Most people agree that the internet has and will continue to be positive for social relations. But according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, it’s also presented many more challenges, and perhaps opportunities, for how reputations are made, tarnished, and remade, reports the Washington Post. In its annual future of social relations survey, the Pew Internet & American Life Project asked 895 experts how eMail, social networking sites, and video conferencing, among other applications, are redefining the way we think of relationships. “As information shrinks our world, it will become easier for one’s misdeeds to return to them or for outbursts of regrettable behavior to be reported and shared,” said Stuart Schechter, a researcher for Microsoft and former staff member of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. “For better or worse, technology makes the citizenry its own Big Brother. Some will welcome this as transparency; others will feel oppressed.” Privacy and security experts say users need to be as concerned about how their reputations online are being translated to peers and employers…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Some question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement
Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation’s public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on devices that technology companies promise can raise student performance. Increasingly, though, another view is emerging, reports the Washington Post: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further, arguing that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the interactive whiteboard, locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction than runs counter to the more collaborative, small-group models that many reformers favor. On its web site, SMART Technologies quotes a former Fairfax County, Va., high school teacher saying that after whiteboards arrived, he saw “significant” increases in student performance “across all grade levels.” Such statements reflect the fact that many teachers love whiteboards, and they also reflect the relationships that ed-tech companies cultivate with school officials to market their products, underwriting major education conferences and sponsoring professional associations. “The private sector engagement is a good thing,” said Doug Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which lists Promethean, SMART Technologies, and Apple among its $30,000 platinum sponsors. “It is the [job] of the public sector to evaluate claims of these vendors.”
…Read MoreGlobal firm to pay Montgomery, Md., schools millions for elementary curriculum
Montgomery County Public Schools could soon become a global brand, the Washington Post reports. The school system will be paid $2.25 million to develop an elementary school curriculum that an education company will augment and sell around the world. The school system will also receive a small percentage of sales revenue once the curriculum is completed. The deal, rare in size and scope in the United States, was approved by the school board 6 to 2 Tuesday. Under the terms, Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, will acquire the expertise of one of the nation’s top school systems and the right to use its name and its top employees as sales tools. “I tend to look at it from the standpoint that we are broke,” Montgomery Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said. “You have to have new ways of doing things when you don’t have money…”
…Read MoreFacebook meets the “Unlike” button
The site that functions as one big popularity contest looks a little unpopular today. After a series of changes that eroded its users’ privacy, Facebook has been getting smacked around in public, the Washington Post reports. A Wired blog post declared the widely-used social network “Gone Rogue.” A team of programmers looking to develop an open alternative to Facebook quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars from strangers. A series of bold-face names in technology have canceled their Facebook accounts. I am neither terribly surprised about this nor too sympathetic for Facebook. The Palo Alto, Calif., company has earned this scorn. First, consider the changes it’s imposed on its users. One turns many parts of your personal profile–your city, employer, hobbies and so on–into public links unless you remove that information. Another change can expose your endorsements of links at various sites, this one included, with a click of Facebook’s increasingly-ubiquitous “Like” button. (Note that my first posts on these changes failed to capture their privacy implications.) A third, “Instant Personalization,” shares some of your data, without your advance permission, with other sites…
…Read MoreFCC chairman expected to leave broadband services deregulated
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has indicated he wants to keep broadband services deregulated, reports the Washington Post—even as a federal court decision has exposed weaknesses in the agency’s ability to be a strong watchdog over the companies that provide access to the web. The FCC currently has “ancillary” authority over broadband providers such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon and must adequately justify actions over those providers. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency had exceeded its authority in 2008 when it applied sanctions against Comcast. The ruling cast doubt over the FCC’s ability to create a “net neutrality” rule that would force internet service providers to treat all services and applications on the web equally. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to respond soon to the court ruling. Three sources at the agency said Genachowski has not made a final decision but has indicated in recent discussions that he is leaning toward keeping in place the current regulatory framework for broadband services, while making small changes that would bolster the FCC’s chances of overseeing some broadband policies. The sources said Genachowski thinks “reclassifying” broadband to allow for more regulation would be overly burdensome on carriers and would deter investment. But they said he also thinks the current regulatory framework would lead to constant legal challenges to the FCC’s authority every time it attempted to pursue a broadband policy. “The telephone and cable companies will object to any path the chairman takes,” said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, a media public interest group. “He might as well take the one that best protects consumers and is most legally sound.”
…Read MoreReport examines violent attacks on U.S. college campuses
A report by federal law enforcement officers, released last week on the third anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, offers the first comprehensive analysis of violent attacks carried out on U.S. college campuses in the past century and finds that more than half have occurred in the past 20 years, the Washington Post reports. Researchers looked at public records of 272 incidents of “targeted violence” at colleges since 1900. The study, “Campus Attacks,” was a joint effort of the Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Education. The report offers a foundation of research for the discipline of threat assessment, a growing facet of college administration that seeks to predict and prevent Virginia Tech-style attacks. On April 16, 2007, Tech student Seung Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 people and himself in one of the nation’s deadliest attacks…
…Read MoreNews sites rethink anonymous online comments
Web sites that once embraced anonymous comments are revising their policies to hold users more accountable for what they say online, reports the New York Times. The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy over the next several months, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters using real names. The Times, the Post, and many other papers have moved toward requiring people to register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown on screen. The Huffington Post soon will announce changes, including ranking commenters based in part on how well other readers know and trust their writing. “Anonymity is … an accepted part of the internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.” The Plain Dealer of Cleveland recently discovered that anonymous comments on its site, disparaging a local lawyer, were made using the eMail address of a judge who was presiding over some of that lawyer’s cases—and the newspaper exposed the connection in an article. The judge denied sending the messages, and last week she sued the Plain Dealer, claiming it had violated her privacy. The paper acknowledged that it had broken with the tradition of allowing commenters to hide behind screen names, but it served notice that anonymity was a habit, not a guarantee…
…Read MoreHistorians blast proposed Texas social studies curriculum
Historians are criticizing proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state’s borders, reports the Washington Post. The changes, which were preliminarily approved last week by the Texas board of education and are expected to be given final approval in May, will reach deeply into Texas history classrooms, defining what textbooks must include and what teachers must cover. The curriculum downplays the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, questions the separation of church and state, and says the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists during the Cold War. Because the Texas textbook market is so large, books assigned to the state’s 4.7 million students often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials. “The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they’ll end up in other classrooms,” said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, a group devoted to history teaching at the pre-college level. “It’s not a partisan issue, it’s a good history issue.”
…Read MoreGloves off, Microsoft pushes antitrust review of Google
Microsoft has confirmed it had a hand in helping bring about a European antitrust investigation of its web competitor, Google, The Washington Post reports. Freshly empowered by its search alliance with Yahoo, Microsoft said–in its most vocal criticism of Google yet–that the world has a new monopolist to watch in the search engine giant. “Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly,” wrote Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s vice president and deputy general counsel in a blog post last Friday. “Ultimately the competition law agencies will have to decide whether or not Google’s practices should be seen as illegal.”
…Read MoreEducation secretary pushes to revise student loan practices
Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday urged the Senate to overhaul student lending, asserting that the banking industry has had “a free ride from taxpayers for too long” and that executives with lending giant Sallie Mae have enriched themselves as borrowers rack up college debt, reports the Washington Post.
“Working Americans pay while bankers get rich,” Duncan said in a prepared statement. “Sallie Mae executives have paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade while teachers, nurses, and scientists — the backbone of the new economy — face crushing debt because of runaway college tuition costs.”
Duncan’s unusually pointed critique marked an escalation in the student loan debate as the Obama administration seeks to end a program that uses private lenders as middlemen for federally backed loans. The tone of the comments echoed President Obama’s recent populist rhetoric about the need to expand regulation of Wall Street……Read More