lived and died on the ability to retrieve specific e-mails using a filing system. E-mails that contained things like flight reservations. Like price quotes. Like writing deadlines. Little things like that.

And I've taught people how to organize their own files using folders and subfolders for as long as I have been teaching teachers how to use computers. I used to bring in real file folders as visual aids in workshops. (Just like in your real file cabinet, your hard drive can hold folders. And you can put a folder inside another folder. Everything does NOT have to stay on your desktop.)

Now, whenever I see a computer desktop that looks like this on a teacher's machine in our district, I consider it a personal failure:

Have the "dump everything in one place" people been the organizes ones? Due to tagging and full-text searching using OSX's Spotlight, Google, and other powerful indexing/search tools, I seem to have been wasting my time and effort carefully filing my documents - and teaching others to categorize and sort as well.

Shudder.

It's now a simple matter to save everything in a "Documents" folder morass and then use the Genie of the Find Command to quickly summon just those works with key tags or phrases. Easier and more effective, I admit, than trying to remember the name of folders and subfolders and documents.

But I can't help but think that we are losing a something as well - the ability to think in terms of categories and hierarchies and abstraction ladders ala S.I. Hayakawa. Knowing how to move up and down the abstraction ladder easily:  Living things -> animals -> birds -> penguins -> Tacky.

from Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa

Tagging and full-text searching seem just one small example of technology relieving us of the need to think for ourselves, to come up with ways of organizing our thoughts and our world. Of exercising our gray matter a bit. 

Or maybe such a thought is simply my geezer-itis flaring up.

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post March 31, 2009. This post still resonates with me whenever I create a new folder in GoogleDrive or Evernote....