As the university has started with course redesign initiatives to accommodate all forms or modes of learning, I then thought of sharing a specific practice I used that can also be repurposed when it comes to designing or actually more of finalizing a course syllabus.

I got this practice from a veteran educational technology educator who also pioneered designing effective instruction. On the first day of a face-to-face (F2F) class, I usually spend it on getting to know the students at the very least through their nicknames presented in the form of a Human Bingo Activity Sheet. It was a quick session which does not take up more than 30-40 minutes. And I all got them onboard my preferred Learning Management System by having them accomplish an online Learner Survey Form. Such data will be helpful as I finalize the tentative structure and activities of the course for presentation to them on the second day of class. I always remember that Maslow should go first before Bloom.

In addition, the usual first days of class were spent on approving change matriculations (class or schedule change) and also accommodating more students to enlist. Hence, you will only have an idea on the tentative confirmed class size after the first meeting. I was also fond of collaborative activities so I also plan out how the groupings will be done.

Here is a sample question set of the Learner Survey Form:

Name: 
School Email:

If the survey form was already using the school's platform and configured that signing-in is required, then the email field above is no longer required.

Age Range: The reason for this is sometimes I had a class where I had a student that was a senior citizen. Definitely, this is not birthday information.

Course/Section: (if you are handling many sections and courses)

Twitter: (not required but recommended for PLNs)

Mobile Number: (not required but encouraged especially for those who don't have access to Internet at home)

Working Student: (Yes/No)

What are your hopes and fears in studying?

How is COURSE_NAME related to your program?

What knowledge, skills, and attitudes do you have?

What learning skills do you have?

What are your beliefs about learning?

How do you feel about COURSE_NAME?

How much time do you have for your studies?

What kinds of access to resources do you have?
(e.g. Internet, library, books, etc.)

Do you have a computer? If yes, check all that apply:

-Laptop
-Desktop
-Netbook
-Tablet
-Smartphone

Specify the operating systems used in your computing devices:

-Windows
-Linux
-macOS
-Android
-iOS
-iPadOS

If you have access to the Internet at your location, what is the speed of your connection? (For dormers residing in the university, definitely they can use the university's Internet services)

Have you attended an online course and/or webinar in the past? If yes, please give some statements about such experience(s).

Which topics are you most interested to learn more about in this course? (Can be a checkbox list of topics/subtopics taken from the syllabus)

Note that this survey gives somewhat a big picture on what or how students can have access to learning materials along with their learning styles and expectations. Such mindset can also be used when designing the course packs in this pandemic. Always remember that instruction should be executed with the consideration of the student who has the least or simplest way of access to information - and that is when the student does not have access to any learning device and is also offline. Teachers should always care for the last, the least, and the lost. Lastly, teaching should have been always learner-centered even way before the pandemic.

I stumbled upon this word on the first chapters of the book Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. “Nym” is simply a screen name which a person uses to post on websites, blogs, and even public chats. Yes, people were using such or even multiple ones more than decades ago, and it might be even earlier than the generation of Internet Relay Chats (IRC). It was a great experience for one doesn’t have to be who the person really is. The anonymizing characteristics created a form of privacy, security and equilibrium to all relationships. Of course, this is with the assumption that everyone is using an unlinkable nym.

When arguments have to be thrown, people won’t know anything beyond about what you argued or how you even argued about it. If such nym becomes the target of being bashed, it can easily be dropped and just take on another nym that can even join others towards contribution on the bashing of the discontinued nym. Being dissociative also encourages one to even alter themselves as a form of being open-minded. However, such characteristic has declined the moment when governments and businesses want to connect screen names to offline real identities, mostly either for profit or for surveillance. In addition, people are not aware that their personal data leaks, usually through their own hands by posting too much on social media their behavioral data.

There used to be a statement I heard before in blogging summits (or possibly even earlier than these) - “If you can’t be searched on the Internet, then you don’t exist”. This paved the way for people to create websites or blogs, becoming into potential influencers and making sure that their profile is all over the Internet through likes and shares. Of course, the direct opposite is much better now. Reducing your online footprint means lowering the chances of identity theft, phishing, and other cybersecurity threats.

Anyway, going back to my topic about nyms, I got an anonymous tip recently via secure email that this particular person got kicked or banned from attending an on-going webinar because of using a screen name. This person stated that s/he was not doing anything wrong in the webinar and even emphasized that s/he was having a great time exchanging ideas with the webinar speaker before the webinar started, thus, contributing to the usual knowledge sharing. Unfortunately, after some time, the host of the webinar sent a private message to the person asking that s/he be identified. The person declined because of privacy reasons plus the fact that the webinar is open to the public and that s/he was not doing anything wrong. Within just seconds before s/he even had the time to send the reply to the host, the latter banned the person from participating in the webinar for no reason at all except possibly for the fact that s/he is using a screen name in spite of the fact that the person also registered beforehand using a valid email address. Such move is a denial of the freedom of access to knowledge and information.

Now, if you think about it, this poses a similarity to what can possibly happen when it comes to how privacy is being treated in a different scenario. However, I’ll definitely leave it up to your imagination on how it can be similar especially in these times when free speech and democracies are at stake.

As webinars continue to change the landscape of information dissemination during the pandemic, along with popular events or event organizers transitioning on this platform, a need for certificates emerged to recognize the efforts of participants. Considering that the university is using this popular education suite, I tried exploring its features, the same combo I used when I was holding international edtech webinars in the college and this was through Apps Script alongside plugins or add-ons. I shared this idea to a colleague of mine and he was able to write a user-friendly Apps Script code that can fully leverage on the email sending capacity of the university education email. Note that I did not write this code but only inserted comments to describe the sections that this script does.

Before you start, you must have a certificate template, preferably in the form of a Word/Pages file where you can generate multiple copies and edit the sections of the certificate manually. There might be other tools or even a more comprehensive Apps Script that can do all of these processes. However, in my setup, I used Pages to create the certificate template, filled out the participant names and other certificate sections, exported it to PDF and then used the built-in Preview app of macOS to simply splice each page by dragging it to the desktop and renaming the filename uniquely. Hence, I already have the generated PDF files for each participant that are for uploading on Drive.

To start with the list of participants, create a Sheet that has the following field names and populate it with the corresponding first name, last name, email address, and certificate ID (your unique identifier for the file) of the participants.

On that sheet, go to Tools > Script Editor, then type the following source code:

// Apps Script code

var EMAIL_SENT = 'EMAIL_SENT'

function sendEmailsWithAttachment() {
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  //1st row of participant records
  var startRow = 2;
  //total number of participant records
  var numRows = 101;
  //total number of designated columns on spreadsheet
  var dataRange = sheet.getRange(startRow, 1, numRows, 5);
  var data = dataRange.getValues();
  for (var i = 0; i < data.length; ++i) {
    var row = data[i]
    var firstName = row[0];
    var lastName = row[1];
    var emailAddress = row[2];
    var certificateId = row[3];
    var status = row[4];
    if (status !== EMAIL_SENT) {
      //email subject variable is best used with unique identifiers 
      //such as combination of first name last name and webinar name or date
      //to avoid grouping of emails that have the same email subject
      var subject = 'Webinar Certificate for '+firstName+' '+lastName;
      //message is the overall texts or content of your email
      var message = 'Dear Sir/Madam, \n\nThank you for attending our webinar on Privacy Tips.\n\nCheers,\nEduveloper Team'
      //file refers to the unique file name on Drive
      //example: "Eduveloper Webinars-Privacy Tips-Jan1 Dela Cruz Juan.pdf"
      var file = DriveApp.getFilesByName('Eduveloper Webinars-Privacy Tips-Jan1 '+lastName+' '+firstName+'.pdf');
      if(file.hasNext()){
        //name variable is for the name of the sender, organization, or event organizer
        MailApp.sendEmail(emailAddress, subject, message, {
          attachments: [file.next().getAs(MimeType.PDF)],
          name: 'Eduveloper'
        });
        //spreadsheet will contain EMAIL_SENT status for every successful email
        sheet.getRange(startRow + i, 5).setValue(EMAIL_SENT);
        SpreadsheetApp.flush();
      }
    }
  }
}

It should look something like this screenshot, Save it, then Run it. This will prompt you to authorize the usage of script on your account and just click Accept.

Afterwards, return to your Sheet containing the participant records and you should have an update of a successful email sent for each row.

Enjoy!

“Mabuti na lang at wala akong ganyan” [Good thing I don’t have that].

This was a line I heard probably around 2 weeks ago from a friend that references “that” to Facebook upon seeing the news on the emergence of impostor accounts on such platform after just a weekend. I told my friend though that there is no escape (from the surveillance platform) if friends or family members also upload photos of people that are not even on the platform because of its facial recognition algorithm. Always remember that it is very imperative for people who took photos (or videos) of others as a habit to ask people for consent before even uploading it online, most especially if those concern kids.

As far as I can remember, there was no concrete evidence that Facebook had a glitch, contrary to an article - NBI: Facebook copycat accounts may be due to ‘glitch’, saying that it is not impossible. Of course it would have been better if the person that had stated this came from or works for Facebook, right? A glitch or not, identity theft has been happening already for decades. Technology, especially social media, has made it just a lot easier for thieves to harvest the data. And where can they easily get data? Facebook, of course! Data is like water or oil, it leaks.

In the Philippines, more than 40M users are subscribed to the platform. This was also made possible through partnerships with telcos by offering free access to the platform. A week ago, a documentary about a journalist, freedom of the press, and social media disinformation was released. Though the video mentioned about how Facebook was greatly leveraged for political campaigns through behavioral manipulation, I find it ironic that those who had watched the film and defend democracy and free speech still went on and continue using the platform.

Another suggestion that came out to get rid of impostor accounts was to perform a KYC on Facebook which would mean giving even more data to the platform. No, this will be very problematic in the future, assuming that the future still has democracy left.

Satisfyingly, for the past 2 weeks, I noticed that more medical doctors are starting to move out of their Facebook pages or accounts and some had even deleted entirely their accounts after downloading their data out of the platform. I greatly commended them then for taking the big leap towards protecting their patients’ privacy and at the same time defending democracy as well.

At the start of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) which was about 80+ days ago, I had already included privacy as one of the webinar topics that should be delivered to the entire university. Privacy can be a very basic technical topic but it is usually the most ignored and disregarded one by many people. Here are then my listing of privacy tips though some were already mentioned on my previous post about working from home:

1. Think before you click or tap.
2. Avoid sharing Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) versions of webpages or news portals.
3. Check the privacy settings of your computing devices.
4. For those who are using Zoom, you can check out this page: https://tidbits.com/2020/04/03/every-zoom-security-and-privacy-flaw-so-far-and-what-you-can-do-to-protect-yourself/ and learn how to protect yourself.
5. Prevent cross-site tracking on web browsers.
6. Perform password hygiene.
7. Check account involvement in data breaches.
8. Delete your Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts after requesting and downloading your data from this surveillance capitalist platform.
9. Avoid using Google’s services. Use DuckDuckGo.
10. Be vigilant when sharing any data; this can be in the form of facial data, location, or any form of behavioral data.

Each of the privacy tips can still be expounded further through examples so I leave it to my readers now on how you can put everything into action especially the tips concerning usage of Facebook and Google. A week ago, news about the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 had emerged, probably a few days after or even during the Privacy Awareness Week 2020 (where the National Privacy Commission held an online event via Facebook).

On the other side of the world, activists are being cautious when it comes to privacy. However, the most ironic thing is when people are trying to protect democracy but still kept on using surveillance capitalist platforms (such as Facebook) that are the biggest threats to democracy. Everyone should realize now that governments are slowly beginning to be subordinate to big tech companies.

Now this is why the struggle is real when it comes to defending privacy, fighting surveillance, and protecting free speech. My small wins during the quarantine period at the very least, include spreading awareness about privacy and surveillance capitalism through local and international webinars and getting a group of friends to switch to a more secure and private messaging platform.

In times like this, let us all try to stay safe, and stay free.