Select findings from a new study by Andrew J. Flanagin, Professor in the Department of Communication, and Miriam Metzger, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The results are based on a web-based survey of a representative sample of 2,747 children (age 11 to 18) with internet access in the United States, and one parent of each child.

The full report will be available in early 2010 as part of the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning, published by MIT Press.

Read Spotlight’s interview with Flanagin about the findings. Below are some of the study’s highlights:

• Most kids begin using the internet between Grades 2 and 6.
• Nearly all kids surveyed (97%) are online by eighth grade.

To read more…

An online attack Friday morning on Twitter was the result of the simplest of security breaches: someone got the password to enter the master directory of Twitter’s Internet addresses and then redirected users to an alternate site instead.

No user information appears to have been stolen in the attack. But the security breach — the third major one at Twitter this year — underscores the continuing weakness of the company’s systems as its micro-blogging service is becoming more important to business and even global politics.

The incident also highlights a basic vulnerability in the way life is lived as it becomes increasingly digital: With so much vital information stored on the Web, people are only as safe as their passwords.

To see the article…

One of the themes I’ve been exploring for the past few years is computational thinking. It’s an evocative phrase that has led me in a few different directions. One is my intentional use of tagging and syndication as key strategies for social information management. Another is my growing interest in the kinds of uses of WolframAlpha outlined in Kill-A-Watt, WolframAlpha, and the itemized electric bill.

A lot of what I’ve read and heard about WolframAlpha seems to focus on its encyclopedic nature. But it aims to be a compendium of computable knowledge, and as such I think its highest and best use will be to enable computational thinking.

To read the full post…

Facebook just “updated” its privacy settings, and I almost did not notice. That’s because I’m (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmare: I don’t “share” anything on Facebook to begin with, so my Facebook profile contains little to be private about.

But some of those who do share things on Facebook “came close to killing [their] account this week”, as Danny Sullivan did, when they paid attention to the details of the change.

A year ago I predicted in our (The Economist’s) sister publication, The World in 2009, that this brave new culture of “sharing” would cause discontent. Maybe that point is now nigh. For me personally, it arrived long ago.

Because I used to cover the internet in my previous beat at The Economist, I had to be one of the first to try new things like Facebook, and I usually was. But from the start I made a pact with myself:

• No pictures of, or (indexable, Googlable) information about, my loved ones.
• No names, birthdays, diaper photos etc.
• No drive-by shootings (photo, video, status update) of third parties

In particular, my wife and children should, in effect, not be on the internet at all unless they themselves later choose to put themselves there. You may have noticed that their names do not appear on The Hannibal Blog, even though I share my ideas here quite liberally. Yes, you may know me very intimately by now in an intellectual way–as I feel I know some of you quite intimately through your comments even though I only see your pseudonym and avatar. But you do not know me biographically beyond what I choose to divulge. I practice Platonic sharing.

To read more…

Popular discourses about the technologies that have been built on the microchip have focused primarily on the hardware, the software, the industries, the economics of computer games, PCs, dotcoms. My experiences have convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and leave behind those who don’t know how to use their telephone as a medical instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool. Chip fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of fiber optics and satellites, have played and will continue to play their parts in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on Earth. But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social institutions is literacy. My definition of “literacy” builds on the thinking of Neal Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance.

For video..

For words…

Ubiquitous Learning

Exploring the anywhere/anytime possibilities for learning in the age of digital media

This collection seeks to define the emerging field of “ubiquitous learning,” an educational paradigm made possible in part by the omnipresence of digital media, supporting new modes of knowledge creation, communication, and access. As new media empower practically anyone to produce and disseminate knowledge, learning can now occur at any time and any place. The essays in this volume present key concepts, contextual factors, and current practices in this new field.

Contributors are Simon J. Appleford, Patrick Berry, Jack Brighton, Bertram C. Bruce, Amber Buck, Nicholas C. Burbules, Orville Vernon Burton, Timothy Cash, Bill Cope, Alan Craig, Elizabeth M. Delacruz, Lisa Bouillion Diaz, Steve Downey, Guy Garnett, Steven E. Gump, Gail E. Hawisher, Caroline Haythornthwaite, Cory Holding, Wenhao David Huang, Eric Jakobsson, Tristan E. Johnson, Mary Kalantzis, Samuel Kamin, Karrie G. Karahalios, Joycelyn Landrum-Brown, Hannah Lee, Faye L. Lesht, Maria Lovett, Cheryl McFadden, Robert E. McGrath, James D. Myers, Christa Olson, James Onderdonk, Michael A. Peters, Evangeline S. Pianfetti, Paul Prior, Fazal Rizvi, Mei-Li Shih, Janine Solberg, Joseph Squier, Kona Taylor, Sharon Tettegah, Michael Twidale, Edee Norman Wiziecki, and Hanna Zhong.

Bill Cope is a research professor in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is coeditor of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. Mary Kalantzis is the dean of the College of Education and professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is coauthor of Cultures of Schooling: Pedagogies for Cultural Difference and Social Access.

“This book taps directly into seismic shifts occurring in what it means to go about one’s everyday life when access to information and ideas are so readily at hand. The contributors move well beyond the speculative to afford readers a rich range of substantive definitions and concrete examples of ubiquitous learning.”–Michele Knobel, coauthor of New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning

For more information on purchasing…

Do you ever wonder why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) might be more memorable than other technological schools? To become memorable, a school must reach out to people in ways that seem beneficial. Alumni organizations can help spread the word about their alma mater. Great sports teams and debate teams also can help boost a school’s standing. But, another fork to take in the marketing path is through the Internet, as MIT and other schools have done in sharing courses online and without charge.

MIT and other schools are up front about these open source offerings – no one can earn credits from taking the courses, nor can they use the courses to claim a degree. But, when MIT and other colleges opened their virtual gates to allow the average person to get a glimpse behind their ivory towers, these colleges became well known for their altruism and transparency. Open Courseware has become a marketing tool, as it helps schools that use this option to become more well known in a local and global community.

That said, the following list represents a handful of hundreds of open courseware initiatives that now exist. The following fifty collections are from English-speaking universities and colleges, located across the U.S. to England, Canada and Australia. Additionally, the list points to open courseware projects such as directories and primary source projects offered by various universities and colleges.

The list is divided into categories and each link is listed in alphabetical order within those categories. This method shows our readers that we do not favor one collection over another.

To Read More…

When University of California-Irvine associate project scientist Heather Horst and her colleagues at the Digital Youth Project set out to study how children, their parents and families interact with digital media, others thought they would probably come away with a set of “do’s and don’ts” for parents.

That, it turned out, was not the case. There was a lot of variety in how parents were dealing with the situation. Parents’ comfort or confusion depended on their own sense of expertise with new media.

Parents’ Involvement Depends on Their Digital Know-How

Parents with greater technological sophistication (a significant number of Silicon Valley families were interviewed for the study) didn’t view their children as digital natives, nor did they necessarily see themselves as outsiders.

“They knew their kids interests were different [from their own],” Horst says. “But, they weren’t afraid of the technology.”

For these families, the battles were the familiar battles. “[The arguments] weren’t about the media itself,” Horst says. “But, the kind of control debates that go on with adolescents in the U.S.”

But, in other less privileged families, and particularly those where English was not the primary language, the comfort with new media was markedly less, and the fear of online dangers much greater.

Read more here…

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
6:00-7:00 PM •   Reception and displays of digital work
7:00-8:00 PM •   Panel Discussion and Forum

The Academy of Natural Sciences   •   Auditorium
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway   •   Philadelphia

This forum is free and open to the public. You may attend this forum in person
or follow the event online. Registration is required.