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Distributed leadership and transparency needed in education and student leadership. It's time to abandon antiquated models of Prefects and Student Councils/Governments which promoted limited voice, action and impact.  Discussion by Mashable and OneYoungWorld inspire some thoughts in this direction and the role of social media and new models of social entrepreneurism  

Collaboration & sharing Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes - it's an obsession. They text, MSN, BBM, Myspace, Facebook, Facebook message, Facebook chat and Skype. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there's Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in parties when playing games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. Then along comes someone who wants to teach them this so called 21st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned. I'm always amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we even have the skills we claim we want to teach. There is no area of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education. Teaching and lecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution. The culture of NIH (Not Invented Here) is endemic. 

"The one thing I know is that as technology advances, we become desensitized to the impact our actions have on others. This was a really good message for them," Krocker said.

"No news is better than Fox News" What the researchers found out may not surprise you: For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6 points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.

A new Facebook program aims to prevent suicides by connecting distressed users with counselors via chat. The program, which launched Tuesday, lets friends alert Facebook when users express suicidal thoughts, reports The Associated Press. If your friend posts a comment related to suicide, for instance, you can report it to Facebook by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook will then send an email to the comment's author directing them to a telephone hotline or a link they can click to start a confidential chat. Facebook reps could not be reached for comment on the program, which was identified as "Lifeline."

What does the SOPA threat mean for online education and the cloud? Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and sixth most visited site in the world, will join websites like the content aggregator Reddit to "go dark" on Wednesday in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are currently being debated in Congress. "What these bills propose are new powers for the government and also for private actors to create, effectively, blacklists of sites that allegedly are engaging in some form of online infringement and then force service providers to block access to those sites," says Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "What we would have is a situation where the government and private actors could censor the net."

Don't shoot the medium. While no doubt FB presents challenges in its application in education, the real problem is not Facebook. The issue is professional value of teaching in the US, and North America in general. Until teachers are treated as professionals with salaries, responsibilities and statuses on par with university professors, following the Scandinavian and Asian models, the calibre of professional conduct will be as inconsistent as the pool of quality teacher candidates committed to an underpaid and undervalued profession.

The teen years can be emotionally difficult, but blogging can help adolescents to open up and become more socially confident MORE: Kids Sexting May Not Be as Big a Problem as We Thought

This was sent to me by a G10 parent. I haven't had a chance to review it. The focus of this web site is to help your kids understand how technology affects their privacy, and what they can do to build secure online profiles while keeping their information safe. This page is to help you understand how many kids behave online - and will illustrate how important it is for them use this site as a reference point.

Nine-year-old food blogger-turned-citizen-journalist Martha Payne from Argyll, Scotland, won the Internet's heart after using her cameraphone to expose the shoddy quality of her school meals.