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"So you want to pop your filter bubble - to see the neutral, un-filtered, un-personalized web. How do you go about it? Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets: The ad companies and personal data vendors that power and profit from personalization are far more technologically advanced than most of the tools for controlling your personal data. That's why The Filter Bubble calls on companies and governments to change the rules they operate by - without those changes, it's simply not possible to escape targeting and personalization entirely. But that doesn't mean all is lost. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to de-personalize your web experience. They won't work forever, but for now they'll take you out of your own personal echo chamber."

Some very good advice here to try out. Check out the links.

So Facebook was basically used to facilitate a discussion group, which can certainly be done with an LMS like Blackboard or Moodle or with various other tools, but the nice thing about Facebook is that many students are already familiar and comfortable with it - it's a "known entity" to them. Another positive thing, which addressed a concern of mine in this environment, was that there was a 'wall' between this academic use and the personal uses students have for the tool - by being in the group you didn't have to friend anyone or expose your personal information.

"Twiplomacy is the first-ever global study of world leaders on Twitter. The governments of almost two-thirds of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter: 45% of the 264 accounts analysed are personal accounts of heads of state and government, but just 30 world leaders tweet themselves and very few on a regular basis."

Gooru: Just launched in beta, Gooru Learning is a "search engine for learning" that harnesses the power of the web by organizing free, online education resources into searchable collections, accessible from any web or mobile platform. Using machine learning and human judgment, Gooru curates, auto-tags and contextualizes collections of web resources to accommodate personalized learning pathways. Gooru collections are aligned to US Common Core Standards for Math and to California Science Curriculum Standards.

"Start small, make training personally relevant, pair staff with knowledgeable co-workers-and keep it fun, readers recommend"

Web apps offer a personalized browsing experience for you and your needs. Google's Chrome browser has effective web apps to help students create a focused, more productive and intuitive way to study while online.

The Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) is the core underlying technical scaffolding for the badge ecosystem that supports a multitude of issuers conferring badges into the ecosystem, and many displayers or earners using badges to share their competencies and achievements. Any given learner/badge earner can earn badges across many issuers, collect them in one place tied to their identity, and then share them with various websites and audiences including career sites, social networks or personal portfolios. Mozilla is building this infrastructure including the core repositories and management interfaces (each user's Badge Backpack), as well as specifications required to push badges in (issuers) or pull them out (displayers).

Many of us use email signatures on our emails to promote yourself, by putting personal information, some quotas or they write some funny messages, WiseStamps allows you to put customize signatures on your email."

The article provides information to current personal and nonprofessional video practices and on fair use.

Phil Brady's Blog post 60+ Fake and spoof websitesI've updated the pages on my site that deal with science spoofs, commercial fake sites  and social, political, historical, news, religious, travel and educational spoof and fake sites. I know from the feedback that I get that these sites are well used, so I have deleted the few that no longer work and I have added some more in. There are now a total of 61 sites split between the two pages. It's not a complete listing, and it's just my personal choice, but you might be interested in them. They're primarily designed as a teaching aid, but some of them are very amusing indeed, if you have that sort of a mind!

This post is meant for the hard working, passionate educators in your school who have not yet found their personal learning network and are not yet using social networking to improve their teaching and further their professional development.

"Some Google projects really do start from one person hacking around. Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don't support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born! Today we're making the first version of Swiffy available on Google Labs. You can upload a SWF file, and Swiffy will produce an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari. It's still an early version, so it won't convert all Flash content, but it already works well on ads and animations. We have some examples of converted SWF files if you want to see it in action."

"Personalized products FOR you and BY you"

"Turn your iPad into your personal interactive whiteboard!"

# According to Picasa, If you've signed up for Google+ photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage. (hat tip to Greg Grothaus) # To add people who have added you to their circles, but you haven't add them, go to the "People who've added you" tab and select "Not yet in circles" from the sort menu. All the people not in your circles will be listed first (hat tip to Owen Prater) # Right click on a circle and select "View circle in tab". This is a terrific way to see who's in a circle and allows you to do neat things like drag all the people inside it to another circle. # If you have a lot of Circles and/or a lot of people in your various Circles views (e.g. "People in your circles", "People who've added you", etc."), Mac users can use the pinch functionality to make the Circles section smaller so you can view all of your Circles. # Order of Circles in Left-Hand Nav: Default Circles appear first in this order - Friends, Family, Following, and Acquaintances. Then your personal circles are arranged alphabetically. You can rename any of the circles, including the default ones, and renaming a default one makes it part of the normal alphabetized list. Put an underscore in front of one that you want at the top of the list. You could also delete the default circles and start over in the order that you want.(hat tip to Donna Fontenont and Joe Hall)

"How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he's seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition."

"# International Review of Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks Internet Archive: INCA provides descriptions of government policy on education in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA and Wales. It focuses on curriculum, assessment and initial teacher training frameworks for pre-school, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education in schools (3-19 age range)."

If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.