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Mobile GPS will open a Pandora’s box of possibilities, say others. “I’d be very concerned about pedophiles or identity thieves hacking into a system and locating me, my wife, or daughter,” says Henry Simpson, who coordinates new technology for the California State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB). “It raises huge safety issues,” he adds.

But new technologies have always brought new risks – such as identity theft. Philosophically, every technology has both positive and negative values, says Andrew Anker, vice president of development at Six Apart, a Web consulting firm. “In fact,” he points out, “the most positive aspects are what also add the most negative.”

Companies looking to do business on college campuses have paid particular attention to security concerns. Rave Wireless introduced a GPS/MoSoSo enabled phone for students this past year, emphasizing the security value of the GPS feature over its potential to deliver underage victims to predators. While the Rave phones enable students to find like-minded buddies (Bored? Love Indian food? Meet me under the clock!), it also offers a cyberescort service linked to campus police. If the student doesn’t turn off a timer in the phone, indicating safe arrival at a destination, police are dispatched to a GPS location.

For example, miniDV cameras are not only among the new tools of self-expression, but the very act of creating personal videos with friends and creating events and key themes to shoot have become key aspects of entertainment in and of itself. To this generation, playing music via your cell phone, and movies and TV shows via your iPod are a given. Emailing is considered too old-school by many, whereas texting is outpacing cell phone calls. These things also go hand-in-hand with changes in online shopping patterns, top website preferences, communication and blogging patterns, and new habits for using social networks—not to mention the tremendous changes in preferred social networks and profile page usage patterns in general. These things are changing the paradigm of how the businesses of entertainment, communication, retail, marketing, advertising, and branding have been done in the past.

Unfortunately, as more companies pour big money into expanding their new media marketing components, as many people have discovered, the Field of Dreams theory (“if we build it, they will come”) certainly doesn’t apply when it comes to reaching savvy youth today. Popping up a site (or social network for that matter) no matter how cool it is means nothing if you can’t reach the market it’s intended for. This Report, therefore, also includes a great deal about how young people find out about new websites, communicate with others, and other forms of grassroots networking.

Overall, the Digital Lifestyle Youth Culture Profile Report 2008 not only reveals traits by target demographics, but also the growing generation gap occurring even within this generation.

Director of Special Programs for Paducah City Schools, Tom Ballowe, says the new law impacts reporting requirements and gives new directives to principals and schools on the reporting of the information.  He says the law also requires the state to send out reports each year on each district and each school in that district, so it’s a reporting issue as well as a policy and procedures issue. Ballowe says people should not be afraid to report bullying to school officials because you should report it and you’ll be protected from retaliation. The school district will then report the incident if it’s serious enough to law enforcement. 

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.

But a high-ranking Olympic committee official said Wednesday that the panel was aware that China would continue to censor Web sites carrying content that the Chinese propaganda authorities deemed harmful to national security and social stability.

Students there and in four other New Jersey school districts will take a leap in classroom technology this year, using Apple's iTunes store to post and share educational material.

Lectures, student projects, orientation videos and other media can be posted on iTunes, available free to students and parents in the five districts, or anyone else.

K-12 on iTunes U

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’

In the past, the Medford district had used its umbrella policy on bullying, harassment and intimidation to crack down on cyber bullying.Spelling out the ban on cyber bullying and threatening to suspend driving privileges sends out a clear message that school officials are on the watch for such behavior, officials said.