February 6th, 2010
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field.
I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition classes. By teaching, I don’t mean that they were teaching how to communicate on the Web as much as how to use the programs, in other words, they were spending class time showing what each button of the respective programs did. In essence, their courses were software instruction classes instead of writing classes and, in my opinion, the students’ writing suffered.
I came to composition instruction fresh from industry, where technology was a tool to get a job done. I wondered how, as instructors, we could use technology to fit our needs, rather than the other way around. This, I found, was not a popular approach in my department. Once I entered grad school, I signed up for the main listserv in the field of computers and composition and made a disappointing discovery — they, too, were focusing on how to fit their lessons around the technology. In fact, in 2005, I attended one of their conferences at Stanford and spent three or four days completely frustrated by the focus on technology, rather than writing. Who cares about Drupal or Flash if the students can’t write?
At that point, Larry Cuban’s Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001), addressed my concerns. While Cuban is skeptical about educational technology, he also reports on successful use of ed tech, and that’s what interested me. In particular, he described Esperanza Rodrigues’ preschool classroom at Benjamin co-op, in the Bay area. In teaching students about shapes, Rodrigues blended strong practice using both offline and online techniques, seamlessly moving between using and not using technology to enhance the learning experience. By strong practice, she had a clear lesson plan and learning goal, she engages the students in the learning process, reinforces the lesson and pushes them beyond their comfort level to a new understanding. In my opinion, Rodrigues demonstrates best practice in using technology in education — she uses it as a tool to enhance a strong lesson plan, it is not the main feature and she has not formed her lesson to fit the technology.
A few months later, I read Richard Mayer’s (2001) Multimedia Learning for the first time. I was happy to discover he was at UCSB and started attending his classes. Multimedia Learning establishes clear, rigorous methods for measuring whether learning occurs in multimedia environments and whether the technology enhances or detracts from the learning environment. Mayer offers research-based recommendations for designing learner-centered multimedia environments. [Note: Rich Mayer is my advisor. My research, thinking, and teaching have very much benefited from his mentorship.]
Around that time, James Paul Gee (2003) published What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which approaches the question of technology and learning differently from Mayer’s text, but nonetheless makes very strong contributions. I was most interested in Gee’s claims about why video games are so compelling. The main take-away messages for me in terms of effective ways to incorporate technology into learning environments were the concepts of active learning (see DH Jonassen for more info), pushing students beyond their zone of proximal development (see Vygotsky for more info), and allowing for risk taking by making the consequences for failure low.
I became increasingly interested in student classroom engagement and wanted to compare engagement in classes that taught the same lesson, but one used the learning concepts I was studying and one did not. My colleague Doug Bradley and I developed a learning simulation in which we incorporated Gee’s and Mayer’s ideas. Not surprisingly, in classes where computers were available, but not used, students had high levels of disengagement, using the computers for off-task activities such as ESPN, shopping, and entertainment (we conducted this study before Facebook was popular). In the classes where we used the simulation, off-task activities were minimal, indicating that students were highly engaged (abstract available on ERIC).
While I’ve read many interesting and useful books and articles on Educational Technology, Mayer and Gee are my main influences. Another text of interest is Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point (2000), Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor, where he discusses why kids love Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. Michele Dickey’s (2005) Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design, published in Educational Technology Research and Development presents research-based findings about engaging students using techniques from video games. Of course, there’s many others.
In her recent interview on Frontline, Sherry Turkle said “The point is we’re really at the very beginning of learning how to use this technology in the ways that are the most nourishing and sustaining. We’re going to slowly find our balance, but I think it’s going to take time…” She said that technology is neither good nor bad, but it is powerful. When considering the history of reform in education, we’ve jumped from one promising method to another. I agree with Turkle that the key is balance. We should prioritize learning and engage teaching methods that will best enhance the learning experience.
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February 2nd, 2010
My dissertation is now available online, thus increasing the chance that more than three people will read it. Here is the abstract:
In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they find. By comparing the processes of 150 graduate and undergraduate students during a 50 minute online academic research task, this study examined the role of prior knowledge and cognitive processing in proficient online literacy practice. The findings of this study challenge the assumption that technology alone is all that is needed to effectively complete online academic research. Results of this research indicate that students who bring academic experience to an online academic research task are more likely to succeed than those with technical expertise alone. Furthermore, analyses of students’ cognitive processes yielded insight into online literacy proficiency, defined as the ability to select sources relevant to the research task, synthesize multiple perspectives to build understanding, and effectively communicate that understanding. While certainly requiring medium-specific adaptations, online literacy is not very different from offline literacy. Without the essential literacy skills of gauging credibility and synthesizing materials to form and communicate an understanding, the ease of information access afforded by the online environment does not matter. Findings from this research additionally show that deliberate practice afforded through years of schooling more significantly contributes to online literacy proficiency than short-term instruction.
Further, this research presents and tests a cognitive process model for online literacy proficiency. The model illustrates the interrelated cognitive processes of online literacy while additionally demonstrating the significant contributions of expertise to proficiency. While the scope of this study is limited to college students completing an academic task, the model has implications for other online literacy practices.
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February 1st, 2010
What do you do with the stacks of journals you amass annually as part of your professional memberships? Use them? All of them? Add them to the “free take one” stack in your department’s mailroom? I recycle them on a quarterly basis, after perusing the Table of Contents and any potentially relevant articles. Do we need to receive print copies?
I’m going to use the American Educational Research Association (AERA) as an example of poor practice. Members automatically receive Educational Researcher and have the option of 1-2 additional journal subscriptions added for free. AERA does not offer members the option to receive current journals digitally. Environmentally, this practice is irresponsible, but the following text indicates a larger problem with AERA’s access to scholarship:
AERA is pleased to offer online access to the AERA journal archive — including full-text search capabilities — to members through a joint project with JSTOR. Access may be purchased at the low subscription price of $40 a year and is available only to current AERA members.
Journals in JSTOR have “moving walls” that define the time lag between the most current issue published and the content available in JSTOR. AERA journals have a five year “moving wall.” This means that the most recent issues available to AERA member JSTOR subscribers are from five years ago. The “moving wall” shifts each January when new issues are posted.
I have a problem with their five-year “moving walls.” As AERA describes, there’s a time lag. To impose a five year time lag for scholarship that likely took two years to publish is unacceptable.
Basically, anyone doing research who does not have access to the print publications must wait five years to access the articles. AERA is not alone in this publication practice, many well-established academic journals delay online publication.
Why?
What threats to intellectual property exist if an academic journal publishes its contents online? While I’d like to see this information freely available, let’s consider the question within the current confines of subscription-only library databases. What is so dangerous about publishing research, within the context of a peer-reviewed academic journal, online? Libraries and databases have already established a functioning profit model whereby articles are accessed through subscription or one-time payments. The research is already published and widely available in print, so availability/increased access shouldn’t threaten the intellectual property.
In fact, other print-based academic journals that do publish their articles within the database model send quarterly alerts that include the Table of Contents and links to the articles (with a subscribe or buy option, of course). I’m actually more likely to read these articles because (1) convenient access, (2) I can read them the way I usually read articles, print, highlight, and/or highlight in Adobe Reader, (3) they’re portable, and (4) I can organize them the way I usually organize articles, on my hard drive.
So, AERA, why the five year time lag?
I think we often fear what we don’t understand. Judging from their website, their clunky conference submission system, and their year-long delay in posting papers from their annual conference, AERA seems hesitant to enter the digital space. Regardless of the excuses, this digital ignorance is threatening educational scholarship. True scholarship is a dialogue, a sharing of information that advances our thinking. By limiting access to only those who receive the printed copies of a journal, AERA is, in effect, denying many scholars the opportunity to participate in this conversation.
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January 27th, 2010
Well, Apple’s much anticipated tablet is here: the iPad. Without the benefit of testing it yet, I did a quick tour of the features demonstrated on the Apple website. It looks like a grown-up iPod or iPhone…larger screen and more functions. In fact, maybe it’s the future of laptops — touch screen keyboard, slim design, everything in one place.
I’m most interested in iBooks. I was wondering if vendors would sell a chapter at a time, or the entire book. As Brad Stone pointed out in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, there is concern that Apple will deteriorate profits and presentation of books the way they have music by allowing users to purchase single songs, rather than entire albums. Already, Google and Acrobat make it possible to keyword search books and articles, so in theory, someone can read a section completely de-contextualized from the larger document. However, a spectre of the larger document is still present, whereas with iTunes, users can download a single song without any experience of the larger context. From the brief description on their website, Apple seems to be selling the book as a single unit, but we’ll see.
Of course, to access these fun features, iPad users must have an account with AT&T. So, our reading will be mediated by both Apple and AT&T. If we don’t wish to have an account with AT&T, we won’t get an iPad. More discomfiting, is if a book isn’t in Apple’s catalog, it won’t be available for reading on their tablet. True, this problem exists with Kindle, but Amazon has such a large catalog, it hasn’t seemed problematic.
Before these technologies, our reading was mediated by what was on our shelves, our libraries’ shelves, and the shelves of our local bookstores. Now, in theory, the world is at our fingertips. I have to wonder what we’re losing, though. I remember as a kid finding old books like Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators series serendipitously at my local library.
No one would have recommended it to me and I don’t think it will be a candidate for iPad, but Hitchcock told good stories and I much preferred his series to the more popular Nancy Drew because they were less predictable. What serendipity are we losing by relying on e-catalogs instead of local bookshelves? Definitely, a counter-argument can and is being made for increased accessibility, but I wonder if, the goal is ease of access rather than breadth and relevance of material. Taken a step further, are these new devices selecting popularity over quality, and if so what will we miss?
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January 16th, 2010
I just read William Zinsser’s beautiful address to incoming international students at Columbia’s school of journalism. Toward the end, he says:
“The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t the swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups, windows, and sidebars—or from scraps of talk on a digital phone.”
In an article in the New York Times this morning, Anand Giridharadas claims that we are becoming linguistic utilitarians, treating language “as computers do, as a protocol: a code that machines use to communicate with other machines, a code that is not savored or loved, a code that exists to get the job done and works precisely because it is boring, standardized and pragmatic.” What an unfortunate description of current language use! This claim is pretty bleak and omits the most interesting part of the story.
As many scholars point out, the advent of computers, Internet, text messages, etc., have increased literate practice. Up until the early 80s, most executives dictated messages/letters for others to type. Phone conversations were the norm of business communication, rather than the exception. Innovations such as e-mail and texting, however, require us to think and communicate textually.
Recent additions such as texting and Twitter seem to move us toward less words, rather than providing a space to expound upon our thoughts. Often, these shorter phrases lead to impoverished communication, but they don’t need to. Zinsser’s address emphasizes a point that Nancy Duarte consistently makes in her book slide:ology (2008): the importance of message. A benefit of abbreviated communication is the pressure to condense our message into a sentence. We now need to identify the most salient part of what we’re trying to say and communicate it clearly and concisely.
Clarity and conciseness are a benchmark of good writing regardless of medium. Before Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses, however, we had the luxury of space that a page provides to develop our thoughts. Many abused this privilege. To be an effective communicator in this new space requires skill in condensing a message into a single, compelling sentence. Likewise, in longer pieces, each sentence must have a message.
Now, as Duarte and Zinsser point out, is where story is important. We no longer have the luxury of space for a data dump. Readers expect a lot from our single phrases or sentences and if there isn’t a story or some coherent theme tying our ideas together, we may be read, but we won’t be understood.
True, students are now expected to compose in new media. We assign them to create video, images, presentations, or blogs of their ideas. Rather than seeing these new media as a threat to literacy, especially to good writing, we should engage the possibilities these modes afford.
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January 12th, 2010
Responses to my earlier post about Google-proofing essays made me think about the purpose of “research” assignments in the primary grades. James Ford mentioned that when he was 8 years old, he would copy text out of an encyclopedia. I did, too. Of course, we were handwriting, so we engaged in a low-tech copy/paste.
Reflecting on this practice got me thinking about the purpose of the assignments: report on the state of Kansas, for example. I remember I needed to find out what the capital of Kansas was, the state bird, state flower, and a map. Report is important here. There’s no room for synthesis in this type of assignment. In fact, though the final product was a couple pages about Kansas, the assignment really could have been a fill-in the blank sheet.
State name:
State capital:
State flower:
State bird:
[Paste map here]
Instead, this assignment took the guise of a research report. I remember spending a couple hours on Saturdays at the library, dutifully copying directly out of an encyclopedia, not thinking I was plagiarizing, but instead believing I was doing good work. Given the limited variety of encyclopedias, I have to imagine my teachers were familiar with the texts, especially because 25 students each year would likely turn in the same reports.
So, what is the purpose of research reports in the primary grades? Are students demonstrating their ability to find information? When asked to report on something, they’re basically asked to repeat what they find. There’s really no room for much else.
Copy/paste is not a new phenomenon brought to us by the computer. Blair (2003) describes similar, low-tech practices in the 16th-18th centuries, though it’s likely existed since there were printed materials and means to copy them.
What do we learn from copy/paste? I think we learn more from copy/paste practices than the popular press would have us believe. Taking the example from James’ and my third grade copying efforts, we learned how to find relevant information in a reference text and we read the academic language and selected appropriate passages to use in our report. By reading the encyclopedia entries, we started to familiarize ourselves with a form of academic language. Including the texts in our report helped us practice the language. Imitation is a form of learning, no matter how elementary.
In his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, Bauerlein (2008) describes the copy/paste practices of fifth graders as an example of the erosion of learning and deep thinking: “go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.” This description, however, does not consider the full story. Perhaps the fifth-graders do engage in the superficial stages described by Bauerlain, but how do they select the relevant sites? Which passages do they cut and paste into their document? How do they transition from one idea to the next?
In my dissertation research, I noticed that, even at the university level, students frequently copy and paste. I don’t believe that the thinking stops when they hit control+v, though. Savvy students use the pasted information as a starting point or mid-point, not as an end. While locating the information is made easy by the technological affordances of Google and other search engines, the task of sifting through this information, finding relevant bits, and making meaningful connections remains a challenge.
Perhaps copy/paste is the beginning of the process. As students gain sophistication and their assignments ask them to synthesize, rather than report, these practices complement or supplement the more challenging sense-making processes in which they engage.
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January 7th, 2010
Most of the fun tech tools I use were shown to me by designer friends and colleagues. I find this realization interesting, because I’ve spent the past six years working closely with Computer Science students and can only think of one app a fellow student showed me the entire time we worked together. My art friends, on the other hand, always seem to be asking “have you seen this?” or telling me to “try this,” or, as was the case yesterday, installing a collaborative app, dropbox, on my laptop while I was watching a Youtube video on a different computer.
It makes sense, though. Artists use technology as a tool. Well, we hear a lot about using technology as a tool, but artists are seasoned tool users — they’re used to experimenting with variations of the same tool (different paintbrush sizes) or trying different tools to achieve a certain effect. They’re purpose-driven users who, in their tech use, generally start with a vision and then find a tool to fit, rather than the other way around. Or, they think of ways to use the tool differently, perhaps against its intended purpose.
Speaking of vision, artists are also comfortable with seeing something no one else sees and spending time pushing that kernel into reality. Often, this push involves time to learn how to present the vision with a new medium, mix colors, textures, text & images…in essence, try new approaches until it all comes together exactly right.
AP Photo/Arizona Daily Star, Greg Bryan
Thus, artists are undoubtedly hands-on technology users. They’re not afraid of breaking anything, making mistakes, or getting their hands dirty, because technology is a tool that like any other tool must be experimented with to understand its possibilities. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find Photoshop daunting. InDesign is similarly intimidating. Undoubtedly, these programs have a steep learning curve, requiring hours and patience for proficiency. Yet, I’m always amazed with how fluidly my artist friends use them. Come to think of it, many of my artists friends probably logged as much time in front of video games as my programming friends when we were kids.
For education, I’d like us to take an artist’s approach to teaching with and about technology. Let’s get our hands dirty, experiment without fear of breaking anything. Let’s have a vision first and find the tool to fit. Think of the beautiful result!
[Special thanks to the designers in my life who inspired this post: Tosh, Colleen, Russ, Safa, Nancy, Aaron, Rama, Loretta, Miljena, and Michael]
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December 18th, 2009
In the New York Times last week, Michelle Slatalla wrote a reflection about reading and the loss of attentional focus possibly caused by technology. Her reading experience echoes Nick Carr’s description in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Basically, with so much information available online, she has a hard time focusing on reading a novel…so many questions and ideas compete for her attention that she finds herself putting the novel down in favor of pursuing answers to other tangential questions. About a month ago, another article in the New York Times, “Stop Your Search Engines” by Peggy Orenstein likened this online information seeking to the Sirens’ song: alluring, but ultimately destructive.
Orenstein makes an interesting case for not pursuing the information trail. With so much available, when is it enough? When is information-seeking focused on endless searching rather than finding?
In Slatalla’s article, she challenges herself to read a book and, upon the advice of a friend, re-reads Gilead. I decided to take up the challenge and read it, too. I blocked out a few hours and decided that during that time, I wouldn’t check e-mail or go online. Then, I came across a word that I knew, but just wanted to double-check, insouciant. I could have grabbed my dictionary, but I decided the temptation was too great to go online, so I skipped it. Then, a few sentences later, effulgence. Again, a word whose definition I’m nearly sure of and could certainly glean meaning from the context, but would have liked to look up…online. A few paragraphs later, begats appeared, which I immediately figured out, but found it charming, and wanted to know more. When I was a kid, I always read with a dictionary beside me (very cool, I know) and I was again tempted to grab it. A few pages later, I stopped at susurrus, feeling that surely the author was showing off or at least taunting me. Looking up words to learn or confirm their definitions isn’t pursuing a Siren Song, is it? If I looked them up in the dictionary, I might linger over their etymology or read the definitions of surrounding words, but it likely wouldn’t interfere much with my attentional focus on the novel’s text. However, looking up definitions online would likely mean also checking e-mail, a trip to Facebook, and then, who knows.
I suspect Nick Carr is right. When I came across the vocabulary words in Gilead, I automatically pictured how I would look them up in Google (define: susurrus). I also started wondering what Wikipedia would have to say about the term. Gilead is interesting, but slow. Oddly, Internet searching feels a bit more gratifying…instantly finding information, solving problems…and then, of course, its interactivity makes it seem more entertaining. Is it wrong to be thinking like a Google search? Google was developed to mimic how academics evaluate information, so technically, maybe Google makes our thinking more focused and organized.
When is information just noise? I wonder how much information clutter I subject myself to in my daily searches. I also wonder if all of this searching eventually leads to finding, or just more searching. I guess the insouciant searcher isn’t concerned with the results, but what about those of us really trying to learn something?
Regarding Gilead, it is such a beautifully written book, that I’m glad I took up the challenge to read it. That said, after spending so much time on Facebook, reading a book seems, well, lonely. To be honest, I tried to give Gilead away to an ill friend the other day and she wouldn’t take it, which made me decide to renew my commitment to finishing it, this time in shorter bits. So, now it’s your turn: pick a novel and block out an afternoon or evening for reading and let me know if you’re more successful… Unlike Coke and Pepsi, I think the difference between reading online and reading a novel will be more pronounced. That said, I remember reading a piece by Malcolm Gladwell that said that people preferred Pepsi in taste tests, but if they had to drink a full glass, Coke was the winner….so enjoy your novel.
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December 13th, 2009
I came across an interesting discussion on John Sowash’s blog this morning about Google-proofing essay questions. Sowash provides instructions for making questions Google-proof, using Bloom’s Taxonomy. I have mixed thoughts about this approach.
In defense of Google
First, in defense of Google, I think that educators should not discourage Google use, but instead provide guidelines for informed use. If a teacher notices that students immediately type an assigned question or essay prompt into Google’s search, take advantage of a teachable moment. Discuss, say, how different search terms yield different results. Ask students how they choose which sites to read and then discuss strategies for evaluating credibility. Compare sites that provide informative, documented resources with those that are based on opinion, or not thoroughly developed. Draw upon the findings of Leu’s (2007) study of seventh graders and the endangered tree octopus — ask how believable pictures and images make websites.
AP Photo/Herald Press Joel Phillippsen
Instead of creating walled gardens or entirely banning websites from students use, especially in a research context, educators should empower students to be informed users.
Smarter questions
I like Sowash’s suggestions to use questions that require responses beyond copy/paste or fill in the blank. He suggests asking questions that can begin with a Google search, but then require students to make connections between the materials they find, or draw some sort of conclusion, or move beyond the simple answers in some way. In this scenario, Google search complements students’ learning processes, rather than detracting from it.
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December 7th, 2009
Do you remember the prescient flash piece about Googlezon? If you haven’t viewed it, set aside a few minutes and check it out.
Created in 2004, it rather accurately describes customized content, crowdsourcing, and social networks. It also predicts the future of media, the fall of newspapers in favor of infotainment, the rise of bloggers. What really interests me in thinking about it today, though, is its prediction that Google, a seemingly benign search engine, would take over the world. True, there were already signs, for example, Google’s creation of their own mail service, but really, Google didn’t seem set for world domination yet. Since the Googlezon piece was created, Google has invested in too many services to name, including Blogger and Youtube, and just last week partnered with Tivo.
Google’s motto “don’t be evil” is puzzling. If a giant corporation says it’s not evil, does that make it true? I only wonder because they recently took over EtherPad, an amazing collaborative tool that most of you probably haven’t heard about. To be honest, I was excited to find a cool writing tool that wasn’t part of the Google franchise. I wanted to support the little guys I guess, and I didn’t want to be served adwords or have my behavior tracked in a not so transparent way. I have no reason to believe I was safer with Etherpad, but I’m beginning to wonder what price I’m paying for my free Internet.
Savvy Internet users should know that their behavior is being tracked on the Internet, but do they act accordingly? Does it bother you that Google serves Adwords related to the content of your e-mails when you’re reading your Gmail inbox? Sure, they’re just pulling text, they don’t really know you. In fact, some of the ads they serve are downright funny. But now I use Google calendar — I have a personal and work calendar. I also use Google docs for work, where I also manage two blogs on Blogger. Any Internet search I do is through Google. Why use AltaVista or another search engine when I like the way Google functions?
In the Googlezon world, magazine subscribers receive a magazine with a picture of their house on the cover, taken by satellite, and content served according to the preferences of each resident. Eerily possible?
I feel like a pretty savvy user–I study how people conduct research on the Internet, after all–but I’m not censoring myself on Gmail. The thing is, I don’t really know what information Google is collecting on me. Sometimes I care, but to be honest, I’m pretty complacent. I mean, their motto is “don’t be evil” and they were started by two grad students at Stanford…I feel like they’re like me…(mostly) normal, well-intentioned people. But I have to remember that Google is a company, a company that is quickly snatching up anything independent that competes with them and offering services that directly compete with mega-corporate Microsoft.
Why don’t I, a savvy Internet user, know what information Google is collecting on me and how they’re using it? Why isn’t Google more transparent? Am I a lazy, uninformed user, or is the company who does no evil being secretive and perhaps downright sneaky with my information? What price am I paying for Google’s free services? I find it interesting that a company that pushes for open source and general openness on their phone is so opaque when it comes to us, our information. Where is Google’s worth, after all? Is it in free searches, book previews, streaming video, news? I think its value lies in us.
What does “being evil” mean exactly, in Google’s terms? To write this blog, I did a quick Google (of course) search on its privacy policy. Google has privacy policy videos available, but how many average users view them? The terms don’t explicitly state how or if Google integrates our information across its various platforms or what exactly is shared with third parties. Understanding how our information is used (collected and shared) should be as easy as sharing our information is — perhaps a status bar similar to the one in the bottom corner of Facebook could subtlely appear and request that we opt in/out of information sharing. As Zittrain and others have asserted, more transparency is necessary. For example, Yahoo recently released an Ad Interest Manager that provides opt in/opt out of information collection/sharing. Similarly, privacychoice.org shows which companies collect information from sites you visit. Information collection isn’t necessarily good or bad, it’s a choice, but it’s a choice that we as users have a right to make.
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