Facebook glitch brings new privacy worries

A major security flaw in Facebook’s privacy settings has heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information, the New York Times reports. On May 5, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether. Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information. “Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md. Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University. “It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Katz said…

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Consumer groups say proposed privacy bill is flawed

A long-awaited draft of a Congressional bill would extend privacy protections both on the internet and offline, but privacy advocates said the bill does not go far enough in protecting consumers, reports the New York Times. The draft legislation was released May 4 by Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. The two lawmakers will collect comments on the draft and hope to have formal legislation introduced within a month or so. Consumer groups have been fighting what they see as the prevalence of online tracking, where online advertising is targeted for a certain user. Right now, there is no national legislation governing how companies tell consumers that they are collecting data, but companies do post privacy notices because certain state laws require it. The proposed bill would expand what information should be considered confidential, and it would require companies to post clear and understandable privacy notices when they collect information. In a conference call with reporters, however, representatives from privacy and consumer groups said the draft included several loopholes that might let companies track consumers too closely…

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Despite push, success at charter schools is mixed

For all their federal support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases are worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, reports the New York Times. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education, and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.” Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools. Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools—numbering perhaps in the hundreds—as the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students. But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school-choice movement have come to a hard recognition: Raising student achievement for poor urban children is enormously difficult and often expensive…

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When history is compiled 140 characters at a time

Twitter’s donation of its archives to the Library of Congress offers vast potential—as well as challenges—for historians, reports the New York Times. Twitter users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated. Not a few are pure drivel—but, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before. That’s why Twitter last month announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress and supply it with continuous updates. Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. For one thing, the Twitter archive will be easily searchable by machine—unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics. Also, 10 billion Twitter messages take up relatively little storage space: about five terabytes of data. But there are some privacy issues that need to be resolved. Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that isn’t enough to put privacy issues to rest, “we may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available,” said the library’s Martha Anderson…

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In New Jersey, a civics lesson in the Internet Age

Inspired by a Facebook message, thousands of New Jersey students walked out of class on April 27 to protest cuts in school aid, reports the New York Times. It was a silent call to arms: an easy-to-overlook message urging New Jersey students to take a stand against the budget cuts that threaten class sizes and choices, as well as after-school activities. But some 18,000 students accepted the invitation posted last month on Facebook, the social media site better known for publicizing parties and sporting events. And on April 27 many of them walked out of class in one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years. The protest disrupted classroom routines and standardized testing in some of the state’s biggest and best-known school districts, offering a real-life civics lesson that unfolded on lawns, sidewalks, parking lots, and football fields. The mass walkouts were inspired by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old aspiring actress and a college freshman, and came a week after voters rejected 58 percent of school district budgets put to a vote across the state. “All I did was make a Facebook page,” said Lauto, who graduated last year from Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan, N.J. “Anyone who has an opinion could do that and have their opinion heard. I would love to see kids in high school step up and start their own protests and change things in their own way.”

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In a world of ads, teaching students how to read them

A government campaign, built around a new web site called Admongo, will try to teach children from the fourth to the sixth grades how to think critically about advertising, reports the New York Times. The initiative seeks to educate children about how advertising works so they can make better, more informed choices when they shop or when they ask parents to shop on their behalf. The centerpiece of the effort is a web site called Admongo (admongo.gov), where visitors can get an “ad-ucation” by playing a game featuring make-believe products closely modeled on real ones. “Advertising is all around you,” the home page declares in urging youngsters to always ask three questions: “Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do?” Sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, which polices deceptive, fraudulent, and unfair marketing and advertising practices, the initiative has enlisted educational publisher Scholastic to help distribute materials to classrooms. The idea that children need to understand how commercial speech differs from other forms of communication is not a new one. Many schools have courses in what is called media literacy, intended to help students analyze various methods of persuasion, among them sponsored messages. But the belief that youngsters ought to be given additional tools to help them decipher sales pitches has been gaining support as the internet, and social media in particular, are used more for marketing…

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For web’s new wave, sharing details is the point

Mark Brooks wants the whole web to know that he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work, the New York Times reports. Too much information, you say? On the internet, there seems to be no such thing. A wave of web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class. Not that long ago, many were leery of using their real names on the web, let alone sharing potentially embarrassing personal details about their shopping and lifestyle habits. But these start-ups are exploiting a mood of online openness, despite possible hidden dangers…

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Museums take their lessons to the schools

To make up for a decline in visits, many museums are taking their programs to the classroom through traveling programs, video conferencing, or computer-based lessons, reports the New York Times. Over the last few years, many schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips—partly because of tight budgets that make it hard to pay for a bus and museum admission, and partly because of the growing emphasis on “seat time” to cover all the material on state tests. “Even if they can’t come to the museum, we can bring the excitement of science to the school,” said Katie Slivensky, one of seven traveling educators at the Museum of Science in Boston. At the museum, where school visits have dropped about 30 percent since 2007, demand for the 14 school travel programs—from the $280 “Animal Adaptations” to the $445 “Cryogenics”—is booming. On a sunny spring morning, the Sutton schools, about an hour from Boston, have brought in both a planetarium program and, for the kindergarten, “Dig Into Dinosaurs.” “It’s $275 a bus, and we’d need three buses for a grade level,” said Michael Breault, the principal. “We pay for field trips and special assemblies from a magazine fundraiser at the beginning of the year, and this year, we didn’t sell as many magazines…”

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iPad too much for some campus networks

The New York Times reports that the iPad has been touted as the next big thing in higher education technology, especially as more textbooks make the digital conversation, but according to a Wall Street Journal report, not all college campus networks can handle the mobile tablets. George Washington University students and faculty members who sprung for an iPad can’t access the campus wireless network. Princeton University has blocked about two dozen iPads that were messing up the university network. Seton Hill University, which is equipping every student with an iPad, has had to quadruple its bandwidth and charge students a $500-per-semester technology fee. Cornell University is also seeing networking and connectivity issues, similar to what happened with the iPhone hit…

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Open courseware 2.0: The next steps in the OER movement

Putting free courseware online was a first step in reimagining education. So what now? Wiki universities, smart courses, and—maybe—improved learning, reports the New York Times. A decade has passed since MIT decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” (OER) movement, with its ethos of sharing knowledge via free online educational offerings. The movement has helped dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings and has given higher education unprecedented reach—but putting course materials online for free isn’t cheap. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the principal financial backer of the open educational movement, has spent more than $110 million on these efforts over the past eight years, and now the foundation is pushing its grant recipients to do more than just make courseware available. In a letter to grantees in February, the foundation said that the current financial climate has forced it to reduce its education grant-making budget by 40 percent since 2008, requiring the foundation to adhere more closely to its primary goals: “to increase access to knowledge for all and improve the practices of teaching and learning.” “We’d like to see data being gathered, and see these materials being improved, and we’d like to see new models of learning,” says Victor Vuchic, the Hewlett program officer responsible for open education. He says the foundation is interested in projects that track and analyze who is using programs, look at how open education enhances learning, and examine how it is changing the future of education…

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Florida governor splits with G.O.P. on teacher pay

Gov. Charlie Crist has been jawboned and buttonholed as he has traveled around the state in recent days, and his office was deluged with 120,000 messages, the New York Times reports. Passions have not run so high in Florida, the governor said, since the controversy over ending the life of Terri Schiavo in 2005. This time, the point of contention was eliminating tenure for Florida public school teachers and tying their pay and job security to how well their students were learning. On April 15, Crist picked a side, vetoing a bill passed last week by the Florida Legislature that would have introduced the most sweeping teacher pay changes in the nation. The veto puts Crist, a moderate Republican, at odds with his party base in the Republican-controlled Legislature. His decision has also renewed speculation that he might drop out of the Republican primary for a United States Senate seat and run in the general election as an independent. For months, he has been trailing the more conservative Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, in polls…

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Despite budget woes, university still has money for bottled water

Times are tough at the University of California, the New York Times reports. The state’s budget crisis has led to cuts, layoffs and higher student fees. It is enough to drive someone to drink–as long as it’s not plain old tap water. Even though money is tight, the university has spent about $2 million in recent years on brand name, commercially produced and delivered bottled water to campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley. With both cities boasting some of the nation’s highest-quality drinking water, critics see bottled water as a questionable expense that is bad for the environment. “Bottled water is, largely, an unnecessary waste of money,” Peter H. Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland and a MacArthur genius fellowship recipient for his work on water issues, wrote via eMail from Alexandria, Egypt, where he was attending a conference on water sustainability. “But there are also substantial environmental, social and political costs not captured in the price alone…”

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