World-Shaker

ideasareawesome:

Reclaim Privacy provides a bookmark allowing you to see instantly what’s private and what’s not on your facebook page.

So here is the deal. I read a book. Yes, a book. This takes focus and attention. We read a lot online these days, but we jump around from blog post to blog post, twitter posts, Facebook posts, email, etc. Most of this is short format, sometimes very short, and then our attention is on to the next thing. Reading a book brings one back to the pre-internet time of focusing on one thing and giving it your attention. But, I did not read just any book, I read a book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (2009). I highly recommend this tome to those who may be struggling with focusing on tasks at hand and dealing with the distractions of the Web, not to mention how to focus on things in your life without letting them pass you by.

“[Facebook] actually made things like lists of friends publicly available so when they did the upgrade they opted people in - they didn’t ask you to accept the extra publicity that you were getting.

“Basically this has been called Facebook’s great betrayal.”

Peter Nagy Jr. is responsible for the domain http://www.cancunallinclusivetravel.com which runs a robocall fax scam. They take your money and either don’t follow through with your trip, or don’t give you what they promise. They never answer the phone or e-mail. We’re literally going to have to sue this scumbag. Make sure everyone knows.

When Facebook launched its Open Graph API and brought instant personalization to the web it probably didn’t expect users to revolt — but they are. In light of growing concerns around user privacy, Matthew Milan and Joseph Dee are attempting to mobilize a formal Facebook revolt with Quit Facebook Day.

Simple application, outstanding results.

In practice, students use the technology by writing essays and other assignments that they post on sites that other students can access. Classmates reading their work can leave comments, suggestions or point out grammatical and punctuation mistakes. “That helps you change your writing to do better,” Kelli said. “It helps me see things I didn’t see. You see the mistakes you made and you change it.”

Or, 7.3% of the world’s population.

I’d originally intended to keep politics off of here, but this is ridiculous.

The government bailed out Wall Street after they bet on loans they knew were toxic. They bailed out the American auto industry, who, with the exception of Ford, did not plan ahead or try to stay competitive.

But when it comes to funding education, specifically science education, that’s too expensive? Give me a break!

We’re looking at losing up to 300,000 teachers due to a lack of funding. Where’s the bailout for education? Where’s the bailout for America’s real future? Let’s stop bailing out those who cause the financial crisis, and those who didn’t run their businesses properly, and start bailing out those who actually make a meaningful difference.

It was strike two for a major science funding bill on May 19 as House Republicans again united to derail legislation they said was too expensive.

Going down to defeat was an updated version of the America COMPETES Act, legislation that would have committed more than $40 billion over three years to boost funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies involved in basic and applied science, provided loan guarantees to small businesses developing new technologies, and promoted science and math education at the K-12 and higher-ed levels.

A new malware attack is spreading via Facebook’s news feed, according to reports from users on Twitter.

The attack consists of a message starting with the phrase “try not to laugh xD,” followed by this link: “http://www.fbhole.com/omg/allow.php?s=a&r=72306″ (don’t open it).

Four students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences want to create an alternative to current social media that lets users better control their privacy.

And in less than two weeks, total strangers donated over $10,000 to the project.

Facebook was started for free in a dorm room by a drunk jackass. Imagine the potential of four motivated kids with a free summer.

When asked by one user why Facebook kept making changes to its security settings and whether Facebook customers are really “pounding on your door screaming that they want more categories of their personal data to be available to marketers every few months”, Schrage replied: “Clearly, we need to rethink the tempo of change and how we communicate it. Trust me. We’ll do better.”

An amazing infographic exploring Facebook’s privacy features. The stunning thing for me?

In 2005 Facebook’s privacy policy was 1004 words long.

Today it’s 5,830.

Author Meaghan Edelstein has gained national media attention through her blog, I Kicked Cancer’s Ass, which she started to document her battle with end stage cancer.

As @SilentClark, Clark Harris is communicating solely through social media channels during the month of May to raise money and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

The application, Tutor Matching Service, lets students search for tutors by subject, class, or tutor name. They can see ratings and comments on tutors, when tutors are available, and how much they charge. Tutors can also post pictures and videos of themselves.

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students. We’ve heard college students in particular really appreciate getting their voicemail sent to their email, sending free text messages and reading voicemail transcriptions rather than listening to messages (especially handy while in class).

But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way. As a recent college graduate, I can’t think of anything more painful! So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students. To get an invite, just visit google.com/voice/students and enter an email address that that ends in .edu.

These 18 apps are a useful starting point for those looking to delve beyond Facebook and Twitter in the classroom.

Additional Key Survey Findings:

• Most respondents (84 percent) believe that technology will play a large role in “improving how students learn.”

• A similar number (82 percent) believe that technology will play a large role in “helping prepare students for the workforce of the future.”

• After “retaining good students” –which ranked first – respondents feel that the most important administrative and strategic issues facing schools are:

• Communicating better with students’ parents
• Providing physical safety on campus
• Providing online network security
• Communicating better with students
• Taking advantage of new technology
• Improving the ability of teachers to use technology, media and computing tools
• Communicating better with faculty and staff

At Chester Middle School, an hour north of New York City, Principal Ernie Jackson, 52, challenged his staff to teach poetry using text messaging. He then gave an old version of a state test to those students who texted in summaries of the poems and to those who learned the poems in a traditional manner.

Dominick Fiorille, Times Herald-Record

The result: Those who texted averaged 80 percent on the exam, versus 40 percent for those who didn’t.

That’s fascinating.

Dr. Kelli Marshall from U of Toledo shares her experiences using Facebook and Twitter to teach her Intro to Film course.

Public NotePad: Twitter is really good for sharing short inspirations, thoughts that just popped into your head. Not only are they recorded, because you can go back and look at them, but you can also get inspiration from others. This is really useful for any “creative” based class.

“All of this started when groups and fanpages became public,” Epelboin said, “allowing those guys to make some list of profiles to be harassed on Facebook, taking advantage of a loophole in Facebook’s crowd-sourced moderation process when it comes to banning profiles: if a few dozen members alert Facebook about one profile as being a fake, it is automatically deactivated.”

“If you were to come into my classroom, the first thing you would notice is that my desk is in the back corner, despite the building design to make it otherwise. This placement is but an outward sign of an implicit philosophy, that teaching must be learner-centered,”

Sarah Wessling, winner of the 2010 National Teacher of the Year Award.

But how are they using it? Is it meaningful, or are they still just exploring because they don’t understand it yet?

More than four out of every five professors use social media. And more than half of professors use tools like video, blogs, podcasts, and wikis in their classes.

Those are some of the findings of a new national survey of nearly 1,000 faculty members released today by Pearson, the publisher.

Bucknell won in the category of best school or university Web site. The academy specifically praised Bucknell’s virtual tour. Visitors to the site can click buttons to complete sentences that describe their interests and characteristics. The site then shows visitors a campus map, with arrows pointing to programs and areas at the university in which those interests might be developed. Visitors can then read related blurbs about Bucknell and click on mutimedia describing the Bucknell experience.

More than half of all users of social networks in the U.S. are posting information that could put them at risk of being targeted by cybercriminals, according to a Consumer Reports study.

The magazine, which released its State of the Net survey today, noted that 52% of adults who use social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, have posted personal information like their full birth dates and other revealing facts that criminals could use to victimize them.

A quick read from the editorial staff of The Herald from Arkansas State University.

The report identified the significant challenges facing education institutions and the trends that the authors identified as ‘critical’ including:

1. Inadequate digital media literacy training for teachers;
2. Out-of-date learning materials and teaching practices;
3. Lack of agreement on how education should evolve despite widespread agreement that change is needed;
4. A failure of education institutions to adapt to informal education, online education, and home-based learning; and
5. Lack of support for or acknowledgment of forms of learning that usually occur outside the classroom.

Aiming to engage students who are multitasking with different forms of technology, companies are creating collaborative learning spaces online where students can help one another solve homework problems and study—all while building important 21st-century skills.

Something off-topic to celebrate an exceptional member of our species.