Tag: Education

Checking Intuitions – Is Facebook As Bad As We Think?

Last week, I published a long, rambley set of thoughts about my relationship to Facebook.  The following night, I sat down with a group of friends to discuss a taped forum discussion published by the CBC.  If you have never looked into CBC’s programming, particularly their show Ideas, and their daily program The Current, I highly recommend them.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/screened-off-the-dangers-of-an-insular-web-1.3937638

It’s always good to check your intuitions and opinions against what others think, because sometimes its possible that your biases blind you to alternative considerations.

Now, what I’m about to write about is entirely unverified and does not serve as an argument on any side of this debate.  This post is not meant to deliver any definitive answers on the topic of whether Facebook (or the modern internet) is less democratized, more problematic, or having a polarizing effect on how people think.  What I wish to capture is how my mind expanded a bit when I listened to how others viewed the podcast topic and their reactions to it.

Going into the meeting, I felt that I aligned with the views discussed in the program.  I feel that people are polarizing in the online echo-chamber communities and that the internet, or specifically products created for the web, are designed to be attractive and modify behaviour to increase engagement.  Shallow content and emotional shortcuts are easily bypassing critical thought and our ability to maintain our attention is being eroded.

There were two counter thoughts brought up at the meeting that significantly shook my opinion.  Again, I pose these as items to consider, not definitive rebuttals to the original claims.

Rose-Coloured Nostalgia

The first assumption challenge by one friend was that the understanding and explanation of how the internet is currently, and how the internet “used to be,” do not adequately reflect reality.  In the first instance, the speakers on the program are only speaking to a mainstream understanding of social media.  They use Facebook as the default conversation piece because it is the highest trafficked site, however their descriptions do not account for all uses of the net, nor all demographic engagements.  In fact, Facebook-use is in decline among younger internet uses (“old people got on Facebook and ruined it”).

But in the second instance, my friend (whom is a few years older than I am) disagrees with the assumption that the internet in the late-90’s and early 2000’s was more democratized.  On a purely surface level, sure, it was more democratized because there were less corporate products.  But at the same time, the internet was more closed off to the mass market because no one knew how to use the internet.  Without the advent of streamlined user-interfaces, most people lacked the technical skills to adequately use the internet beyond services provided by internet providers (the Yahoo’s, the AOL’s, etc.).

I realized that my understanding and buy-in for the arguments is predicated on an understanding of the internet that I have no direct experience of.  I only started using the web in 1998, compliments of AOL and the many coasters they sent to our house.  Other than chat rooms and Slingo, my recollection of the net pre-2000 is pretty spotty.  I have nothing that informs my opinion on the matter, and it’s entirely possible that I’m agreeing with a characterization of the web that is out of line with reality.

Deep Data

Another excellent criticism that another friend raised is that Facebook isn’t necessarily forcing people into echo-chambers, nor are people necessarily becoming more radical in their views.  In fact, we don’t really know what’s happening relative to the pre-2000’s.  For the first time in history, we are able to collect massive amounts of data on the reading habits of people online.  Until recently, understanding where people seek out content, how they share, what they share, what they click through, etc, was not possible to the degree we are seeing now.  It’s bad for us to see the limited data and fit a worldview to it.  Quite simply, we don’t know if Facebook is changing anything, or if we are just able to glimpse into the minds of others for the first time.

But, you may say, “I’ve been on Facebook since the mid-2000’s and I’ve noticed a shift in my news feed.”  Yes, that’s true.  It’s also true that algorithms are more sophisticated now to curate your news feed.  The only thing missing from that consideration is that the sample size for you has changed.  If Facebook’s size had remained constant, we could potentially make an inference to how Facebook has impacted people.  Instead, Facebook has gone from being the domain of college students (a typically liberal-leaning demographic) to high school students (remember when we thought that was a mistake, and these kids shouldn’t be on the network) to when our parents joined Facebook (ugh! They ruined Facebook!).  Consider an alternative perspective – our experience of other people on Facebook was initially biased, and then regressed back to the mean once the user pool expanded to include non-university users (which is a fairly homogeneous class of people, all things considered).

Closing Thoughts

Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure what’s right, but I suppose that’s a good thing.  Recognizing that my own views and opinions should be treated as suspect is a valuable insight to have.  It requires a level of self-awareness that usually doesn’t get a lot of discussion in today’s media.  Instead, everyone seems to speak from a position of authority that I feel as though I lack in my internal monologue.  Maybe my friends are correct, and that the think-pieces about the dangers of walled-gardens and the role that social media has on our ability to think critically is all smoke and little fire.  To be fair, where there is smoke, there is usually fire, so there is *something* there that needs to be discussed.

I appreciate the insight my friends brought to the table.  It shouldn’t be surprising that the answers they gave above are wholly connected to their fields of expertise.  The first friend has a PhD in criminology and has studied deviance online.  The second friend works in marketing for a major Canadian food company.  Their experiences are helpful to provide alternative viewpoints to my own, and if it is true that you are the average of the 5 people you most commonly associate with, it’s a pretty powerful example to me of the value in a diversity (plurality) of thought.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

New Year and New Updates

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a fun and safe weekend.  This year’s celebration was the smoothest we’ve seen at the bar in a long time.  No fights or accidents, and everyone left before close.  From the staff’s point of view, it was a great way to ring in the new year.

A big bit of news happened for me in early December – I got engaged!  After months of scheming, everything came together and my fiancé and I are busy with wedding plans.

The decision to pop the question also forced me to think more about my future, specifically the next 3-5 years.  While we are not planning to wed until late 2018, the added commitment of marriage raised some questions in my mind about what I need to focus on in terms of priorities.

When I started this blog, it was meant to help me focus on my learnings on my way to becoming a paramedic.  A lot has happened since then, and it would be bad if I ignored the contexts at play.  In the beginning, I was a bit down on myself, felt aimless, and I didn’t like work.  2016, while a crappy year for the world, was a good year for me in that I focused a lot on improving myself.  In that time, my conditions at work have markedly improved, and I feel better about myself and where I am in life.  The only thing that hadn’t shifted was my career – I was still running under the assumption that I would be applying off for a paramedic program and would restart my career in two year’s time.

Getting engaged, however, forced me to think critically about this.  With my fiancé just starting out on her own professional career, us moving in together in the near future, and planning for a wedding, it seems like a bad decision for me to drop the security I currently have and take several steps back for the sake of a new vocation.

Maybe if I were a few years younger (I turned 30 in December), I could have pulled this  gamble off.  But for the present, I will be putting my paramedic aspirations on the shelf to focus on building what I have in front of me.  Down the line, there is always a chance that I could make a pivot into medicine but for the interim, this is not a good choice for me.

Which now raises the question of what is happening to this blog?

Short answer: nothing.  I will keep the blog for the foreseeable future.

Long answer: a change in theme will need to be made.

Obviously this won’t be a medic blog anymore.  At the very least, this blog has been very broad, so I don’t see a lot changing in terms of content.  I’ll still post on topics that are relevant to me and my interests, such as personal development, teaching, etc.  I don’t know what the changes will amount to, but if you are enjoying my content now, then you can rest assured that things won’t change materially.  In time, you may see a new coat of paint and a some rearranging of the furniture.

However in the mean time, check back in each Monday for a new post.  Let’s keep this thing going!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

My 2016 Reading List

2016 was a fairly productive year for me compared to 2015.  At the end of every year, I reflect on my life and sketch out a rough vision of how I want to tackle the new year.  Last year, I noted that I had read relatively few books (and completed even fewer).  Don’t get me wrong, I was reading a lot, but it was all online and typically blogs and articles.  My shallow reading was going strong, but my slow, in-depth reading with books was waning.

I felt a sense of shame at this realization – I had completed undergraduate and graduate studies in the Humanities, but my commitment to arts and letters was dismal at best.  I decided to use 2016 as a year to focus and develop myself.  Using a combination of physical and audio books I have, as of this post, read 41 books, which amounts to a hair under 13,000 pages of content.

See below for the complete list.  If I finish anything else before the end of 2016, I’ll ensure to issue an update.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Note – eagle-eyed readers will count 42 books on my list.  There is a book on my list that for personal reasons I’m not publicly disclosing.

Title Author Pages
Deep Work Cal Newport 304
The Way of the Superior Man David Deida 207
Intentional Living John C. Maxwell 288
The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg 416
The 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferriss 416
The Imperfect Board Member Jim Brown 224
Mate Tucker Max 384
The Art of Asking Amanda Palmer 352
The War of Art Steven Pressfield 190
The Way of Men Jack Donovan 192
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 272
Living in More Than One World Bruce Rosenstein 244
Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl 168
Start With Why Simon Sinek 256
Antifragile Nassim Taleb 544
Zero to One Peter Thiel 224
Level Up Your Life Steve Kamb 288
Quiet Susan Cain 368
The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal 288
The $100 Startup Chris Guillebeau 304
The 4-Hour Body Timothy Ferriss 592
Leaders Eat Last Simon Sinek 256
A Thousand Naked Strangers Kevin Hazzard 288
Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here Ryan Estrada 132
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey 432
Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology Elaine Marieb 656
Born To Run Christopher McDougall 304
No Fears, No Excuses Larry Smith 272
Doctored Sandeep Jauhar 288
Wisdom Stephen Hall 352
The 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene 496
Awaken the Giant Within Tony Robbins 544
Tribes Seth Godin 160
Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg 384
Purple Cow Seth Godin 244
Free Prize Inside Seth Godin 256
Ego Is The Enemy Ryan Holiday 256
I Will Teach You To Be Rich Ramit Sethi 266
Thinking Fast And Slow Daniel Kahnaman 512
Born For This Chris Guillebeau 320
Total Pages Read
13,487 (revised)

Addendum

After this post went up, I added two more books to my list to round out 2016:

Title Author Pages
God is not Great Christopher Hitchens 320
Left of Bang Patrick Van Horne and
Jason Riley		 228

Blog – The Rewards of Grading

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend grading papers from my class.  It was their first foray into writing a philosophical essay for me, so it was an interesting indictment on whether I was effective in teaching for the first half of the course.  There were the natural ups and downs, but I suspect my grade curve falls in line with what is expected (I have two late papers yet to grade, so the jury is still out).

I jokingly grumbled about the extra work it takes to grade poor performances for me.

This isn’t to say that I look down on students who do poorly, nor do I want to make light of their performance.  For me, marking is an opportunity to help the student learn and develop.  When a student does well, I often feel less compelled to give a lot of feedback because there is little they could have done to do better.  I praise where it’s merited, but I don’t think the students are helped if I don’t offer something constructive to mull over.

Marking poor performance, on the other hand, takes significantly longer to finish for three reasons. First, as in the tweet above, when I’m dealing with plagiarism, I need to do more research to ensure it’s genuine cases of plagiarism versus sloppy citation practices.  I use the TurnItIn service to give a “sniff test” for the paper, but the majority of the cases of flagged plagiarism are merely properly cited references to the text.  Otherwise, I use context clues to determine where students might have plagiarized, such as changes in font, and changes in voice or phrasing the student uses in their writing.

The second biggest reason why it takes me so much longer to grade poor papers (and this will relate partially to my next point) is that I have to sufficiently document my reasons for awarding a poor mark.  This is to not only justify my decision to the student (and avoid seeming arbitrary), but it’s also to protect future me.  My annotations and comments help me in the potential case where a student wishes to talk to me about their mark.  After time has elapsed, I need memory aids to help me understand why I made the decisions I made while grading.

Finally, the most important reason why it takes me so much longer is that I have to identify instances where the student could have done better, and give them direction on how to improve.  It’s not enough to rely on quick notations to tell the student the problem (i.e. Awk or awkward phrasing, SP or spelling error, Citation Needed, Does not follow, etc.).  I have to take the next step to identify the problems and provide guidance for improvement.  This is why the process is so time consuming.  It’s an important process.  I remember how important that direction was when I was in school.  Without the time my profs took to help me through my papers, I doubt I would have won an essay prize in grad school.

Grading has its rewards, though.  Sometimes, you are amazed at the quality of the work that gets turned in, as happened in this tweet below.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Thoughts on Email and Ethical Research

I sit on the Board for the Community Research Ethics Office.  Our organization helps community organizations have access to support and research ethics reviews traditionally only offered to members of an academic institution.  We field a number of applications each month that explain a research project to us, and we evaluate the degree of ethical considerations made by the organization/researchers and sign-off on projects that align with the requirements set out in Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on Conducting Research on Human Participants.

At each of our monthly meetings, the Board dives into lively discussion on topics not often considered in the course of normal research.  During our last meeting, we had a discussion concerning the use of email during the data processing phase of a project.  In a review we conducted, there was mention of researchers using email to share data across geographic distances (the study was occurring in multiple cities).

When we consider email, especially at a corporate level, our intuition is that it’s reasonably safe.  There are the occasional reports of data breaches, but if you use adequate security measures, your content is relatively safe.

But there is a crucial consideration that we need to make when we conduct research.  In research, the most important element is the rights of the participants.  If a researcher wants safeguard the participant’s interests while the participant freely participates in a research project, then a number of additional measures must play into your research system.

The participant, by agreeing to participate in a study, trusts that the researcher will not only always make research decisions that respect the participant’s wishes, but also the researcher must work to actively protect the participant’s right to safety, security and privacy to the fullest extent possible.

This is where emailing data to researchers gets complicated.

The intuitive thought is that as long as your computer terminal is secure, the data is safe – if you can prevent anyone (except maybe a super spy) from breaching your data, you have done your due diligence.

Community-based research has become cut-throat in the last few years…

So, here is your security weak-points and your measures to guard against a breach:

  • Physically accessing terminal location – lock the building/room and restrict access
  • Accessing computer terminal – password protect computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal – ensure login credentials are enabled and encrypt the data before sending

Yes, there’s a problem with the third bullet: email is more complicated that that.

When you send an email, you are not taking a document/letter, folding up a copy and sending the only copy via the web to the recipient.  If that were the case, then email would be fairly secure.  But, what happens with email instead is you end up copying the information to various sources as it gets uploaded, transmitted, copied, and downloaded over the web.  There is a copy created in your computer’s cached memory, there’s a copy that get uploaded and saved to your email server, the data is transmitted to your recipient’s server, and that information is downloaded as a copy to your recipients device.

That’s right, device, not necessarily a computer. You see, a further layer of complexity is when we route mail to our mobile devices, which is yet another copy of the information.  A computer is cumbersome to physically lose, but cell phones are lost/misplaced all the time.  Same with external hard drives and flash drives.  And don’t forget your mobile device; if you send the data on the same email platform that is accessible on an app on your phone, that information can be retrieved from your sent messages folder.

All of these points are potential security breaches.  So, let’s update the list above as to the number of ways data can be compromised:

  • Physically accessing your terminal location
  • Accessing computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal
  • Your mobile device
  • Email server(s)
  • Recipients physical terminal location
  • Recipients computer terminal
  • Recipients data/email on terminal
  • Recipients mobile device

There are probably other ways the data could be breached that I’m not considering in this example, but I think I’ve made my point that ethical and security issues are ridiculously complex when considering research projects.  Regardless of whether you think your data, if exposed, will actually harm your participants in any meaningful way, that is missing the point entirely.  Your participant’s data was important enough for your to collect in the first place, and therefore you have an obligation to protect the rights and well-being of your participant to the fullest extent that you can.

The point of our ethics reviews is not to halt research.  Our purpose is to help the researchers think of all of the ways we can conduct good research and ensure that our good practices ensure we can continue to conduct research in the future.  We must learn from past mistakes and the harm that has come to people who participated in research (inadvertently AND in good faith).  Respecting our duty to care is the cornerstone of what it means to do good research.

Blog – Week Two of Teaching

I’ve received some feedback that my readers like my posts on teaching and want more updates on how I’ve been progressing.  Since this blog doubles as a record of experiences and things I learn, I’m more than happy to share more of my thoughts on teaching (so far).

General Reflection

Week two ran a lot better in my mind than week one.  I felt more prepared and more excited for the lecture material, which I think translated into a better experience for my class.  There were some concrete steps I took to make things better this time too:

  1. I practiced better self-care.  I slept a little better, ate lunch before teaching, was better hydrated, in more comfortable clothes, etc.
  2. I had a guest speaker, which changed up the pacing a bit.
  3. I showed clips from YouTube to make my points, rather than using lecturing alone.
  4. I had a better sense of the lecture flow I wanted to achieve.

There were, of course, elements that I want to improve on, such as practicing my transitions in speech a few more times, or being ahead of the game in terms of my preparation.  However, I think I am overall doing well.

Shadow Work

I also graded my first round of assignments this past weekend.  I have to be mindful of how much non-teaching time I devote to the course because I’m only, technically, paid for the 3-hours of teaching I do per week.  The rest of the work is factored into my wages, but not actually paid out as hours logged.  I’m not overly worried at the moment because the items I’m marking took me around 2-hours to complete Sunday morning, so it’s not a huge burden at present.  It will, however, become a concern when I have to mark essays and the final exam.

Connecting with Students

I’m receiving positive feedback from students that they are enjoying the class so far.  I’m hoping to gather more formal feedback in an upcoming poll/questionnaire.  As a person who values real-time feedback for self-improvement, I feel waiting until the end of the term to get feedback is a missed opportunity.

Lecture Material

I was super jazzed about my lecture content last week.  I challenged the students’ conceptions concerning health and disease/disability.  I wanted to open their minds to the idea that health and disease are not mutually exclusive.  Disease gets cached out as a deviation from “normal,” but normal is fairly hard to pin down outside of fuzzy concepts like “statistical normality” aka, bell curves.

I opened the chain of thought by discussing how our biases of viewing the world will often distort our thinking, whether we are aware of it or not.  As a fan of The West Wing, I showed the class this clip as a fun but straightforward example of how we react and value parts of our reality without consciously thinking about it.

 

I then moved into real world examples of how biases in our thinking affect how we interact with other people, and how it can have devastating consequences.

 

 

Then, because I thought the clip above brought the mood down a bit, I ended with a fantastic video that challenges our ideas of ability and disability.

 

 

I was pretty happy with how this section of the lecture seemed to land with the students, and I hope it had the intended effect – that our approaches to problems are often bound up in unconscious biases that can limit our thinking.

Anyway, I should get back to prepping for this week’s lecture.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Video – Dangers of the Job

Despite my recent spate of posts on teaching and education, I still want to use this blog as a platform for self-improvement as it relates to medicine.   I don’t know, yet, whether I will follow the path to paramedicine to the finish.  Teaching is occupying a fair amount of my time, so I will give priority to the things that seem most pressing.

Having said that, this video came across my social media feed last week and serves as a painful reminder that no matter how noble your job is, no matter how badly you want to help people, those very people you serve are also (sometimes) your greatest threat.  Crisis and trauma cause people to react in wildly different ways, and if you are not prepared for it, you could very easily fall victim to its chaos.

I have many medic and security friends who have their own horror stories from getting caught flat-footed on shift.  I’m glad to see agencies are seeking to remain proactive in arming medics with the tools and experience to protect themselves.

Remember, you’re no good to anybody if you are incapacitated, so watch your back.  That’s why the first step you are taught as a medic and responder is to mind your environment.  Constantly scan and re-assess for danger.  No one will look out for your well-being better than you.

Stay Safe,

Ryan

Blog – Reflections on my First Day (Teaching)

Last week, I taught my first class at college.  It was quite the experience to say the least.  Even now, I’m split between knowing that I did somewhere between “adequate” and “well,” and allowing the super self-critical side of me to autopsy the wreckage.

Wreckage is a gross overstatement because things weren’t *that* bad.  I’m mostly critical over some common themes.  First, I feel that the transitions between ideas could have used more intentional thought to make things smoother.  Second, the second half of my presentation was fairly slap-dash in construction and could have spent less time buried under procrastination as I prepped.  Finally, that my oration could have been better performed (read: slow down!).

The biggest observation was on just how exhausted I was when I finished.  There are a number of reasons why I was so drained by the end, all of them preventable in hindsight: I didn’t sleep well the night before, I hadn’t eaten food all day prior to starting class, I hadn’t consumed any caffeine like I normally would have, I wore a moderately heavy sport coat for the first half of the class on an already humid day, I’m very animated when I speak, and teaching just takes a lot out of you.  Only the last thing, I would say, is something I can’t control and will need to learn to manage.  Everything else, yup, that was my fault.  Next time, I’ll bring a lunch.

Those were the “bad” things.  Almost everything else about the experience was great.  I seemed to connect with the students.  I felt that I was able to convincingly show that the students should take these issues in philosophy seriously.  I feel like I earned their attention, despite it being a class from 1-4pm on a Friday.

Of the feedback I’ve received, students enjoyed my class and are looking forward to the rest of the term.  That may be because I did my job well, or it could be because they feel less pressured by the work of the course.  Time will tell on that front.

My final verdict for my first day of teaching is probably a B-.  I made a fair number of points and supported my claims with evidence.  The flow and presentation kept the audience entertained while sticking to a path that was clear to follow.  There is room to improve, in that this felt like a first draft and could use a few more rounds of editing for coherence and to remove repetition, but otherwise a solid entry into the gradebook.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Power Imbalance and Pedagogy

I had an idea for my class that online discussion postings that might be construed as uncivil could serve as a teachable moment in class to discuss and elaborate on.  My plan was not to shame or rebuke the students in front of the class, but to take it as a chance to reflect on the content of the idea and why it might be disrespectful to others.  I ran the idea by a colleague and she cautioned against it.  She pointed out that you never want to be seen as “picking on” a student or singling them out in front of their peers.

Then, I realized that I forgot about the power imbalance that exists between the student, the collection of students, and I when I stand at the head of the class.  Despite how I feel about whether I am truly a teacher, or if I’m closer to being their peer (compared to other teachers they encounter), I must remember that I am still their teacher.  I institutionally have more power; I stand in front of them as an authority.  I have power, whether I realize it or not.

Somewhere along the line, it was pointed out that picking on students picks them out from the amorphous mass that is your class and distances them from their peers.  They are free to stand themselves apart, but I cannot force them for the sake of a teachable moment.