From Eszter Hargittai in the journal Sociological Inquiry:
People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.
For more…
From the dScribe web site:
dScribe, short for “digital and distributed scribes,” is a participatory and collaborative model for creating open content. It brings together enrolled students, staff, faculty, and self-motivated learners to work together toward the common goal of creating content that is openly licensed and available to people throughout the world. It was first developed by students and faculty at the University of Michigan to leverage the interest and talent of students in working with faculty and staff to transform educational material into open educational resources (OER). The dScribe model encourages students, faculty, staff, and other interested individuals such as alumni and community members to get involved in not only creating open content, but also generating awareness about the benefits of creating and sharing educational content with a global learning community.
To view the site…
Author, teacher and commentator Howard Rheingold has made available a four-year collection of bookmarks in educational technology via the social bookmarking service delicious.
From Tricia Wang’s blog cultural bytes:
Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.
While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:
- Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.
- Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.
- Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.
- Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
- Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.
For the complete post…
From Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal:
What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?
Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.
The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.
For more…
From Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.
New software developed at MIT takes advantage of the GPS technology in mobile phones to inject new adventures into the traditional science lab. The technology creates learning games that can track players’ real world locations and send a stream of virtual information to them as they track environmental spills or solve science mysteries. Teachers and students can also build their own games to share with others.
For more on MIT’s learning games that teach science and math read Spotlight’s Think Like a Mathematician, Save the World from Monsters.
For the item with YouTube video…
Jenna Wortham and Nick Bilton write in the New York Times,
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…
Jon Udell’s recent blog post begins,
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…
In this seven and a half-minute video Howard Rheingold discusses technology and education. Those who attended the recent Ubiquitous Learning Conference may find what he says resonating with much of what was presented and discussed at the meeting.
Howard Rheingold has something to say about new literacy:
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…
A public forum presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Writing Project, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
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.
Jiangping Chen and Yu Bao have an article, Cross-language search: The case of Google Language Tools, in the latest issue of the journal First Monday. This is the abstract:
This paper presents a case study of Google Language Tools, especially its cross–language search service. Cross–language search integrates machine translation (MT) and cross–language information retrieval (CLIR) technologies and allows Web users to search and read pages written in languages different from their search terms. In addition to cross–language search, Google Language Tools provides various language support services to multilingual information access. Our study examines the functions of Google Language Tools and the performance of its cross–language search. The results and analysis show that Google Language Tools are useful for Web users. Its cross–language search service provides quality query translation while the automatic translation of result pages needs further improvement. The paper suggests that cross–language search could be used by different types of Web users. The authors also discuss the strategies and important issues with regard to implementing multilingual information access services for information systems.