Heigh Ho Silver Away with Computer Crime

Have you ever read your bank statement and found charges that you never made?  Have you been working on your computer and noticed that all of a sudden it is working much more slowly or many ads keep popping up?  These things are evidences of potential computer crimes.  Pauline Go has listed a few of the crimes that individuals can experience.  Computer crimes can also target businesses, industries, and even governments.  The Target scandal affected 40 million shoppers this past year.  I was affected by this because my bank noted I had shopped on Black Friday at Target and they wanted to prevent a crime against my account.  This type of crime is becoming such a problem that the U.S. Department of Justice actually has a computer crime and intellectual property section.  This section of the department works to fight computer criminals.  The FBI also has a cyber crimes unit.  They work to mitigate identity theft, fraud, and computer intrusions as noted by their website.

Earlier this year a young boy in our school district gained control of the school's robo-calling system and sent a message to over 500 families telling them that school was closed the next day.  As you can see by this article,  the local police didn't know exactly what to charge him with.  The article doesn't mention that the messages came from the school phone number and therefore were very convincing.  It also doesn't tell you that the problem was discovered quickly and they did end up having school that day.  So, computer crimes can be carried out in a wide variety of ways and it doesn't take a degree in computer science to break into computers or steal identities.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics stated that in 2005, 67% of businesses had experienced at least one cybercrime.  In the European Union, organized crime groups take $1.9 billion dollars from credit card users according to Huffington Post in 2013.  Numbers like these probably do not paint even half of the problems that computer criminals create. Back in the days of yesteryear, the Lone Ranger would ride into town and take care of the bad guys.  Today we have Anonymous and other hactivists that use computers to disrupt computer criminals or to be political activists.  Here is a case where Anonymous felt the need to ride in on his/her shining white computer to fight for those that were crying for help in Kenya.  Just as it was never quite known if the Lone Ranger was a good guy or a bad guy until the end of the show, it is difficult t tell whether the hacktivists are really the good guys or not.  Until there is a better way to catch computer criminals, we may see hacktivists riding in to try to save the day.

Sneaking Peeks

Have you ever walked by someone's desk at work and seen them very quickly minimize a window that contained their FaceBook page or maybe even a shopping site? Was this person just sneaking a peak at their personal online sites or have they been doing their shopping or FaceBooking for hours instead of the work that they are being paid to accomplish? Are critical items being shared with the organization's public that the organization is unaware of? This report from 2008 shared that workers play games, shop, check personal e-mails, and even maintain personal blogs while at work.  How does any work actually ever get accomplished in this very connected world?

The Pew report noted above, also shared that although shopping, etc. can and often is done during work hours on work machines, most people that work in this hyperconnected environment observe that they actually perform more work than they did when they were not nearly so connected.  The disparity between the two ideas can be resolved by understanding that individuals develop communication pathways and connections through their use of the internet - Shirky defined this as social capital.  He then further observed that increasing social capital increases "health, happiness, and earning potential".  So, on the individual level, connected employees are healthier and happier.  This can be further upscaled to the group level at a workplace.

Harold Jarche's article listed several assets to having a connected workforce.  He stated that connected workers bring relational capital to the workplace. These individuals know how to connect with others and like to form relationships.  Shirky noted that when individuals in an organization are more networked, their communication is better and they have a more "flexible social structure".  The individual that is comfortable surfing the web to do his or her shopping and knows how to navigate social networking brings value through their knowledge and abilities to form connections at work as well.  Recently, several new faculty members have been added to my department.  There is a noticeable difference in the way that they work compared to some of the older faculty that may not have grown up in this more hyperconnected environment.  I have noticed that these faculty try to find ways to connect to others and are very interested in sharing their work ideas with others in many different formats.  They also seek input from others about how work has been done in the past and ask for critique of their work more readily.  I may be making assumptions regarding the driving forces behind these behaviors, but they seem like logical assumptions when viewing these behaviors in light of hyperconnectedness.

As we move into the future, the skills that workers will need to employ will be enhanced by their connected behaviors.  The Atlantic listed the future work skills for 2020.  Many of those skills, such as new media literacy, transdisciplinary, and trans-cultural behaviors can be enhanced by skills gained from interacting with others online.  In education, as interdiciplinary courses increase and online offerings become more accepted, the skills learned through internet interactions will be more and more important.  So, is sneaking a peek at the internet during work hours hurting work production or is it really on- the- job training?

Reference

Shirky, C. (2009). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Homeostasis of the Educational System in a Technological World

I teach Human Anatomy and Physiology.  Students learn about the skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, and more in these classes.  The most amazing piece of these classes comes at the end of their second semester, when the student finally realizes that none of the systems act on their own - they work in synchrony in order to function in a healthy manner within a particular environment. Each body part "collaborates" with many others in order to function correctly.  

An educational system is much like the body in that it takes many parts to accomplish the work. Systems react to the environment in order to maintain homeostasis. The systems used to be much simpler and relied heavily on physical classrooms. The internet has created an environmental change in education that is promoting changes in the educational system.  Margaret Spellings' Wall Street Journal article described some of the effects that are and may be seen in higher education mostly due to the internet.  Online classrooms are growing in number and competency-based education is being explored by many institutions, including my own.  These adaptations are not without dissent from internal stakeholders.  Does a student get the same type of education if they take online courses rather than face to face courses?If not, is that better or worse for the student?  If seat time is not the measuring tool and competencies are, does that mean that seat time is not valuable?  Will face to face courses be a thing of the past or  are these other modes of learning simply additions to the system required by a new environment?  Unfortunately, these questions cannot be answered at this time.  The system is in the throes of adjusting to the environment and the efforts have not had enough time to fully take root.

Community college education has also been historically focused on providing accessible education to the community in which the college resides.  These colleges are now focusing more on the provision of accessible education to the global community.  This report noted that online technologies are making education more accessible.  The globalization of the marketplace demands that students are trained to work in a global workplace and education can provide that with online classrooms that have students from across the globe.  Collaborative classrooms are being developed where teachers from one country can co-teach with teachers from another country.  Not only can people from different countries collaborate in their teaching, but also people from differing disciplines.  Of course, this isn't just seen in community colleges.  Creighton's Interdisciplinary EdD program is a prime example of this.

Jon Husband's blog stated that leaders in this very interconnected environment must:

Become deeply aware of and truly mindful about the scope and reach of interconnected markets and flows of information. Understand how and why people are connecting, talking, sharing information. Be prepared to listen deeply, be responsible, be accountable and be transparent.

Leaders in education will need to do these things in order to initiate homeostatic mechanisms  to survive and thrive in this technological environment.

Reference for picture:

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A Revolution in Learning

It is no surprise that the ramifications of the internet continue to change life as we know it.  Not only can we find any type of information we may be searching for, we can often interact with others to learn more.  Web 2.0 has made these interactions not only easier to accomplish, but also an expected aspect of using the internet.

Acquiring knowledge has never been so easy!  I lament the days that I had to dig through card catalogs as I wrote my Master's thesis.  If I didn't understand something completely, there was not a way to easily find information on just the part I did not understand by refining my search.  At this time in my past, information was more scarce and it was controlled by the media (journals, etc.) that took time to publish information after it was submitted.  The information had to go through peer review, possible modifications, and then printing.  All of these things take time and create a bottleneck for information.  Shirky noted that the "professional became the gatekeeper" of knowledge.  The professional in this case was the journals.

That changed dramatically with the advent of the internet.  As Nancy Dixon stated in her blog Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where it is Going Part 1, knowledge began to be managed at  by connecting people to content.  As Web 2.0 emerged, the inter-connectivity of the Web has increasingly connected people with people.  Now, not only can I use the internet to search for information about a given topic, I can connect to others through FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media to interact with others on a particular topic.  Blogs and various user groups are also available to acquire more knowledge - often the practical knowledge of a given topic.  Part 2 of Nancy Dixon's blog about knowledge management provided an overview of how people gain knowledge from others' experiences.  With so many outlets for knowledge to be expressed, Shirky commented that this expansion has led to a "publish-then-filter" system.  Individuals can publish their experiences, etc. and essentially get peer review to occur in real-time.  This has blown away the bottleneck effect that used to keep information more scarce.

The next step in knowledge management is "leveraging collective knowledge" according to Nancy Dixon's third blog post on this subject.  It will require leaders to "include cognitively diverse perspectives", integrate knowledge, and increase transparency.  I am trying to imagine what this will look like in higher education.  Coursework is changing and both the medium and modes by which we teach or changing.  How will this affect higher education administration that is typically very hierarchical?  I look forward to riding the wave of innovation an change in this area.

Outside Reference:

Shirky, C. (2009). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York, NY: Penguin Books.