Certainly what all the coverage of the Murrysville, Pennsylvania, school stabbings indicates is a society trying to make sense of a so far inexplicable tragedy, but there is no – zero – sense or accuracy in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "report" that this is "the latest face of the national epidemic of school violence." There is no such epidemic. In fact, the latest national data available shows a … [Read more...] about In the face of school violence, what do we default to?
Social Media
FB & Oculus VR: The potential of a virtual-reality platform
For years we've heard about the potential of virtual reality, but even when the virtual world Second Life was a hot tech-news story, it hardly felt like a second life to most people. I wrote about it a number of times because of the amazing work some very cutting-edge educators and their students were doing in Teen Second Life, when it existed. Then it faded into the background, and those teachers … [Read more...] about FB & Oculus VR: The potential of a virtual-reality platform
What’s (importantly) different about Snapchat
It's not what you might think – or what you might've read in the news. What makes Snapchat stand out in the crowd of social media apps, in fact what makes it "matter," as social media researcher danah boyd put it, "has to do with how it treats attention." Snapchat users don't just swipe through a gazillion photos in a stream or album. The app doesn't work that way. They actually pause and pay … [Read more...] about What’s (importantly) different about Snapchat
We ‘like’ faces in social media: Study
That we like faces in our photos – or simply that we like faces – was reconfirmed by a new study at Georgia Tech. "Instagram photos that include faces are far more likely to get likes from followers than those without," Mashable cites the study as finding. "Of 1.1 million randomly-selected Instagram photos analyzed with face detection software, those with faces were 38% more likely to get Likes … [Read more...] about We ‘like’ faces in social media: Study
Yik Yak update: How the app came to geo-fence off US schools
After Yik Yak "fenced out" her daughter's entire high school in southern California, Diana Graber of CyberWise.org did some investigating to find out how the app was blocking use in schools. What she found out is an example of digital citizenship on the part of an app developer (see this for an example from the funding part of the mobile ecosystem). In "Yik Yak App Makers Do the Right Thing," … [Read more...] about Yik Yak update: How the app came to geo-fence off US schools