Month: December 2022

Reflections on 2022

We are at the end of yet another year, and this time, the end of 2022 so its time to briefly blog a bit of a reflection on my year. The easiest place to start in reviewing the year is the pledges I made at the beginning of 2022.

Exercise and Health

2022 saw me once again reach 750km of running for the year however it saw me much more inconsistent than I had been in 2021.   Although I managed to run over 100km in each of 4 months, more than I had managed before, I also had some months where I achieved very little distance at all.   In terms of distance, I did finally manage to achieve a couple of 10km runs although these runs were rather broken and slow.     My speed over the whole period continued to be rather slow, being on average 6:21 min/km whereas I would have very much likely to have been closer to the 6-minute mark.  That said, throughout my years running my focus was always on achieving the distances regularly rather than on building up my speed.    Towards the end of the year, I did start to suffer some joint and muscle pains so decided to rest from mid-December onwards to allow me to then look to restart in 2023.

I suggested at the start of 2022 that another health related plan was to reduce my alcohol intake.  Sadly, this didn’t really happen and the idea of a “dry” month certainly never looked like happening.   Now, I enjoy a beer especially when watching the football or a good film, plus it is one of the few vices I believe I have so I am not too disappointed on failing to meet this pledge.   It is important to balance trying to achieve things, to work hard, etc, with also having a bit of fun.  I suspect my alcohol intake is overall slightly less than in 2021 although I don’t have any really evidence to support this, so this may simply be me justifying not doing more.

Another area of health which didn’t work out in 2022 related to dental accidents with a number of accidents during 2022 resulting in dental treatment which I find difficult, and that’s even before, as a Scotsman, I get to having to pay for it!

I also note that as I finished work in December I fell ill with a bit of a flu (not covid!).  Upon looking back to 2021 the same issue had occurred with illness in December.   I wonder if this is me simply pushing too hard and failing to consider my health, then as the term and year ends and I relax, the strain on my body catches up with me, manifesting in illness.  Maybe something to think about next year in ensuring I take care of myself as term ends in order to hopefully avoid a period of illness over the festive season.

Wellbeing /Happy memories

Sitting here writing this things don’t quickly come to mind although a family holiday abroad, our first since the pandemic does come to mind and was enjoyable.  I also thoroughly enjoyed a trip with my wife as part of our anniversary which saw us spend a few days in London together, even taking in a stage show and seeing a number of historic sites around London.   There are also a number of other significant memories created during the course of 2022 however I will not go on to list these here.  So this is all positive.

I think part of the issue here is that I maybe don’t have a great long term memory and therefore find it difficult to quickly reflect.   To that end I started noting things, achievements, etc, starting in March 2022 to help me with this.    Reviewing this it seems clear a vast majority of the notable things from 2022 relate to either my job or to the wider education and technology sectors in which I work rather than to personal or family related things.  This is something I need to think a bit more on in terms of my work/life balance and whether it is a balance I am happy with.

One memory I will have for 2022 will definitely be turning up to the Houses of Parliament to attend a morning meeting, but sadly attending on the wrong day, a day to early, followed by feeling ill and not being able to attend the event on the correct day.  Ooops.

Reading

I didn’t read quite as much as intended or would have liked during the course of the year.   I think I maybe managed 6 or 7 books rather than my normal 12 books although I did start to read some fiction in addition to my non-fiction, enjoying re-reading Frank Herbert’s Dune and also a number of HP Lovecraft short stories.    The issue was generally one of time and priorities with reading sitting with a reasonably low priority.  This was however helped by the various conference and other events I attended which required train travel, thereby providing me with an opportunity to catch up on reading.

Contributing

This is likely the area where I think I did best during 2022.   I had opportunities to contribute to several different education and technology conferences or other events as a speaker, panellist, or guest while also developing a number of different bits of content for various organisations.   There were also many brilliant opportunities to network and catch up with colleagues from across the UK including the ANME ambassadors, Bukky Yusuf, Mark Anderson, Al Kingsley, Olly Lewis, Abid Patel and Emma Darcy to name but a few.  The fact that Abid Patel presented me with a can of my favourite Bru (intentional spelling) at an event being a particular highlight.   I was also both surprised but also very pleased to be nominated for Network Manager of the Year as part of the EduFuturist awards for 2022.  This was definitely not something I had expected or even hoped for.    As such am not sure I could have achieved much more that I did in 2022.    Here’s hoping for the same kind of opportunities in 2023.

Work

I think the year in work went well with the fact I have began to take notes of achievements being a useful aide-mémoire to help in assessing this.   When I addressed my team before the school broke up for Christmas it was good to be able to go back to the summer holidays and the beginning of term and list off some of the many things we have done, introduced or changed during the course of a single term, where had I not noted these down they may have simply slipped from memory.  

Other achievements

2022 once again saw me take on an external accreditation in ISC2s Certified in Cybersecurity.   It had been a number of years since I had last needed to take on a proper exam so I was a little nervous.   As it turned out a lot of the content overlapped with some of the other accreditations I already held and as such I didn’t find the exam to be that challenging but was still happy to achieve confirmation of my achievement of the certification.

Conclusion

2022 was a busy year and I think I crammed quite a bit into it.   I think one of my issues is that I seek that single highly significant and memorable event where this just didn’t happen in 2022, or indeed in a number of the preceding years.    This may detract from the many lesser events and achievements I did reach in 2022 and hence leave me feeling a little depressed or under appreciative of what I did achieve.   For 2023 I need to get passed this and be more positive and appreciative of that which I can and do achieve.

And so with my quick review of 2022 out of the way, it is onwards to 2023.   I want to try and treat 2023 as a fresh start and new year so hopefully be able to look back, around a year from now, and find my reflections on 2023 are not merely a repeat of those from 2022.    My next blog post will therefore focus on pledges for 2023 and how I might bring about the change I would like to see.

Online Safety Bill

So, the online safety bill is once again back under consideration and already looking like its getting softer.    The proposed dropping of the “legal but harmful” clause being another example of a focus on individual privacy winning out over monitoring and filtering in the interests of public, and child, safety.  

Now I understand the challenge here of balancing individual privacy and public good.   Individual privacy is enshrined in the principles of basic human rights, yet we want our governments, intelligence services, police and even schools to be able to monitor and filter content to keep people safe and to proactively identify potential threats to the lives and wellbeing of those under their care.    These are opposing points on a continuum and each step made positively in one direction is usually at the expense of the other position.   More privacy means less ability to monitor/filter in the interests of public good.    More filtering/monitoring means less privacy and the risk of data being mis-used or leaked.

To me it is clear that there is a definite tendency towards individual privacy winning out in this argument.  Apple quietly dropping its plan to monitoring iCloud accounts for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and now the UK government looking to remove the “legal but harmful” clause being two good examples of how privacy is winning.    I doubt this will change, at least for now, and especially as more and more organisations are seeing fines and reported issues as to how they are managing the data of individuals.   So, what is the solution in particular in relation to schools where online safety is such a key and important topic and issue?

I think the key here is in establishing very clearly the need for social media vendors to look after children using their platforms.    Maybe the “legal and harmful” clause is inappropriate when applied across the general population but surely we must be able to agree we need to protect our children and therefore identify some of the materials which might be legal yet harmful to them.   And it isnt just the content that is the issue, but the medium and the algorithms feeding the content.   Is it right to categorise a child, where children are more impressionable, and then field them a specific type of content constantly, based on trying to keep them hooked on an app?   Might this not shape their world view such that they see things as rather binary rather than the more nuanced and complex nature of the real world and real life?    Is it right to feed children almost constant streams of content, including potentially harmful content, or provide contact with unknown individuals?   We need to make the vendors consider the medium they providing along with their algorithms and the potential impact they have rather than just pointing to the content as the issue which needs dealt with.

I will admit I saw problems with the Online Safety Bill from the outset, and even more so given it was first proposed as a draft in May 2021, over 18 months ago;   In the technology world 18 months is a long time and a lot can happen so this highlights how legislation will always be playing catch up.    My original concerns, I will admit, were more on the technical side of things.   Privacy points towards end to end encryption and other security solutions which then hamper monitoring and filtering, plus there is the challenge that social media vendors cross geographic jurisdictions, where different governments may have different motives and ethical standards for the monitoring they may require or request.    Also any weakening of security and privacy may in turn increase the likelihood of cyber criminals gaining access to data. So my concerns were that, although the bill might be well meaning, it would be difficult or impossible to effectively implement.

That said, something needs to be in place and I think this is the point we have now got to, that we need to accept something imperfect as a starting point and then hopefully build from there.    I will also admit that the responsibility for online safety doesn’t just belong to the centralised provider of social media and other services, or to the centralised government of the nation within which a user resides.  When we talk of online safety and children, parents and guardians also have their part to play, as do school pastoral teams, form group tutors and teachers, friends and other members of a child’s wider social and family circle.   And maybe this focus on the online safety bill for a single answer may actually be having a negative impact in taking our eye of the need for a wider and collective effort to keep children safe.

I suspect the solution at this point is to get the online safety bill into law.  Its better than nothing and can add to the wider efforts required, and hopefully be seen as a step in the right direction rather than an endpoint.

Big Tech and balance?

Within the technology space there are now a small number of hugely powerful players.   These players, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta (previously Facebook) and Apple, are now so dominant that their impact is felt beyond the technology space.   With this comes some advantages, but as I have often written, we live in a world of balances, and therefore there are also some potential risks or drawbacks.

Writing this blog piece came as a result of reading an article in relation to Sony and the PlayStation brand, a large and powerful player within the gaming space, where they are being sued in relation to breaching anti-competition laws, using their powerful position to apply pressure to games developers and publishers which then drive up game prices and therefore profits.  You can read the article here.    We have previously seen similar lawsuits levelled against both Google and Amazon in relation to their shopping platforms either favouring suppliers or brands based on their relationship with Google/Amazon or favouring their own brand products in the case of Amazon.    In the case of Google/Amazon the concern relates to their power resulting from providing the search functionality for users while also either providing products themselves or providing advertising services to brands/suppliers.  

And this isn’t the only risk in relation to these big players.    In the case of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple, they store our data for us in the case of Google Drive, OneDrive or iCloud.    Where this is free storage, this is convenient for us, but if we aren’t paying for the service how are the ongoing costs being covered?Recently France suggested that schools not use the free services of Google or Microsoft for this reason.

It may be that in using their services for search or for purchasing items or for music, etc, they gather data about us.   So as the large players, that most of us will have regular interactions with, they will be gathering huge amounts of data about us which they then can use to profile and predict our behaviours.    Now we might accept that they do this for good reasons such as improving their services, etc, however if we believe that some of their corporate practices have been questioned it may also be reasonable to consider that they could seek to misuse this data.    And in the case of those services supported by advertising revenue it would be easy to see how they might use the data to influence our decision making and that’s before you consider the possibility of these services, themselves, suffering a data breach resulting in all this data being leaked onto the public internet.

There is also the issue of truth;  In the case of Google and Facebook, which allow users to access the news and other current affairs information, they control the information they present to users.   How do we know that they are presenting the “right” information?    (I note that establishing what is “right” or “the truth” is a problem in itself, however is outside the scope of this short post)   How confident are we that the information being presented to us is absent of bias?   Do the algorithms present sufficiently broad viewpoints or just present a singular viewpoint, that which the algorithm thinks we want to hear? In trying to keep us engaged with the platform do the algorithms tend to only present viewpoints we are likely to agree with, thereby creating echo chambers and online binary arguments?

The significant issue here is the fact that we havent been through this kind of technological change ever before in history.   Yes, we had the invention of the printing press, of radio and of TV, but these didn’t impact on society with quite the same pace of change as the combination of smart phones, internet access and social media.    And the difference in pace of change is so easily observed in the rate of adoption with the TV taking 22yrs to reach 25% of market access while Facebook only took 2 years.   We are now in a situation where so many of us are carrying an internet enabled device in our pockets, and regularly interacting with apps, including search and social media, where these apps and their underlying algorithms are constantly gathering data in order to hone and adjust the content which they serve us with.  

Now I know when I talk to students they don’t want to give up the convenience of google search or amazon for shopping, or the interesting content, including that from friends and family, provided by TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.   I will admit I am equally reluctant and would find not having google and twitter difficult.  

So what is the answer?    

Well I think the answer is simply to discuss and acknowledge that these services and the vendors that provide them, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, etc, provide us beneficial solutions, however in most things there is a balance.   We need to be aware of this balance, we need to discuss this balance with students such that they know the drawbacks and risks associated with the vendors and solutions we now so commonly use.It may be that our current technology revolution resolves itself much like TV, radio and the printing press of the past, however in case it doesn’t, I think we need to develop our overall awareness of the risks.