Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time

sc-189-550-x-358From Steve Lohr in the New York Times:

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like FacebookTwitterand Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

For the article…

Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall

From Sam Dillon in The New York Times

12bus_ca0-articleinlineVAIL, Ariz. — Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).

But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.

To read more…

Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity

websterdamon_danahboyd_fn_euFrom Danah Boyd, the preliminary draft of her welcoming keynote address at the 2010 SXSW conference.

What keeps me up at night is trying to make sense of how social media transforms society and, more importantly, what it helps make visible about humanity. Technophobes love to talk about how technology is ruining everything and technophiles obsess over how everything is radically different. I like to wade through the extremes to see the subtle inflection points. Reality is always in the details.

My goal today is to invite you to step back and ask: what hath we wrought? We’ve all been involved in social media from at least one perspective. Some of you are creators, developers, designers; others of you are business folks, marketers, analysts. Some of you use social media in your jobs and some of you live it as part of your daily practice. We are all collectively creating culture through our engagement with social media. So what I’d like to do is offer some insights that allow you to think critically about our collective project so that we can all find ways to do better.

To give you something to munch on, I’ve decided to focus my talk on two interwoven concepts that keep coming up whenever we think about social media: privacy and publicity. I’m highlighting these issues because I think that they’re going to play a crucial role in the evolution of social media. I think that we’re going to have to work them out and I need your help in doing so.

For the full talk…

Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”

headersmall1From 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…

Creating Open Educational Resources with dScribe

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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…

Ubiquitous Learning Journal, Volume 2, Number 1 now available

The first issue of Volume 2 of Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal has now been published.

Volume 2, Number 1 includes:

    Howard Rheingold’s Educational Technology Bookmarks

    hreingoldAuthor, teacher and commentator Howard Rheingold has made available a four-year collection of bookmarks in educational technology via the social bookmarking service delicious.
     
     
     

    The World is a Game: Augmented Reality Software Combines the Real and Virtual to Teach Science

    From Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

    To read more…


    Suggestions for Making Google’s Services More Relevant for Non-Elite Chinese Users (involves some ethnography!)

    culturalbytes1From 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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
    5. Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.

    For the complete post…

    Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere

    renocol_moss1From 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…

    The World is a Game: Augmented Reality Software Combines the Real and Virtual to Teach Science

    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…

    Study on Youth and Information Credibility

    From Andrew Flanagin in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

    kid_hand_mouse-365x274Select 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…

    Web Attack on Twitter Is Third Assault This Year

    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…

    Computational thinking and energy literacy

    judell-headshotJon 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…

    Facebook Flashes Your Trench Coat Open

    From Andreas Kluth, in The Hannibal Blog

    mark-zuckerbergFacebook 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…

    Howard Rheingold on His University Teaching

    romeIn 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 on ‘Future Fundamentals’

    tokyo-shinjukutinyHoward 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…

    Ubiquitous Learning

    From Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, in Ubiquitous Learning9780252076800

    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…

    The World’s 50 Best Open Courseware Collections

    From Linda, in Learning Through Blogging.

    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…

    It’s 10 P.M. Online, Do You Know Where Your Parents Are?

    parentsFrom Josh Karp, in “Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.”

    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…

    The Power of Youth Voice: What Kids Learn When They Create With Digital Media

    youthvoice1A 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.

    Web Searching across Languages

    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.

    Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal

    The Ubiquitous Learning Conference and Journal set out to define an emerging field. Ubiquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media. The Journal investigates the affordances for learning in the digital media, in school and throughout everyday life.

     

    The first issue of the first volume is now in the final stages of production and will be released shortly.