Special Education Today newsletter 4(21)
The week’s news and info for the week of 11 November 2024
Welcome to the 21st edition of the fourth year of the newsletter for Special Education Today. This issue appeared 18 November 2024 and it covers the week beginning 11 November 2024. It includes the usual eye candy in the form of a photo, some notes about the status of SET, a list of posts that appeared during the covered week, and some comments.
Photo
At a meeting in Tempe, AZ, on 19 November 2021, I happened to snag this photo of three people whom I consider admirable colleagues and pals. I think all three are among the subscribers to SET, so when you drop a comment or a like on a post here, you can suspect that they may well see it.
I know that Tim L. will be attending the conference of Teacher Educators for Children with Behavior Disorders. I fear we may not be fortunate enough to see Melody T. and Betsy T. in attendance, too. If they do make it, though, I hope I can get an updated version of this photo.
Betsy, Melody, and Tim won’t be the only luminaries attending (if they all make it). There’s a chance we shall that Hill W., Kathleen L., JT,, and maybe (even if it’s unlikely), Lysandra & Bryan C. Of course, I’ll keep a lookout for other pals, too.
Flashes of the electrons
One of my sources of joy with publishing SET is seeing readers interact with the content. Pretty much every morning, I open the dashboard for SET and scan the activity on the site…”Oh, yay! People are clicking the like button on [post x]!” “Cool! There’s a new subscriber!”
Now, it’s not just the hits of personal joy that I get from those interactions. I also learn stuff. People write informed and informative comments. For example, this past week there were comments by Michael G. and Fredj D. Thank you!
Welcome to some new people in the neighborhood, including Deifa S., Selma P., Sam L., Zandra S., M. A. H., and Sarah.
Sandi R. has been a frequent “liker” for since the spring of 2024, and she was dropping them again this past week, too. I also want to acknowledge the “likes” dropped by Dan H., Jen W., Fredj D. (2), Sandra D. (2), Larry M., Laura McK., Tom Z., Zandra S., Katie D., Linda L., and Sarah.
All these interactions help SET grow. The Intertubes know when people visit, like, or comment on things. Higher rates of interactions move those things up in the rankings of the bazillions of things on the Intertubes. So, your interactions are valuable for advancing the visibility of SET. Thanks!
Of course, a particularly direct way to advance the number of people who know about SET is to tell your friends and acquaintances who share your interest in kids with disabilities and the special education that they should receive. So, it’s great if you forward a post to a colleague. Thanks for doing that. It’s even greater if you share a link via the Substack share feature, because then that recipient connects to the post under her or his own auspices, not yours.
Just in case it’s helpful, here’s a link to share this post!
This week’s ToC
Well, I posted seven notes on SET proper since the last newsletter.1 I hope that they are helpful. Here's a listing:
Special Education Today newsletter 4(20): The week’s news and info for the week beginning 4 November 2024
Readiness of early childhood language learners in Québec: Do pre-k experiences lessen the risk associated with dual-language learning?
Something we wish didn't happen: What is the story about a teacher injuring a child?
World Kindness Day: From where did this day come?
William Conley Rhodes, II, 1918-2011: Here's to a giant who once roamed the special education landscape
North Carolina promoted support of early child care: Should kids with disabilities be considered in finding solutions?
Gigi's Playhouse world conference: Couldn't some of us benefit from learning more about this organization?
Commentary
I’m going to go a little bit off track here. Warning: This commentary is not directly related to children with disabilities or special needs education. I’m simply providing some background knowledge about technology that influences some of my behavior.
Now, by saying “technology,” I’m opening a door to talk about magic pens and other adaptive devices, eye-gaze software, super wheelchairs, speech-to-print…stuff that I know is of interest to many of us. Nor am I going to engage in a dry-as-desert discussion about artificial intelligence (though that’s a topic of interest and one that about which some SET readers—I’m looking at Michael G.—know a shipload).
I just want tell y’all about some features of everyday tech that cause me concern. Just a a few paragraphs ago, I encouraged readers to click a “share” button. I really want readers to share SET content, but—there it is: the “but”—I hope folks are aware of what happens when they click that link. Just like when one clicks just about any link on the Web (or interacts otherwise such as forwarding a message), one sends a mass of data to some where on the Intertubes.
I’m going to anthropomorphize and lapse into an admixture of cognitive psychology, programming, and fiction to explain what happens when one clicks a link on the Web. Before I lapse into admixture, though, I need you to realize that this is all about communications between clients (our apps such as browsers, mail programs, and etc. that are “on” our computers) and servers (remote computers that “host” files—including other programs). And the language they clients and servers speak often uses something like capitalized words to refer to a specific word; I’ve used $ at the beginning of such terms in this dialogue.
So, imagine it’s late at night (play some outer-space or eerie music) and your client computer requests a file from a file-serving computer. One of we human users2 clicks a link, that initiates a message that is sent over the Intertubes from our client to someone’s server.
Back in the day (i.e., 1993-94) when I was first creating Web (and Gopher) sites, The client and the server communicated quite simply:
Client: Hey, Pete, I’m Alyssa. Here are my credentials. Please send me the file named “/about-us/people/home.html.”
Server: “Oh, sure! Here it comes.”
Then we realized that we code writers could use some of those credentials to customize what the server sent. For a dippy example, we could send a certain form of “margin: end-of-line” to PCs and a slightly different form of “margin: end-of-line” to Macs. We also figured out that we didn’t have to serve a specific file itself, but we could write (construct, create) that file on the fly as the server sent it out the door, based on features of the request from the client. The computer scientist programmers were not just in the house, they were it hog heaven.
Client: “Hello. Hello. I’m Jan re’Quest. I’m speaking in $[http or ftp or ssh or Ruby or PHP or even ASP; some Internet Protocol]. Here are my credentials [hands a thick sheaf of papers to the Server]. I’m hoping to retrieve a $file that I understand is located at $/x/y/z in your folder system.
Server: Ahh, greetings and salutations, Jan. I also speak $[that Internet Protocol], thanks. Let me just glance at these documents…hmm, I see you're coming from $[Website] and you represent $[user=Mahatma_Ghandi] who uses $[computer identity] and that computer connects to the Intertubes at $[address]. Okay, the basics seem to be in order. Let me just use some of these data…uhm, I see your client is connecting at a $LowSpeed and your client’s screen size is $Npixels and you are using this $[InternetServiceProvider] and you got my $file location from a $referral by $mnop…let me just file all these other data…and, here you go…I’m sending that $file to your client right freakin’ now….
Woman-oh-man! Customization! Now the data that your client sent (much of it called “environment variables”) gets sucked not into the “logs” for the server. But wait! There’s more. Suppose that the credentials I mentioned earlier also include one or more unique fields.
Most of us have seen these special fields. Sometimes when my friend sends me a link, the link looks something like this
https://www.TurkeyTime.com/about-us/People/Tom/?Til=134hjnl;kehr_qw;ohiernPUPOIHBnPYH_3ryHOC;joph9078X:H~padhfo;h%)O*(__a;hdfQ=mnop-done
What in the world? Well, back to the conversation between the machines:
Client: “Hello. Hey! I’m Jan re’Quest. I’m speaking in $[http]. Here' are my credentials and please note that I have a special entry called "Til=134hjnl;kehr_qw;ohiernPUPOIHBnPYH_3ryHOC;joph9078X:H~padhfo;h%)O*(__a;hdfQ=mnop-done” for the SuperSwamiWhoKnowsAll data base, so please file it accordingly.
Server: Oh, sure.. got you… here comes your file. I’ve sent the data to SSWKA.
OK, let’s skip ahead a bit, but with this recap: I clicked a link on a Web page. That click sent a request for a page to be returned to my client. Along with that click, I sent a shipload of data about my computer, including some obvious stuff (e.g., where my computer connects to the Intertubes) as well as some special poop that is squirted into my request by software lodged on my computer or on the computer where I clicked the link.
Given those data about the requests (the location of the link where I clicked, when I clicked it, from what computer I clicked it, how I connected to the Intertubes, what pages I had taken to get to that link that I clicked, what language my computer is using, how big my monitor is, my time zone, what browser I’m using, and on and on…plus the special codes that go into some proprietary data base.
Just imagine a giant data set about each of your clicks, messages (mail and text), and other actions on the Intertubes….
That’s not all there is to it. Given those data, people with sophisticated (okay, at least advanced undergraduate) skills can use statistical techniques to classify messages. They can sort all the records in the data base that have a certain specific computer number (a “MAC address”) and then sort by those connections to certain Web sites (say, “white supremacist” or “save the whales” organizations). Ahh, profiles might begin to emerge.
Client: “Hey, server. It’s I, your old friend, Jan re’Quest, I’m sending you a request from some client who has recently searched for shoes and a new hybrid car. You might want to use those data to send them some particular advertisements.”
Using fancy statistical techniques such as latent-trait analysis or sub-typing, they can find clusters of users of the Intertubes. This is essentially what Cambridge Analytical did using data from Facebook.
This scenario is why some giant corporations (I’m not naming them, but I bet you can guess the identities of three or four of them) are racing to create better methods for farming-harvesting-storing data about our behavior (Including the behavior or our kids. With lots of data, they can employ AI to describe, predict, and (gasp) control our behavior. What should we do?
Meanwhile
I travel the week of 18 November to the conference of TECBD. I hope to see y’all there. So, okay, here are my familiar admonitions: Whether you’re coming to Tempe or not, please remember, to stay safe (seatbelts!) and that includes taking appropriate precautions neither to catch or to share viri and such. And, of course, please ensure that you teach your children well.
JohnL
SET Editor guy
Once-upon-a-time teacher and researcher
Charlottesville
SET should not be confused with a product with the same name that is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades (see “Lovitt’s Lines” for examples from those days). Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization. I’m not selling anything here other than what you read in the posts.
I wrote “proper” because I wanted to acknowledge the “notes” I posted on the more chatty part of Substack. There are some things that appear there but not on the main site.
It could be a robot, too. You may have heard of “spiders” that “crawl” the Web. They essentially click on links, too, to create maps of connections around the Web.