Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance and aptitudes across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic—from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K–12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age.
Anne Bubnic on 18 Apr 10Here are 8 tips to monitor and protect one's online reputation from the U.S. Government Information Security Blog: Search your name. Type your first and last name within quotation marks into several popular search engines to see where you are mentioned and in what context. Narrow your search and use keywords that apply only to you, such as your city, employer and industry association. Expand your search. Use similar techniques to search for your telephone numbers, home address, e-mail addresses, and personal website domain names. You should also search for your social security and credit card numbers to make sure they don't appear anywhere online. Read blogs. If any of your friends or coworkers have blogs or personal web pages on social networking sites, check them out to see if they are writing about or posting pictures of you. Sign up for alerts. Use the Google alert feature that automatically notifies you of any new mention of your name or other personal information. Limit your personal information. Tweet/chat/discuss regarding business and the emerging trends in your industry, but limit posting information on your personal life, which could be a subject of major scrutiny by recruiters and hiring managers. Also, be sure you know how organizations will use your information before you give it to them. Use privacy settings. Most social networking and photo-sharing sites allow you to determine who can access and respond to your content. If you're using a site that doesn't offer privacy settings, find another site. Choose your photos and language thoughtfully. You need to ensure that information posted online is written professionally without use of swear words and catchy phrases. Also, be very selective in posting photographs, and use your judgment to ensure that these photographs are how you want the world to see you. Take action If you find information about yourself online that is embarrassing or untrue, cont
