What is this image saying? How does it relate to or comment on society or current events? Can you relate to it personally? What is your opinion of its message?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related Opinion essay to find out what it means.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan. You can find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
: of or for the common people
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The word demotic has appeared in five articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 24 in “A Passion for Punctuation Meets a Love for All Things Greek” by Vivian Gornick:
Norris was about 30 when she took her first trip to Greece, came home besotted and lowered herself into the ocean of Greek studies available in New York City: “In the years that followed, I swung back and forth between modern Greek and ancient Greek, cramming modern Greek before a trip, returning to ancient Greek when I got home.” At one point she even moved to Astoria, the Greek-American neighborhood in Queens, embedding herself among living Greeks so that every waking hour away from her office she’d be surrounded by either the demotic Greek of the street or the Greek of Thucydides in her armchair.
_________
Ever since many of us started working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve been invited to countless gatherings taking place on Zoom, the videoconferencing app. Virtual happy hours, work meetings, dinners, you name it.
I’ve been a no-show, and it’s not just because my hair has grown embarrassingly long. It’s because I have a fundamental problem with Zoom.
Let me first say I understand why Zoom has been so popular in the pandemic. The company designed its app to be free and extremely easy to use; in tech lingo, we call it “frictionless.” Even our friends and relatives with zero technical know-how can join a Zoom meeting just by clicking a link. Then, voilà, you are looking at a screen with familiar faces and can begin chatting away.
At least 200 million of us, desperate to see people outside our homes, now use Zoom, up from 10 million a few months ago. Many of us use it for free, though Zoom also has a paid product. For lots of us, it’s a lifeline to see and converse with a friend or relative.
But for the last year, I’ve been wary of the app. Zoom has had multiple privacy snafus in that period, which have come up so frequently that they became a game of Whac-a-Mole.
The missteps included a weakness that would have allowed malware to attach to Zoom and hijack our web cameras. The issues with basic security practices culminated with “Zoombombing,” in which trolls crashed people’s video meetings and bombarded them with inappropriate material like pornography.
In a blog post last week, Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, apologized for all the mistakes and said the recent problems had largely been addressed. The company promised to focus on fixing its privacy and security issues over the coming months; it reiterated the plan on Wednesday.
If there is something déjà vu about all of this, you aren’t wrong. That’s because we find ourselves dealing with the same situation over and over again, focusing on the convenience of easy-to-use tech products over issues like data security and privacy.
We went through this not long ago with Ring, the doorbell camera, another product with a catchy name. Ring, which is owned by Amazon, became popular during another crummy situation: an increase in the petty crime of package thefts. It was also easy to install. But despite glowing customer reviews, Ring became mired in privacy scandals, including one that involved hackers hijacking the Ring cameras of multiple families.
The lesson is one we need to learn and relearn. When a company fails to protect our privacy, we shouldn’t just continue to use its product — and tell the people we care about to use it — just because it works well and is simple to use. Once we lose our privacy, we rarely get it back again.
“There’s a revolving door,” said Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “When you give your data to one company, you have no idea who else is going to have access to it, because so much of it happens behind the black box of company secrecy.”
The onus is certainly on Zoom, not us, to fix the privacy and security problems of its app. But we can put pressure on Zoom by not accepting the situation. If you do use Zoom, do so with caution and strong security settings. More on this later.
Let’s first take a closer look at why Zoom has been under the microscope. The issues boil down to two main things: its privacy policy and the architecture of its security.
Zoom recently announced that it had revised its privacy policy to be clearer and more transparent. In it, the company emphasized that it does not and has never sold people’s personal data, and has no plans to.
But the policy does not address whether Zoom shares data with third parties, as companies such as Apple and Cisco explicitly state in their privacy policies.
This is a notable omission. Tech companies can monetize user data in many ways without directly selling it, including by sharing it with other companies that mine the information for insights, according to research published by the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. In some cases, tools to collect data from users are “rented” to third parties. Such practices would technically make it true that your personal data was not “sold,” but a company would still make money from your data.
Lynn Haaland, Zoom’s global risk and compliance officer, said the company does not anonymize or aggregate user data or rent it out in exchange for money.
So why is this not addressed in the privacy policy?
“We try to be clear here about what we do do with the data,” Ms. Haaland said about the updated policy. “Sometimes when you try to list all the things you don’t do with data, if you leave one out, then people say, ‘Oh, well, you must be doing that.’”
While Zoom has worked furiously to plug the security holes that have emerged in the last few weeks, its products for Windows and Mac computers have weaker security by design.
That is largely because the company opted not to provide its app through Apple’s official Mac app store or the Microsoft Windows app store. Instead, consumers download it directly from the web. In this way, Zoom’s software avoids living in a so-called sandboxed environment, which would have restricted its access to Apple and Microsoft operating systems.
As a result, Zoom is able to gain access to deeper parts of the operating systems and their web browsers. That is largely what makes Zoom sessions so simple to join.
By choosing to circumvent safer methods for installing its app, Zoom has opted for weaker security architecture, said Sinan Eren, chief executive of Fyde, an app security firm.
“They want to make the installation process a lot easier and streamlined, but at the same time they want deeper hooks into the operating system so they can collect more things,” he said. “That also exposes us to potential vulnerabilities.”
Zoom declined to comment on its security architecture.
So what to do? In these difficult times, many of us have no better option than to use Zoom. So here are some steps to keep in mind.
Use Zoom with caution. In general, it’s safer to use Zoom on a mobile device, like an iPad or an Android phone, than on a Mac or Windows PC. Mobile apps operate in a more restricted environment with limited access to your data. In addition, apps served through the App Store or Play store undergo a review process by Apple and Google that include an inspection for security vulnerabilities.
Also, be sure to turn on Zoom security settings, like meeting passwords, to prevent unwanted guests from Zoombombing your sessions.
Last but not least, be mindful of what it means to tell others to use a product with weak data security. Try to avoid using it for sensitive matters, like work meetings that discuss trade secrets.
If you are concerned about privacy, try an alternative. There are video chatting tools from companies with better reputations, like Google’s Hangouts, Cisco’s Webex and FaceTime for Apple devices. These products may not be as simple to use as Zoom, but they work and you can worry less.
A product’s being great just isn’t good enough if it’s lousy at protecting our privacy. Many people appear to have learned this lesson already and have reacted accordingly. Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, barred employees from using Zoom. New York City’s school district recently banned Zoom for online learning.
And us? It may be our turn to pause, too.
, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, who has become a regular at President Trump’s coronavirus briefings, will receive enhanced personal security after receiving threats following his repeated pleas for Americans to help slow the spread of the deadly pandemic, officials said on April 1.
At FutureLearn, we are proud to partner with educators across the globe, and as such, we’ve been keenly focused on what we can do to best support those teachers facing a significant challenge to move their face-to-face courses online and minimise disruption for their students.
As part of this, we built a course specifically for teachers who are faced with moving courses online rapidly. The course How to Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students only opened for learning on Monday 23 March, and two weeks later already has over 30,000 teachers learning together and sharing their new approaches.
A FutureLearn first
This course is a first in many ways. For one, it’s the first time we’ve released a FutureLearn branded course, designed and built by our own Learning team, and totally remotely. Matt Jenner, Head of Learning at FutureLearn and part of the team who worked to build this course, said: “This is FutureLearn’s first in-house course in our own brand, our own voice and luckily on our key topic, online learning. Given the situation, I couldn’t think of a better team to do this with. The FutureLearn Learning team are experts in how to teach online, our learners are experts in how to teach, the confluence of the two is powering the course! We’re all passionate about teaching and learning and that’s why we’re here and why we’re working well together.”
Not only that, but the timescale from conception to going live with learning was just eleven days. “We had the idea on a Thursday, the following Tuesday we had it open for enrollment to start learning in under a week’s time. This was an unprecedented and untested timescale.”
“We, like all teachers, have had no time to prepare or plan for this.” said Matt. “We’ve been building successful courses online for years, so felt confident to share our expertise on this topic. We just had to sacrifice a few evenings and weekends, same as the teachers, as we prepared. We built our course in the same way as teachers are – without any resource except ourselves and our platform. We had no time (no one does) and we did it with a low-fi, open access, and learn-as-we-go approach.”
A collaborative network of Mentors
The course is supported by a team of Mentors, experts from FutureLearn’s partners who nominated themselves to help us. On working with these mentors, Matt said: “Working fast and on something important was always going to elicit emotion. One wave came over me on Sunday afternoon, the day before we opened the course for learners, was when I revisited a tab in my fairly loaded browser. It was a hastily put-together document that listed our Mentors, some default guidance and a table to help them sign up to offer support, advice or answer weekly Q&As. We didn’t want to overload our first run with enthusiasm so ideally we wanted to spread our Mentors out across future course runs. My colleague, Finola Lang, was on email asking Mentors for help and to join, other colleagues Felicity Parsisson, Monty King and myself were working on the course content. I was momentarily overwhelmed when I went back to the tab and found it’d been completed, over a Sunday, by over 20 respected experts across the FutureLearn partnership. The document was alive with Mentors dropping their names into the list and nominating themselves into an uncertain future going well into May. I was honoured to work alongside such experts who hadn’t even seen the course at this stage but they believed in us.”
But why is this course so important to teachers right now? “They are being placed in a very tricky position,” believes Matt. “To work in unfamiliar environments with learners who have been forced back into our homes – spaces not designed for learning. They did not have the luxury of time, they needed practical solutions and shortcuts. This style started as a hunch, so we ran a survey just before we went live – 1600 teachers responded and the overwhelming response was that they needed a course that was practice-heavy and theory-light. These teachers hadn’t taught online before and they wanted a proactive and community-driven space to help, support and guide them into a new and unknown space.”
This view is supported by many mentors on the course.
Dr Simon Rofe, SOAS, elaborates: “The greatest challenge at the moment is the immediacy of the challenge. We can’t avoid the time we are given, but taking time to listen, even 30 seconds to just reflect on a course of action, is vital.”
Mentor, Professor Lisa Harris of the University of Exeter adds: “There seems to be pressure on teachers, particularly in schools, to replicate as far as possible what they have been doing offline, rather than consider what might work best when learners are dispersed geographically, have varying levels of connectivity and bandwidth, and uncertainty in many areas of their lives.”
“Learning might be less visible and engagement may be less visible,” continues Neil Mosley of Cardiff University, another mentor on the course, “this can be unsettling and challenging if you’re new to teaching online. Remember that active and effortful learning can happen despite not being visible through people posting in places that we can see for instance.”
The course is unique in the sense that it gives teachers a chance to discuss with one another their approaches, share concerns, and reflect on their own practices: “The discussions across the course, especially in responding to participants’ pressing questions, have been incredibly supportive and positive.” says Hannah Tyreman from the Chartered College of Teaching, a mentor on the course. “One theme I have recognised is the pressure educators feel to ‘get it right first time’.”
Responding to a crisis is one thing, but the challenge over the months ahead, and beyond, is to mature our understanding of the opportunities that new digital technologies offer
Teaching after COVID-19
Although the current situation will come to an end, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to leave its mark on the world of teaching: “Although it has somewhat forced people to transition very rapidly, I think with the right support, educators will hopefully see the benefits of moving to a much more blended model of learning.” says mentor, Dr Angela Davies from the University of Manchester.
Professor Mark Brown of Dublin City University adds: “Certainly the pivot to rapidly teach online has forced us to think around corners and in many respects fast-track the future. While history teaches us to be wary about making bold speculative predictions of the future, it’s highly probable that ‘online education’ will never be the same again. Responding to a crisis is one thing, but the challenge over the months ahead, and beyond, is to mature our understanding of the opportunities that new digital technologies offer for a more transformative model of education which prepares students for tomorrow’s world, today.”
The course How to Teach Online: Providing Continuity to Students may be a rapid solution to a very current issue, but the potential for a long-term supportive network of educator peers to experiment and understand what works, together, is huge. “We can’t fix all the complex problems of the online pivot;” says Matt “our goal is to reassure teachers, help them be compassionate to themselves and put best practice in place for their students. We want to remind them they’ll make mistakes but if they get feedback, reflect and make changes it’ll get better and they’ll be OK!”
The course How to Teach Online: Providing Continuity to Students is open for enrolments now. Please feel free to share this resource with your networks.
By Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant
As our Chief Enterprise Officer Leah Belsky wrote to many of our customers last week, the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) has profoundly affected our work – and our lives. At Coursera, we’re grateful for the opportunity we have to continue to serve businesses, universities, and governments during this time.
This month’s list is split into two categories: 1) new COVID-19-related content, and 2) general new content. I would also recommend a recent blog by my colleague, Alison, on resources to support your learners during the pandemic.
Wherever you are and however COVID-19 has impacted your life, we hope that our courses and projects can be of help to you.
March 2020’s COVID-19-related content:
March 2020’s general content:
Top new Guided Projects
Guided Projects enable learners to learn a job-relevant skill in under two hours through an interactive project that’s guided by a subject matter expert.
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Business
Technology
Data
Other
All Guided Projects
Business
Technology
Data
A couple from South Africa found themselves stranded on their honeymoon in the Maldives after their country closed its borders to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
If you were stranded somewhere during the pandemic, where would you want to be? Why? How would you spend your time there? What do you think it would be like to be stuck somewhere, unable to go home?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out more about Olivia and Raul De Freitas’s adventure in paradise.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan. You can find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
1. a sudden happening that brings good fortune (as a sudden opportunity to make money)
2. an especially rich vein of precious ore
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The word bonanza has appeared in 98 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on March 18 in “A Small Country, an Oil Giant, and Their Shared Fortune” by Anatoly Kurmanaev and Clifford Krauss:
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — They are the odd couple of the global oil patch: Guyana is a poor former British sugar colony. Exxon Mobil is America’s largest oil company.
They came to depend on each other after a series of extraordinary oil discoveries off Guyana’s coast transformed the small South American country’s fortunes and boosted the oil company’s assets at a time when its fortunes were flagging elsewhere.
… “Our people have to feel they are a part of it,” said Newell Dennison, the head of Guyana’s oil exploration regulator, about the oil bonanza. “There are fundamental issues about the country’s direction that ought to be addressed at the national level. I’m concerned it’s not happening as it should.”
_________
Are you avidly following the news right now … or are you mostly looking for distractions from it? Either way, we want to hear from you.
Right now, from April 6 to July 6, high school students across the United States can get free digital access to NYTimes.com. To celebrate that, we invite you to explore the paper, then tell us about the most interesting stuff you find — whether related to the pandemic or not.
At the end of this month, judges from around the newsroom will choose favorite responses and we’ll honor them in a special post.
Questions? Read on, and if they still aren’t answered, please write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
A. If you don’t already have a Times digital subscription, your teacher can use the directions on this page to visit nytimes.com/highschoolaccess and sign up your whole class. Another option? Everything on The Learning Network is already free, so you can also just use any of the articles, photos, videos or graphs we have already linked to.
A. Literally anything ever published on NYTimes.com is fair game. Just explore, perhaps using this piece, “21 Things Teenagers Can Do With a New York Times Subscription,” to get started.
It can be an article, essay, Op-Ed, video, photo, podcast or infographic. It can be about politics or pythons, meditation or memes, face masks or flying cars. We don’t care what you pick, we just want to know why you picked it.
A. Post your response as a comment on this page by going up to the top and clicking on the little conversation bubble underneath that top skateboarding image. Please note that our system only gives you about 250 words to work with, so you’ll need to be concise.
You can post anytime between now and 9 a.m. Eastern on May 1, 2020, but, please, just one response per student.
As for what to write, this challenge is a special shelter-in-place version of the Summer Reading Contest we’ve been running since 2010, so we have over a decade of good examples to show you. Just scroll through the winning comments from the last several years and you can see that teenagers have written about weighty topics like gender, race and identity, space exploration and 21st-century concentration camps, but they have also written on power napping, junk food, Beyoncé, Disney shows, running and bagels.
In short, we don’t care if you loved the piece or hated it, we just want to hear why it got your attention. Over the years, we have found that the best answers are those that make thoughtful personal connections to the topic.
A. The Learning Network staff, plus a team of as-yet-to-be-named New York Times journalists, will read everything that comes in, then we’ll honor our favorites by publishing them in a separate post sometime in May. We’ll announce it at the top of this post, and on Twitter and Facebook when we do.
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
