Or Samsung, Apple… you get the idea.

Blood in The Mobile is a documentary by Danish filmmaker Frank Poulsen, which pulls back the curtain on the electronics industry’s dirty little secret — indirectly financing child labour and war through their dependence on conflict minerals in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo.

Tin, tantalum and tungsten join gold as yet another natural resource prized by the developed world and problematic for Africans, to say the very least. Regional instability and corruption in the highest levels of national politics certainly don’t help matters much.

The film has a few problems of its own. Given the scope of an industry-wide problem it’s understandable that the film would choose to focus on one manufacturer (Nokia); but given that the story begins with Poulsen and crew at Mobile World Congress — an industry trade show — there was a missed opportunity here in not pressing other manufacturers for at least an informal statement on the issue.

I wonder too why China’s African presence was never brought up. In my own travels to the continent it seems to me that China sees Africa as a business partner whereas the west looks upon it as a charity case — at least publicly. But I’m certainly no authority on the subject, and it may well be that Congo is so volatile that Chinese companies do their business at arm’s length, just like Nokia and their ilk.

However, Blood In The Mobile is absolutely worth seeing for the simple fact that the crew gain access to the infamous mine at Bisie — and more incredibly, goes deep into a mineshaft to reveal what workers endure there. Words honestly can’t describe it; all I can say is  that I’m not exactly well-rested after watching the film last night.

So what can we do about this?

The film’s companion website has a list of charitable organizations that you can donate to. Fans of Apple’s locked-down iAppliances can sign this petition. And you can always vote with your wallet — this table ranks phone manufacturers on their ethical practices, though the scores are hardly encouraging.

But before anything else I urge you to see the film for yourself, then encourage others to do the same. Once you’ve witnessed the horrific conditions in which these precious minerals are extracted you’ll not soon forget.

When all the tech pundits publish their articles and blog posts about how educators are all “abuzz” over Apple’s announcements regarding the next evolution of e-textbooks on their iDevices via iBooks 2, I feel left out.

After all, I’ve been a high school teacher for fifteen years and a bit of a geek most of my life. I blog, podcast, teach social media to other teachers, and yet for some reason I was not “abuzz”. Instead, I was filled with a sense of dread at what could be a golden opportunity missed to remove the suffix “book” from the equation. The author of Steve Jobs posthumous biography, Walter Isaacson, notes that Jobs “believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.” The problem is that iBooks isn’t so much destroying an industry as propping it up and redistributing the wealth so Apple gets to take an indulgent bite.

I’ve been waiting for the “destruction” of the textbook industry for a decade. Why should we provide eminent domain to publishers to lock information on paper in a digital age? Why should students be restricted to ten pound tomes of desk-thudding grandeur when the same information could be provided in bit-form? The textbook industry generates billions of dollars in revenues every year for a handful of publishers that become de facto gatekeepers of education. Of course schools/boards have the choice to buy or not buy specific titles, but when the choices are Grade 9 survey Science text from Publisher A or Grade 9 survey Science text from Publisher B, the only piece to weigh is quantity discounts and whether a staff member is getting royalties.

The costs of producing a textbook that will weather the realities of evolving knowledge and a student’s backpack are no doubt tangible. The costs can be prohibitive as well. Does the “gold standard” text cost $100/copy? Does that prohibit some schools or classes from purchasing enough copies or force alternate titles to be considered? I would hate to think that equitable access to education for all students is subject to tax rates and potential fundraising. Surely knowledge that is good for one student must be good for all.

I’m not disputing the costs involved in putting a textbook together. Instead I’m questioning the need for textbooks (or e-textbooks) at all. The internet provides a grand resource of knowledge that can be searched, clipped, archived and updated on-the-fly. Educators spend countless hours scouring the web for the best online resources for students and share them with each other. Just as a textbook is curated by a publisher, web resources are curated by educators.

Material for textbooks is curated by teachers, just as material on the web is. The web is, by nature, cross-platform. It does not require an iPad or any other brand specific device. Any tablet, smartphone, netbook, laptop, or PC from $100 to $1000 will be able to provide a comparable web experience for students. What part of the formula is missing to explain the unwillingness to shift from paper to bits?

There is a certain level of authority that has been ingrained into anyone over the age of 30, that for information to have worth it has to have weight. Almost every parent of a school age child learned everything they knew as a student through textbooks. If it worked for them, it must be the only option for their children. There is a shift happening in this level of authority, however, as the demographics for web use are becoming ubiquitous and people can’t help but see the ease and portability of web information.

And let’s get past one over-riding piece of marketing propagation here: tablets (including the iPad) are primarily consumption devices, they are not built for sustained creation, especially at an academic level. They can be interactive and engaging, but most students will never be able to comfortably write their first essay or complete a poster project on a tablet. I’ll also be the first to admit that maybe the essay or poster project is not the best form of evaluation in a wired world. I will maintain, however, that we shouldn’t allow the tools of technology to dictate curriculum as much as mitigate the implementation of it.

The choice to move to e-textbooks could put publishers in a tenuous situation, at least in Canada, until Bill C-11 ensures the illegality of breaking digital locks. Most copyright legislation has fair use or fair dealing exemptions when copyrighted material is used for education. In fact, C-11 would make it legal for Canadian teachers to photocopy excerpts from textbooks under such an education exemption. Such an exemption is nullified when a teacher breaks a digital lock to provide such an excerpt even if it’s for education purposes. Since all e-textbooks will come with digital locks to preserve their proprietary device compliance, any teacher who breaks one will be subject to a $5000 fine.

If a page in a Grade 10 Geography e-text would be a great example for my Civics class, and I found a way to crack and copy that page, fair use would not protect me even though my students would benefit. That said, if I performed a web search, I’d probably find a dozen alternatives online that would be adequate replacements.

The internet is a ready-made, platform-independent, crowd-sourced, authority-curated source of knowledge for K-12 education. It contains boundless rich media and allows for browser-based interactivity. Teachers, all over the world, volunteer to curate information that is not only tied to their respective curricula, but relevant to the local needs of their students.

E-textbooks will not be cheaper than hard copies purchased now because schools will not be purchasing books; they will be purchasing licenses that will last for the duration of the course. At the end of a course now, teachers collect books and redistribute them to the next group of students. E-textbooks will be based on a subscription model that will expire when the course ends.

This model has been drilled into consumers’ heads in the same way that you think you “own” DRM-laden music or video files on your iPod or iPhone that you have to illegally “crack” to transfer to another device. You no longer own a CD or DVD. You don’t even own the mp3. You own a license to play that mp3, on that specific piece of technology, for yourself and no one else. This is model we’re being asked to accept for public education, that our taxes pay for limited access to knowledge for our students.

The evolution of textbooks should be in eliminating “books” from the equation. That Apple is wading into the mix with the appearance of cheaper prices of “$15 or less” shouldn’t fool anyone. Textbook publishing houses have made billions of dollars each year up until now, and you can be sure that any future business models will be set up to make even more. In fact, let’s posit the following scenario:

Over a full school year, I teach 6 sections of Grade 10 advanced science every day. In each class I average 30 students. I have purchased a class set of a science texts for the classroom at $100 a copy. We do most work in class, but if a student wants to sign out a copy of the text to take home and return, they can. Under the new e-textbook system each student must have their own $20 copy as they are non-transferable. The $3000 I paid for a class set, which can be used by all my students will now cost $3600 in licenses without the publisher having to print a physical copy. Beyond this year, where I would normally be able to use the class set of texts for at least another couple of years, instead my costs will be $3600 annually on a perpetual basis. After four years, my school will have paid $14400 in individual student licenses that expire at the end of each course instead of $3000 for a class set of printed texts.

This is the publisher’s model for sustainability. If their lobbyists have their way, not only will you not have any choice about buying such licenses, but the numbers of each student enrolled in the course will be forwarded to them by school boards and billing will occur accordingly. Publishers will eliminate the expense of printing, packing, and shipping while making more money for “renting” ephemeral information to taxpayers.

Being “open” is the answer. Let’s embrace the technology that allows us to access the platform-independent information online.

We don’t need to equip students with $600 iPads so they can download iBooks. Buy them a $300 laptop so they can consume and produce content with ease.

Don’t pay rental licenses on digital information that is freely available online. Instead, give educators the resources to find information that will be customized to the needs for sharing, printing, clipping, archiving.

Don’t buy into the archaic model that pages in a book are intrinsically worth more than a webpage. Not only should we allow teachers to curate information, but it should become an essential skill for digital age students. Fostering such a skill is precluded by having a static package of words issued in paper or digital form.

Finally, let the stakeholders in education be able to build on each other’s work. Let curation build on curation. Let lesson and unit plans be public domain. We should not accept legislation that, in any way, prevents a teacher from using any and all resources at their disposal to enable a learning connection with students. To replace an old textbook model with touchscreen version of the same, or worse, seems antithetical to meeting the needs of students. Instead, Apple and textbook publishers seem to be meeting the needs of their bottom lines on the backs of taxes.

—

Anthony Marco is an educator and podcaster based in Hamilton, Ontario. Check his online activities here and offline credentials here. And hear both of us live every Wednesday night on Dyscultured.

I won’t be participating in today’s SOPA blackout for the simple reason that you and I both get what SOPA is, along with the dangers it represents.

Not even a year has passed since I read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, but already the author’s stern warnings about the end of the Internet as we know it seem surprisingly close at hand. Ditto for Jonathan Zittrain and the rise of the Internet appliance, usurping the generative freedom of a personal computer with black boxes so locked down that you can’t even remove their batteries.

It’s scary, awful stuff but the sad truth is that so very few people seem to care.

Most online folk are too busy professing love for their favourite brands on Facebook, handing all sorts of personal information over to Google and letting software algorithms rank them on Klout. For them, “the Internet” is a glittering landscape of commercial services — free as in beer, not freedom.

Likewise for the gadgets they use to get online. They don’t mind a locked phone or a carrier contract so long as the hardware is cheap. They’ve no idea what UEFI Secure Boot is; all they need to know is whether or not there’s a shiny Apple logo on the back.

I really do think that this is how most people see technology and the Internet. Most, but not all.

Though proportionally much smaller in number, there are a lot of us who would choose FTP over Facebook, torrent over Twitter. Some of us are pirates who take the law into our own hands; others are members of The Pirate Party, striving to make the Internet a better place from wherever we happen to access it. We see through the smoke and mirrors, we find what’s broken and fix it — or at the very least lay bare the flaws for all the world to see.

The Internet is often a different place for us. We can take steps to anonymize ourselves and online activities if need be. And when it comes time to choose products and services we tend to favour those that respect our privacy and freedom. As in free.

Sure, there’s some overlap, but through these two very different types of users it almost seems as if there’s two Internets — same technology, different philosophy. There’s the bright and shiny stuff, and underneath the platform and packet-agnostic foundation on which it runs. Some of us know this because we are old enough to remember how it all came to be; some of us are simply curious about how it all works. Most of them are blissfully unaware.

We’re trying to let them know. And this SOPA blackout is proof of that.But honestly, I’m not so sure it’s going to work. Facebook itself hasn’t gone dark, and mum’s the word at Apple and Google. Maybe we’re fighting a losing battle here. Maybe it’s inevitable that the days of the free-for-all Internet have come to pass.

Maybe it’s time to start taking care of ourselves.

The first day of the new year saw me in Hong Kong’s Mongkok district — more specifically the Meizu flagship store there, selling its inaugural shipment of the MX Android-powered handset. You can read more in-depth reviews of the MX here and here. What follows is my own impressions of the device, along with the hype surrounding it.

About the hype… because the first MXes in Hong Kong had to be pre-ordered online I don’t think anyone had to camp out beforehand to secure one. But by the time of my midday visit the queue of customers was so long and the store so busy that I wasn’t allowed inside to even look at the device.

I returned to the store for an informal hands-on with a display unit a few days later. The two standout features of the MX seem to be (1) the contextual “soft keys” on either side of the physical home button, and (2) a very aggressive price — the equivalent of about $400 USD for a dual-core Android device.

Other good stuff includes:

• No carrier locks;
• Pentaband 3G service for Canada’s upstart carriers and T-Mobile USA;
• A removable battery;
• An unlockable bootloader, according to a manager at the store.

The only real gotcha is Meizu’s choice to go with a micro-SIM instead of a standard SIM card. I’ve a feeling this was a decision driven expressly by the desire to woo iPhone users.

Now it’s been a few years since a friend in Japan showed me Apple’s Asian character input for touchscreens, but it was apparently quite revolutionary for its time. And not speaking or writing Cantonese myself I can’t tell you how text input on the MX compares; instead, how about I show you and you tell me?

Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to switch the handset I was looking at over to English, but Meizu’s Flyme OS looked a lot like MIUI, another Chinese take on the Android platform. Flyme goes perhaps a step further than MIUI in offering its users an online locker for media and such.

With the Galaxy Nexus priced at more than $700 CAD locally it’s no wonder the Meizu MX is drawing such crowds. It’s fast, well-built and optimized for the local market. Were it not for the micro-SIM I might have brought one back as a souvenir.

Hope everyone is enjoying a safe and happy holiday thus far… Starting today I’m taking a little break of my own; I’ll be in Hong Kong for the next week or so, with regularly scheduled blog posts resuming on January 11th.

See you then!