Should Job Applicants Provide Facebook Passwords? No. Unless It's the HR Manager Post They're After..

"Please enter your facebook log-in details." If that were one of the requests on a job application form, what would you do? When I first noticed streams of comments this week on the topic of employers asking (or demanding) to be able to view candidates' facebook pages I have to admit to thinking that this was just a limited bit of nonsense in some backward part of a distant state across the Pond.

It is real, though, and, whilst I am not sure how many actual instances have arisen or whether it might be restricted to applicants for professions where it might (I say 'might' - that doesn't mean I agree it should) be reasonable to make a thorough check of someone's personal publications, it is a worrying development.

If it is something that Human Resource Managers have decided to start including in the process of selecting from what must be an ever increasing pile of candidates for jobs in these days of high unemployment levels then I would like to add my voice to the objections being raised.

My first thought is 'Why just facebook?' This makes me think that there was a group of very intense and well-meaning sorts sat around a table one day who made the decision in a virtual vacuum, with little or no informed advice. One can imagine the discussion:

"Did you hear about that man who posted rude pictures on his ex-wife's facebook page?"
"Oh, terrible. Seems to be more of an unsocial network to me..."
"Yes, lots of youngsters putting silly images of themselves on there. No shame. What is the world coming to..."
"When I was young..."
"Exactly. It sounds a horrid place and not somewhere I'd want to let my children go."
"I suppose our employees do use it. Who knows what they're saying about working here..."
"Or us..."
"Hmmm. We ought to do something to check."
"We do. I regularly Google the names of some - you know, the ones we'd be worried about."
"So you know what they're doing there then?"
"No, there's some private setting or something they use to hide stuff from us. We would have to have their log-in thing."
"How about asking all our new applicants for that? That would give us some background as to what mischief they get up to and also probably cut down the number that get through to interview as well."
"Good idea. I'll get that added to the form. If they don't like it then that's a good indication that we wouldn't want to trust them anyway. Probably the sort that will come in half awake after being on that internet all night."

What I do find odd, though, is why this is all about facebook. There are rather more places than just the one everyone talks about out there and, of course, Google+ which has so far survived remarkably longer than I had anticipated in being readily accessible at work and in the Colleges I know about. Whilst one might expect a better class of people using the latter, if the HR Committee is going to want to look for the dirt then they really do have to realise that the social networking world is not called facebook. It seems that uninformed managers are beginning to use the term rather like they might use Biro or Hoover.

Then there are blogs which they don't seem to have thought much about at all. That's where I would write the stuff that I am most likely to be thrown out for, where HR would see what I thought about something, or what I got up to In The Village and that would be far more informative than some snaps on facebook.

It strikes me as quite wrong. In the rare instances of someone being suspected of publishing comments that damage their employer's reputation, provide information that should not be made public for commercial or other reasons or in cases of bullying then one would expect investigations to be facilitated to ascertain the accuracy of accusations with specific permissions being granted but some general rule that says someone can roam freely through areas that an individual has chosen, probably on good advice, to restrict to certain friends, is wrong, very wrong.

I can imagine the band of social do-gooders raging against my comments and saying things like "If they have to hide what they say or do then they shouldn't say or do it." My view would be to say to the individuals concerned that they should continue to decide what they wish to be in the public domain and, if they're asked to reveal more, look elsewhere. Unless they're applying for an HR Manager post - in which case they should tidy up their act temporarily first, supply all the passwords with a nice smile, get the job and then fire whoever instigated this in the first place!

The section below is from ZDNetUK's article by David Meyer:

Asking job applicants for passwords is not in itself unlawful in the UK, according to Ed Goodwyn, partner in the employment team at law firm Pinsent Mason.
This disturbing practice represents a grave intrusion into personal privacy.
– US senators Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer
There is also unlikely to be a breach of the Data Protection Act if the applicant hands over login details willingly, he noted. However, Goodwyn agreed there are some risks for prospective hirers.
"If the employer relies on a protected characteristic which is apparent from the Facebook pages (such as that the candidate is a trade union activist, is disabled, etc.) then that will be unlawful," Goldwyn said. "Furthermore, once the employment relationship is formed, any further use of Facebook in this way without further permission from the employee would be a breach of the implied duty of trust and confidence."
Companies could also face legal problems if they treat a worker less favourably for refusing the request, he noted.

Professionalism in Further Education. Common sense, at last!

A fascinating interim report has just been released by the The Independent Review Panel established by the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. Brilliant stuff and finally someone has seen the light and proposes to cut through the nonsense that has been the compulsory membership of the Institute For Learning and requirement for qualifications that seldom seem to have produced any improvement in the classroom and certainly no better use of modern technology.

[Anyone would think I had contributed la great deal to this myself!]

Entitled Professionalism in Further Education, here are some key points:

Over the past decade, government has attempted to impose by statute a form of professionalism on the further education sector through the development of national occupational standards for teaching staff. As successive reports by Ofsted and academic research have shown, this endeavour has failed to achieve consistency in the diverse provision for acquiring vocational knowledge and skills.

This Review will endeavour to offer comprehensive recommendations to government which will not only reflect circumstances which are very different from those of a decade ago, but which also pay greater attention to the particular virtues of further education, its unique place in our national life, and a conception of professionalism which suits a body of staff who often enter teaching following a successful career in business, a trade or another profession.

Our intention will be to outline and encourage new directions which will be free of unnecessary compulsion (and the perverse outcomes so often associated with it), and to bring some fresh thinking to issues which, evidence suggests, have become confused.

There are sufficient statutory arrangements in place through, for example, employment legislation and the requirements for staff performance management and learner safeguarding set out in Ofsted’s Common Inspection Framework, to ensure at least a threshold level of professional competence. Above that, providers should have the freedom to stand or fall according to the service they offer to learners and the public accreditation they earn for the high quality of that service from Ofsted and others (e.g. IiP, EFQM, ISO etc). The example of the Higher Education Academy shows clearly that a shift from the intention to compel lecturers to achieve teacher-training qualifications, towards one where they and their employers are persuaded that this is in all their best interests in order to enhance standards, is much more effective than regulation.

Initial teacher training programmes appear to be largely generic and theoretical, rather than being related to the professional and occupational expertise of college lecturers; mentoring continues to be weak; the system of qualifications and credits is very inconsistent among teacher training providers; and the commitment of FE employers to support their staff to attain excellence in pedagogy appears distinctly uneven. It is at least arguable that most of the national effort has been made in the wrong place: towards standards, regulations and compulsion, rather than towards fostering a deep and shared commitment to real ‘bottom up’ professionalism among FE employers and staff.

The panel’s doubts about the validity of the 2007 Regulations; a conviction that it would be absurd and impracticable to dismiss those lecturers who have dissented from them (in some cases, from the outset); and our understanding of the tenor of government policy, lead us to conclude that the Regulations are unenforceable.

Setting aside the lack of any form of compulsion bearing on lecturers in higher education and the apparent illogicality of requiring lecturers who may have already worked successfully in FE for many years to become ‘qualified teachers’, the IfL on behalf of the FE sector, is unique in requiring post-qualification tasks before conferral of ‘qualified’ status.

these additional hurdles to qualification might be interpreted as meaning that FE and FE lecturers are inherently less professional than their peers in other sectors. The implication is that they are in need of special measures to assure ‘professionalisation’. The review panel believes that this is nonsense, contradicted by the fact that many colleges in the sector, for example, have been giving a good public service for a century or more.

The researchers were told that ‘validation and endorsement of the new framework was so rushed that things were cobbled together by teacher trainers working in isolation from one another – all having to take their own university criteria, structures and credit ratings into account’. When the qualifications of the nine national awarding bodies are added to universities, variability seems likely to be unhelpfully large.

The panel has noted that the current arrangements are disproportionately concerned with formal teaching in colleges, neglecting much of the breadth and richness of the FE sector. We will invite witnesses from these areas of neglect to describe to us what they need to contribute fully to an ambitious and professional sector during the next stage of the review.

FREE. FE Divided By These Things†.

Remarkable things are happening in the world of learning these days. Over a decade ago I put my first exercises, notes and tests on The Studyzone, really just with the idea of making my life easier - instead of taking piles of paper around with me I could access whatever I needed in the classroom. Then I realised that students who either missed a session or wanted to move forward more quickly could do so from home or work and, in a wonderfully new-sounding course at the time, IT2000 had 12 units at levels from beginner to advanced validated by the Open College Network which could be taken on-line with as much or as little communication from me as participants wanted. I also slowly added more and more of the materials and links to official assessment criteria and the like I needed for whatever I happened to be teaching and, as the years progressed, a good range of units built up.

My main purpose, however, remained the provision of easy access to guidance, information and tasks for students rather than expecting anyone to do the whole thing without coming into the classroom at the College where they'd enrolled.

Then, a few years ago, I heard about some interesting developments by the people at Edufire where complete chunks of courses in a whole range of things could be done totally on-line. Just as well, I suppose, as most of the tutors lived miles, if not several thousand miles away! Broadband speeds and technology had begun to permit video to be streamed at a rate that meant stuttering and freezing was becoming less of a problem. People did need to pay for many of these, though, and to join an on-line 'class' at set times. This may have suited quite a few but both aspects would be inclined to limit take-up so, whilst this still is an excellent development, and one where I'm happy to be a tutor too, it's more of a step in the evolution of learning that takes us a little further along the road I'm observing.

Shortly afterwards I was appointed an Associate Lecturer at Middlesex University's Institute of Work Based Learning where all the students were distant learners. The technology involved was pretty basic but the whole of the undergraduate or postgraduate courses were studied and supported on-line, including the viva element of a Masters programme, where, traditionally colleagues would interview the student and discuss various aspects of his or her project over a glass or two of fine wine but now didn't need to share the wine, this not being an obvious facility that Skype offered.

Along came The Khan Academy. well, it had probably been there for ages so I should say 'along came my noticing The Khan Academy!' This blew me away. I thought it was just a few videos of someone chatting while scribbling on a blackboard but I soon saw the extent to which this has grown and now my two sons use the Maths section regularly and are rapidly progressing through the stages and learning lots as they go. Which, of course, is the whole point of all this.

Then some really good universities began to offer courses that could be studied and assessed on-line and, most significantly, students would gain a certificate accrediting their success from that institution or, at least, a department within that institution which was almost as good as the real thing. I have recently published the amazing introductory course being offered by two wonderfully renowned professors operating through Udacity and now find that there is already a massive list of great courses being offered by prominent and well-respected institutions. All free and many with some form of accreditation and certification. There may be better but The Open Culture site, apart from the annoying ads at the top which I plead with you to ignore, seems to have a comprehensive and well-researched list.

The massively impressive Massachusetts Institute of Technology now launch MITx with their free on-line learning offer. They make a point of emphasising that their on-line courses are the same as those delivered in classes in terms of range and scope and that the same assessment standards will apply, making these totally free, totally on-line courses opportunities for students anywhere in the world to achieve an MIT qualification. Well, an MITx qualification. As I said, there have to be some issues to resolve when it comes to assessment still. There are many examples of students' attempts to fool tutors in class as it is through various combinations of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, using others to complete assignments or just getting a lot more help than they should had they really known what they were talking about. Wise, especially streetwise, tutors can spot these cheats on most occasions but even Turnitin or similar software isn't going to be up to the job of detecting whether someone you don't know did the work or was it someone else you don't know?

I suggested to my class of about 30 students earlier this year that they might be an alternative option to coming in to College and over 50% were interested in the idea of studying at their own pace on-line if they could still achieve a decent qualification at the end of the day. That was when I said there'd have to be a fee which might not be fully covered by grants. Make it free and that percentage can only rise.

This is all happening much more quickly than I'd expected. I had had thoughts just a few months ago of finding a suitable institution and setting up an on-line 'university' where programmes could be delivered at Foundation Degree level and with the idea of competing with FE BTEC-type Level 3 Diploma courses. Now I am beginning to think that there will soon be a range of alternatives at reputable institutions already out there for them. And they'll be free. Once employers start to recognise such programmes and accept them as equal alternatives to the traditional form then whatever troubles FE Colleges think they face now will seem tiny if they don't make substantial changes to how they provide teaching and learning.

E-learning certainly rules. Free could be the beginning of the end of FE as we know it. I think I my just take that offer of Voluntary Redundancy after all.

†For those who didn't do Latin at school, re can mean by these things.

Learn how to program a robotic car. From the Fellow who knows about these things. Free.

How would you like to learn how to buid a search engine, without having any existing knowledge of programming language? In seven weeks? And get a Certificate signed by respected University professors if you get things right? Free!

Image from Udacity.com

Or, for the more advanced, how about learning Programming a Robotic Car? From the Google Fellow (that's Fellow with a capital F) who has been doing some of the work you may have heard about on the news. Free.

There are some wonderful things happening on Google+ these days. I doubt that I would have found out about some remarkable free courses being offered by Udacity. Not the best of names they've chosen there but then I suspect the talents of David Evans and Sebastian Thrun, the guys behind this venture, are better suited to teaching us amazing technology stuff than marketing.

David Evans is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia where he teaches computer science and leads research in computer security. He is the author of an introductory computer science textbook and has won Virginia's highest award for university faculty. He has PhD, SM, and SB degrees from MIT. 

Sebastian Thrun is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. Thrun is best known for his research in robotics and machine learning, specifically hiswork with self-driving cars.

I copied those bits from the Udacity web site. Hope they don't mind but it was easier than trying to add all the useful links myself. So they're pretty expert in their fields. 

There are also a host of other computing courses in the pipeline but the Internet Browser one would be a great place for any students with some interest in this field to start.

You enrol with Udacity and get a series of video sessions where you're taught what to do, with exercises to try in your own time. There's a test at the end too. It's not one of those live series where you have to be on-line at a particular time - just watch and learn at your own pace, similar to the Khan Academy approach that I have been shouting from the College rooftops about for a long time now.

Do take a look at the Udacity site. It's just so great that this is being offered a no cost and they're at the forefront of a whole new movement that I detect of this sort that I think will have a huge impact on the way traditional further education, if not some school learning, is provided in future.

Here is their summary of what the Internet Search Engine course comprises (again copied from their site):

Description:

This class will give you an introduction to computing. In seven weeks, you will build your own search engine complete with a web crawler and way of ranking popular pages. You will understand some of the key concepts in computer science, and learn how to write your own computer programs. No previous background in programming is expected.

Week 1: How to get started: your first program
Extracting a link

Week 2: How to repeat
Finding all the links on a page

Week 3: How to manage data
Crawling the web 

Week 4: How to solve problems
Responding to search queries 

Week 5: How programs run
Making things fast 

Week 6: How to have infinite power
Ranking search results 

Week 7: Where to go from here
Exam testing your knowledge

Just sounds great. Do give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Why am I here?

No, I know about the Mum & Dad thing, it's not that sort of 'why am I here?' I was just wondering out loud why I spend so much time on Google+ nowadays and used to spend similar vast numbers of hours on twitter, blogs and, rather longer ago now, Facebook.

Twitter I understand. Tweeting is like shouting at the television, except more people hear what I say. It's easy, just type a few words as I'm watching something and get a kick out of making someone laugh. It's also been a useful place to get great links to things that are going on in the worlds that interest me and, with careful choice of who to follow, provided a newsreel that was almost essential reading each morning and still is something I'll scroll through once or twice a week, especially for local news and where the people haven't started on Google+.

Facebook was once a place where I thought I would build a sort of virtual world of Me, with huge volumes of photo albums, blogs routed to its Notes pages and Facebook pages for this and that, events I could invite people to or write about and generally keep up-to-date with what friends were saying. I use the term 'friends' loosely - and Facebook friends almost deserves its own entry in the dictionary. The 150 or so who were in my list comprised a strange collection of family, socially-inclined relatives, ex-students needing help and geeky nice people I met at conferences. And a bundle of others I didn't really know very well or occasionally worked with but added as friends anyway. Now its only use is as the place to post an urgent message for one of my children and I genuinely can't remember when I last specifically visited the site or changed my status as Google+ and Twitter updates do that automatically. The funny thing is that most of my 'Facebook friends' probably still think I'm really active there.

Blogs are great for articles and I do love writing and publishing my thoughts and views. So instead of writing piles of notes and uploading them to VLEs or digging out Dreamweaver to edit my web sites I can simply type, add and publish. Job done. I don't think I've changed how or why I use blogs much at all over the last ten years. Apart from Blogger's recent misbehaviour with page links and the advent of Posterous making publishing almost anything delightfully simple being naughty and nice respectively, if I want to write more than 140 characters and also refer to it again in future then a blog has been the answer.

And then along comes Google+. I jumped in at the very start and now have the dubious honour of being ranked by CircleCount in the top 600 men in the UK. Quite what that actually means I'm not sure but, bearing in mind that there are fewer MPs than that, it can't stay long at that level and I'll surely be plunging before long to the ranks of those who ramble on about this and that and have an average number of followers. But I didn't join to get some rank anyway. Why do I write stuff there? I hardly know any of my followers. Or, for that matter, those I follow. I get a brief description of what they do for most and think they may be of interest in one or more areas of the world I inhabit and they go into one or other Circles. Occasionally someone will have a query so I feel that I can be of help and publish advice or even an answer. Equally, there are some damn fine minds there who can provide answers and inspiration.  But that's not the only reason I'm there. The news is good. Like the Twitter newsreel I mentioned above, the Google+ stream is something I'll scroll through several times a day. But even that's not what it was as I now have so many people in the stream from all walks of life and background that it's neither one thing nor the other. One moment I am reading about some fascinating new ideas about teaching and the next there's a video of Andorra's entry in Eurovision. Or a cat doing something cute.

So why am I here (or there, as this is mainly about the time I spend on Google+)?

Level 4 Playing Field

I have been struggling with making sense of what I understand to be the requirements to pass university modules at level 4 compared to those issued for Edexcel HNC units at the same level.

Initially, having read through the indicative content and explanation of the learning outcomes for an HNC unit, I thought: "Fair enough. They're damn tough and will need the students to do a lot more research and examination of concepts in depth, as well as writing pretty well to provide evidence of their knowledge and understanding, and whilst I reckon that's going to be very difficult for them in some, if not all, cases, I guess that's life at this level. They scraped through level 3 but now really do have not only to think but actually put their thoughts together coherently on paper." And with that in mind I have been rather frightening most of them with indications of what I am expecting to see by way of assignments to be handed in shortly.

I was actually in the middle of being tedious on this topic when I remembered how several of their older colleagues had just completed degrees in similar subjects. I had been their tutor for a module with a similar title and learning outcomes and, despite all my best efforts, prodding and verbal abuse (it was before safeguarding was on the menu and we could get away with threatening to do dreadful things or tell their parents what they really did at lunchtime in order to get good results), yes, despite all that, quite a few submitted very weak portfolios and only covered  a few of the points I'd hoped for and had a basic grasp of what might be required but not a great deal more.

When it came to grading, I managed to get hold of some papers that the university had issued to help us figure out where on the 1 - 20 scale their work fitted. Under the column for grades 1-3 this was the text:

High level of abstract thinking original ideas; understanding is generalised and applied to new contexts ideas drawn to conclusions; highly reflective; sharply perceived; generalised from personal experience; shows metacognitive understanding; goes beyond what has been given; the whole is conceptualized at a higher level

Luckily for them, this was in the column 13-16

The work meets one part of the task, but misses other important attributes; little evidence of moving from the specific to the general; often focuses on terminology; sparse understandings, or some higher level understanding offset by some misunderstandings

The latter being pretty accurate for most. So the degrees got completed and everyone was happy. Well, maybe their employers weren't but that's another matter. The point is I could pass them.

Now, this is what the HNC book says for one of several learning outcomes:

3 Be able to evaluate the project outcomes

Evaluation techniques: detailed analysis of results, conclusions and recommendations; critical analysis against the project specification and planned procedures; use of appropriate evaluation techniques; application of project evaluation and review techniques; opportunities for further studies and developments

Interpretation: use of appropriate techniques to justify project progress and outcomes in terms of the original agreed project specification

Further consideration: significance of project; application of project results; implications; limitations of the project; improvements; recommendations for further consideration

Students have to meet all the learning outcomes so in the appropriate task for this they will have to do what it says. This is just to pass. There is a whole host of further requirements for merit and distinction.

OK, the degree guide text and the learning outcomes aren't directly comparable as one lists academic approach and the other lists things to be demonstrated but you'll get the gist. It looks an awful lot simpler to get a pass in the degree module than in the HNC unit. 

In a discussion with a colleague I have appreciated that at level 3 we didn't expect every element of each learning outcome to be covered by assignment. He used the example of an exam at the end of a year: people pass by successfully answering questions about a selection of things covered by the course. So I should use the same approach here too. Yes, I'll provide teaching, materials and guidance about the whole range but the assignments need only test their ability to prove an understanding of some. That was helpful and meant my brain was slightly better able to cope with this assessment business. However, I would still much prefer to deal with university second assessors and panels than the Edexcel External Verifier. Any day of the week.

Why are you here?

A small group of Level 4 students returned from Christmas holiday this week. I don't know quite where the idea came from but I decided to start by asking them this question: Why are you here?


We had some fun with the replies which came eventually - albeit after quite a while! They took just two basic forms:

Well, it's our lesson now. It's on our timetable.


To learn about project management.

Before the break I had published their first assignment - quite a tough task that required them, amongst other things, to explain what ideas for projects they had considered, which particular one they'd decided to plan to go ahead with, a detailed project proposal for that one which would include first attempts at setting milestones and considerations of their own strengths and weaknesses.

They had also been provided last term with a lot of information about the assessment criteria, the subject itself, including some very pertinent notes and presentations covering what they needed to write about in this assignment. All the material was available on-line in case anyone had missed a session when I might have gone through it in class.

I had also made it pretty clear that I needed to have their first attempts or drafts during the break or when they returned as the hand-in date was the end of January and it was plainly obvious that not only was the topic itself something new to all of them but even the brightest was finding the academic demands of this programme markedly more challenging than the mostly practical based National Diploma Level 3 programme they had completed in the previous year.

They really should have been coming in either to give me some work, to finish off whatever they'd been working on or to ask me, or maybe the others, for some help to explain what was actually required. Something along those lines started to emerge when I reminded them about the request. To which I then replied along these lines:

Well, there's not much point you coming out in the wind and rain, spending money on fares or petrol just to give me some paper. E-mail works well these days and is free. There's no way I could provide any meaningful feedback as it would take me best part of the session just to read one draft.


You all have perfectly good computers at home so coming in to use these rather average machines and reluctant printers - the 'coming in to finish off' thing - doesn't make a lot of sense either.


Asking for help? OK, but you have phones or, again, we could do that by e-mail quite adequately.


To learn about project management? One of the first thoughts. That sounds very reasonable but you should already have learned enough to do the first assignment. If you'd thought a bit more about that you'd have concluded that I'm hardly likely to go through all that again. I might have moved on to the next topic but, in the circumstances, with everyone's first assignments still outstanding that would probably only confuse you or delay still further when the first gets handed in.

So the only reason left with any validity was because it's on their timetable. It's like they're still at school and will get told off or have letters sent home if they don't turn up. They come because they feel obliged to. They expect me then to persuade them to do something useful during the morning - like get on with what they should have done earlier. In fact, just like all the previous years, very little actually gets done in class at all or it's used as a sort of 21st century typing pool. If I don't nag and prod then, with one or two notable exceptions, I'd get little work until the last possible moment and even only then if I'm lucky and, if previous programmes' submissions are anything to go by, it will be unlikely to be good enough to pass.

The real reason I would like them to be there is to get feedback on what they have submitted in good time beforehand, to discuss queries that either they've raised previously in correspondence or a phone call and I'd even be delighted to help with something that just occurs to them on the way in or is prompted by another student's question.

That would maximise the use of my time in providing constructive support and advice or imparting a little more knowledge and understanding as necessary. However, even all that, indeed, could be dealt with without their having to attend a class.

So, after a fascinating discussion, we all had to conclude that the only time they should attend would be to learn something new as and when it's appropriate. So a few lectures or discussions each term can do that and I can run workshops on the other days for those that want them.

That would be a nice conclusion but for some target I am supposed to meet. If my programme's attendance is below a certain figure I get talked about in whispered and disapproving tones at managers' meetings. Then I get lots of paperwork, action plans and the students have to complete Individual Learning Plans with SMART targets indicating how they'll meet some institutional attendance target so that my target gets met so that the department's target gets met and so on.

So, the answer to my original question, Why are you here? has to be So you can tick the box that says we're here, sir.