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From Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
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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.
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.
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.
From Andrew Flanagin in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
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.
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.
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.
From Andreas Kluth, in The Hannibal Blog
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.
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.