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A punch in the eye seems so passé. Bullies these days are traveling in packs and using cyberspace to their humiliating messages online. Like the toughies of old, they are both boys and girls and they demand nothing less than total submission as the price of peace. It’s a jungle out there. For school districts, patrolling the hallways and adjacent grounds is just a start. In the 21st century, a new kind of vigilance is necessary—an expanded jurisdiction that serves to both stave off legal actions and ensure a safe and productive learning environment.

Today’s principals rely on district policy and practice to extend the presumed long arm of the law to off-campus incidents. Potentially, that could mean plunging headlong into the electronic frontier to rescue student victims and thwart cyberbullying classmates who thrive as faceless computer culprits.

A December 2009 study by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society found that students on the receiving end report greater emotional distress, are more likely to abuse substances, and are more frequently depressed.

But we adults are afraid. This is not the way we grew up. We had our group of friends, our own little group. Now, the groups to which today's young people belong are hundreds and even thousands strong. Their "friends" lists go on for pages, many of them hundreds or thousands of physical miles away. This is so far from the way we communicated and learned about each other, that we cannot understand it. So we do what most people do with things they do not understand. We ignore it. If it intrudes on the way we do things, we find ways to block it.

Eighty-one percent of kids have visited a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. Yet more than 50% of schools block social networking altogether and over 80% block instant messaging and chatting services. These statistics tell us that our students are accessing these types of services regardless of our efforts to block them.

ith over 80 million users on MySpace alone, social networking is not going away. And that National School Boards Association report said that 50% of students using these services are specifically talking about schoolwork using these social networking tools.What? Students are talking about schoolwork? Yes. Just as we used the phone (despite our parents demands to hang up!) students today are using social networks. They are asking each other questions and discussing homework besides planning to go out. This is their way to communicate and as much as we have difficulty understanding it, it is 24/7 and schools can take some advantage of that.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) today published its Annual Report 2008 revealing a fall of nearly 10% in the number of international websites with child sexual abuse content. The report warns against complacency, pointing to the serious nature of the images which are often carried on commercial websites.   The report also highlights the fact that 74% of child sexual abuse domains traced by IWF are commercial operations selling indecent images of children, and 75% of the these (some 850 unique domains) are registered with just 10 domain name registries. This underlines the importance of recent international efforts with domain name registries to get the site names delisted, and will remain a focus of IWF attention going forward.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ "title": "Changes at MySpace Signal a Move Away From Social Networking", "url": "http://www.thewrap.com/article/2736", "published": "1240950792" }, { "button": true })ShareThis yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = "Changes at MySpace Signal a Move Away From Social Networking"; yahooBuzzArticleSummary = "Sign of the times: One senior executive for comedy at MySpace has 1,403 friends on Facebook."; yahooBuzzArticleCategory = "entertainment"; yahooBuzzArticleType = "text"; thewrapcom49:http://www.thewrap.com/article/27363 votesBuzz up! Slideshow Depeche Mode's Traffic-Stopping Concert Depeche Mode celebrated the release of its 12th studio album, "Sounds of the Universe," with a free concert on Hollywood Boulevard Thursday evening -- which literally stopped traffic. The performance, which also appeared on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" later in the evening, drew a reported crowd of over 10,000. (Photographs by Jonathan Alcorn) Keywords Facebook news corp MySpace Chris Van Natta

In a move aimed at cracking down on cyerbullying, Texas lawmakers passed a new bill that makes it a crime to impersonate people online. The new "online harassment" statute makes it a felony to create phony profiles on social networking sites with the intent to "harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten" others. The statute defines commercial social networking sites broadly, saying they include any sites that allow people to register to communicate with others or create Web pages or profiles. (Email programs and message boards are excluded from the definition.)

his Is Me project aims to look at ways of helping people to learn more about what makes up their Digital Identity (DI) and at ways of developing and enhancing it.  "Digital Identity" is made up of multiple parts - it isn't just what we have published about ourself on the web, but also includes things other people have published about us.

Our first Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, offers strategies for integrating the tools, approaches, and methods of Comparative Media Studies into the English and Language Arts classroom. The guide provides a set of lesson plans using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley entitled Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary adaptation. The guide is intended to demonstrate techniques which could be applied to the study of authorship in relation to a range of other literary works, pushing us to reflect more deeply on how authors build upon the materials of their culture and in turn inspire others who follow to see the world in new ways.

In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks.

As the geeky father of a 9-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, one of my worst fears as they grow older is that they won't be Googled well. Not that they won't be able to use Google well, mind you, but that when a certain someone (read: admissions officer, employer, potential mate) enters "Tess Richardson" into the search line of the browser, what comes up will be less than impressive. That a quick surf through the top five hits will fail to astound with examples of her creativity, collaborative skills, and change-the-world work. Or, even worse, that no links about her will come up at all. I mean, what might "Your search did not match any documents" imply?

digital footprints—the online portfolios of who we are, what we do, and by association, what we know—are becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives.