The information (and production) overload of the digital era creates more of everything: both high- and low-quality content coming from everybody, amateur to professional. To quote the quoter (policy pundit Adam Thierer reviewing tech pundit Clay Shirky's book Cognitive Surplus), "Shirky argues (p. 47), 'The low-quality material that comes with increased freedom accompanies the experimentation … [Read more...] about ‘Cognitive surplus’ calls for more media-literacy
Archives for July 2010
Finding & honoring teachers on Facebook
We see so much coverage of social Web abuse that it was a nice surprise to see a story about what it's great at: finding long-lost friends, relatives, classmates ... and teachers! The New York Times tells of how people out of school 20+ years use Facebook to find their favorite high school teachers and thank them: "At a time when public school teachers are being blamed for everything from poor … [Read more...] about Finding & honoring teachers on Facebook
Video Barbie tight with fast-growing Foursquare
Foursquare, the service that allows people to text to the world when they've arrived at the corner donut shop (that's called a "checkin") just passed the 100 million checkin mark, Mashable reports. That's not registered users – more like 100 million Facebook updates – but it says something about the growth in geolocation apps' and games' popularity. "Foursquare has experienced massive growth in … [Read more...] about Video Barbie tight with fast-growing Foursquare
Got a ‘jailbreaker’ wannabe at your house?
The other day my 13-year-old mentioned in passing that he wished he could figure out how to jailbreak his iTouch so he could download free game apps (I got the feeling that messing around and figuring it out with friends was kind of a game itself). It made me smile, though, that this came up the very day the news broke that "jailbreaking" is ok now (see The Independent). What does "ok" mean? Well, … [Read more...] about Got a ‘jailbreaker’ wannabe at your house?
The goal for digital citizenship: Turn it into a verb!
Readers, this is turning out to be a series on digital citizenship, because the "Jessi Slaughter" story powerfully illustrated why and how much this baseline online-safety education is needed. Yesterday in Part 1, I looked at the kind of online behavior that citizenship lessons need to address and how we can help our children avoid it. Today: the goal of citizenship instruction, which hopefully … [Read more...] about The goal for digital citizenship: Turn it into a verb!