#technological literacy

Misinformation, hidden features, ai, convoluted terms of service; all of has just become the norm!!!! Mostly due to the modern addition to convenience. No. Thank you.

The only way to make a change is to put in the hard work of educating yourself. Learn how technology works. Be aware of everything you agree to. Ignore the lure of frivolous convenience. Take measures to protect your privacy. It may be a slow process. Maybe you just start by switching which browser you use. This is good, this is an excellent start!!! The important part is that you care and you genuinely want to make a difference. You don't have to become a tech genius overnight, you just need to know more than the people trying to control you want you to know.

So first off, there are a few websites with "fx" in their name. You've probably seen people link to them on Discord before, I personally use fxtwitter a bunch. These are a bunch of unrelated websites made to fix embedded links.

One of these sites is "fxdeviantart", which recently had its domain expire. This lead to some people incorrectly believing that the site got "hacked". Nothing like that ever happened they probably just forgot to pay for the webhosting. However, people started spreading this misinformation and tacking bigger and bigger stakes to it.

Suddenly people are saying links to fxdeviantart will give you viruses which, to my knowledge, isn't even a major thing on the modern internet. You tend to see more general malware or just simple phishing far more often.

Then people started saying that the same thing applied to the site "fxtwitter". Fxtwitter is an entirely different website with entirely different owners. It is unrelated in all ways except function.

They then expanded that logic to say that the "FX prefix" was comprised, so using anything with it in the url was a danger to its users. There is no such thing as a formalized "prefix" when it comes to urls on the internet. Any prefix that might exist for a website's url is just an informal thing denoting some common trait. Most of the times it's just a vibe thing.

So basically, baseless misinfo based on a lack of technological understanding spread via people who could've figured out it was bull with a single google search any step along the way.

It's just really interesting to see this kinda stuff still spreading. Rumors so much like the stories spread on the internet when I was growing up. Of how just viewing a single sketchy webpage could brick your PC. Catastrophizing mental gymnastics over how a picture of goatse could steal your passwords. The internet safety equivalent of the rumors of the truck with Mew under it in the first Pokemon games.

“A poll from the Canadian Medical Association, conducted in May, found that nearly half of Canadians have consulted a physician online and were ‘highly satisfied with the results’; many believed that further expanding access would benefit patients and improve health outcomes. But Ann Heesters [the director of bioethics at the University Health Network] is worried about those being left behind... Access to virtual care, she says, can be limited by poverty, homelessness, technological literacy, or lack of Wi-Fi access: a woman living with domestic violence may not have the privacy necessary for a video call; a patient with an acquired brain injury could have difficulty following directions over the phone.”

“But equity in virtual care goes beyond access, suggests Allison Crawford, associate chief of virtual mental health at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. ‘That is the gateway to the care, but it’s also about the experience: what kind of follow up you receive, what interventions you receive, whether you have privacy when you engage in care,’... A spokesperson for Ontario Health... [said] that ‘as virtual care has become mainstream, geographic, socioeconomic and other considerations remain of key importance when it comes to ensuring access to care for all Ontarians.’ OTN, they added, is also working with municipalities to prioritize broadband-internet access and to use locations such as libraries for patients to receive virtual care, and partnering with Indigenous communities and Aboriginal Health Access Centres to improve access to virtual care.”

TVO, November 17, 2020: “‘Left out of this equation’: Why virtual health care is leaving some Ontarians behind,” by Abigail Cukier

Technological literacy being taught from a young age. A+

My top five moments of technological literacy:

1. First time I repair a major problem on a computer.

2. First time I overclocked an older computer.

3. First time I learned how to repair a Xbox.

4. Being able to put pictures from my phone onto the internet when phone cameras were in their infancy.

5. When I explored and self-taught myself about disc imaging and how to modify files into such.

One of the ‘optional requirements’ we need to address is that of our audience definition, something that I've been struggling with since the beginning of thesis. The audience for my thesis product always seemed so broad and vaguely general that it seemed not worth addressing. After all, I wasn't planning on only designing for white males in their 50s with income over $150K. As a nod to my service design project last semester, I decided to focus more on user goals and motivations; psychographics rather than demographics. To do that, I backed up a bit and created a concept map around the core areas of my thesis project: design, technology and geography.

After thinking about the technology required for my project, it became clearer to me the different motivations, needs and technological literacy that various people using this would possess. By technological literacy, I refer not so much to rote skills but to the understanding and critical thinking of the deeper implications of using technology. A generation ago, being able to use a word processor or create charts in a spreadsheet application fulfilled this definition. With computers today being ubiquitous, user-friendly and interconnected by default, just knowing how to use technology isn't enough—one must know how to use it wisely. This kind of literacy centers on understanding the legal or ethical uses of technology and its consequences (e.g.: posting photos of yourself drunk and vomiting on Facebook for potential employers to see).

Obviously, geography is the content of my thesis. My experience with learning geography in school amounted to memorizing state capitals for memorization's sake. No wonder people grow up uninterested in geography and cannot see all of the aspects and disciplines within it. Geography helps teach and visually convey such concepts as patterns, distribution, correlation and juxtaposition—all useful for analyzing data and finding answers (or developing hypotheses) for a variety of subjects. For this reason, I imagine that one possible adaptation could be for educational purposes (‘the budding scholar’ as I'm labeling those beginning users). 

Valuable in my research are the learning theories of the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom. His categorizations of low to high-order thinking skills became a helpful framework to determine various users’ goals and their interactions with my thesis project. While some people would no doubt be passive information consumers (‘the info-tourist’), I'm interested in targeting those who have a deep interest in learning by analyzing data, evaluating it and hopefully creating and collaborating with others, thereby adding to the world's organization of knowledge (‘the deep diver’ and ‘the professional researcher’).

After identifying the basic users, their motivations, technological literacy and goals became more apparent. Assessing their current tools used for informational searches was derived in part from analyzing the results to my recent survey. From all of this, I could compile a list of basic actions needed to fulfill their goals and organize all of this data into a spreadsheet. In turn, hopefully this will inform the functions I want my final prototype to have, or at least the ones required for a minimum viable product.

Finally, using a method often associated with agile development, I developed a few user stories. As a way to describe these people, their goals and actions, the user story is a concise statement written from the user's point-of-view:

“As a [user type], I want to [some action] so that [some benefit].”

This format in not unlike the one I found extremely helpful in clarifying my thesis statement of purpose. With that in mind, a few user stories of my own to conclude with…

As a junior high school student, I want to learn geography so that I can understand other subjects better.

As an armchair historian, I want to quickly find out about some topical story during my commute so that I can engage in intelligent conversations with friends and co-workers.

As an aspiring scholar, I want to gain in-depth knowledge about a particular subject or place so that I can satisfy my curiosity.

As a professional reporter, I want to effectively research, analyze and correlate data through a geo-spatial lens so that I can write a lengthy article for my employer.