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The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. T

what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.

privileged people

Honduras was not the only example of how Twitter is been used to change the fate of politics. On July 5, 2009, Mexico had its legislative elections and a hashtag -#votonulo-[Figure 5] was created. The purpose was to request that Mexicans vote “NO VOTE”. According the CNN en Español this made a difference on the way that Mexican people voted that day.  About 6% of the Mexican population voted “NO VOTE” in a country with a population of more than 109M this means about 6.5M. In metropolitan areas like Mexico City with almost 20M people [12] and Guadalajara with almost 5M people [11] the “NO VOTE” reached 11% (2.7M). This event has never happened in Mexico before, according to CNN en Español, Twitter played an important role in it. [13,14]

Mobil technology has reached critical mass in Latin America, therefore, this may facilitates the growth of Twitter in this part of the world, as its platform can be access by text message. For example, Argentina has a mobile penetration of 98.7%, followed by Chile which has an 80.4% and Mexico and Brazil with over 70%. [3]

It is important to know that in Latin America the first exposure to internet comes from the mobile technology

As a first time student enrolled in an online course, I am dismayed by the total lack of the instructor's input. She merely feeds us the publisher's materials, has a teaching assistant grade the homework and pulls her tests from the publisher's test bank. I could teach this course, easily, myself.

There is no "teaching" or explanation, just self study. Silly things are graded like participation in discussions, and homework is often graded despite the fact the solutions manuals are all available online for students. Many online courses are taught by for-profit schools whose key motivation is to never fail students and to keep their tuition dollars flowing in. Even traditional schools' online courses are silly. The teacher has no way to know who is taking the exams. Exams are open book. Let's all start calling it the sham that it really is.

I have to say, from my experience as a student in an Ivy League school on the ground I had experiences like that. You can't judge an entire way of teaching and learning from these experiences.I have been teaching graduate school online since 1999. I engage actively with learners one on one, in small groups and in the class. I use meeting technologies as well as the Blackboard discussion. Learners work independently or collaboratively, depending on the assignment. I review and make detailed comments on their writing in assignments that require them to reasearch and draw on multiple scholarly sources. There is typically not one textbook, so "publisher's materials" or "open book exams" are non-existent. Even discussion assignments are submitted in full APA style and require references to the assigned and other scholarly readings. Higher order critical and creative thinking, original analysis, are required.

Light's examination of the impact of group study among students at Harvard is particularly compelling. In Making the Most of College, Light presents evidence that "students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. Group meetings are organized around discussions of the homework, and as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (2001, 52).

The purpose of copyright law is to promote the progress of science and art.

most of what you find online is under copyright, even if there is no copyright symbol and no attribution and no source listed

Copyright comes with a set of exclusive rights.

M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)

But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.

Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching.

what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties.

So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.

Between 1933-1941, thirty high schools in the country and over 300 universities and colleges joined the experiment sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.

(Lima, 1833 - Miraflores, 1919) Escritor peruano, creador de un género intermedio entre el relato y la crónica, que renovó la prosa sudamericana. Aunque se le considera integrante de la escuela romántica, su obra no obedece del todo a sus presupuestos, salvo por algunos matices estilísticos que empleó como soporte formal. Es cierto que en su juventud hizo una apasionada defensa del romanticismo, pero luego lo juzgaría con gran severidad y trazaría su propio derrotero artístico.

New Internet SMS and messaging services are proving especially useful to language teachers, turning the focus away from the particulars of language and writing and toward whole language oral output and pronunciation, even at the beginner level.

is the time to revisit and recast the debate over cell phones in education and to consider their relevance as engagement and assessment tools for foreign language teachers in particular.

And it is no longer only what takes place inside the classroom that needs debating. Paradigm shift also means embracing the notion that learning takes place in more collaborative, interactive ways and also — at least potentially — everywhere and (nearly) all the time.

It has long been academe's dirty little secret that bad instructors and bad assignments create cheating.

"In today's information age, where a body of information in all but the narrowest of fields is beyond anyone's ability to master, why aren't colleges teaching students how to research, organize and evaluate the information that is out there?"

If, however, processing information is the issue, if creative solutions are being sought, if students are being asked to develop new syntheses, then cheating will be much rarer, and much more difficult, technology use will become essential, and learning will be far more relevant.

One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.

The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.

When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.

In a sense, the blog is the antithesis of my academic training. Universities are about restricted knowledge. We study our own things, keep our research to ourselves so no one will steal our work, and we publish results in journals in a language no one understands. The idea of blogs is all about shared knowledge. I love sharing and getting feedback on my findings, and this blog has introduced me to so many fascinating people from all over the world — students, scholars, urban farmers — and it is really interesting to hear their takes.

Tokyo Green Space is a public research project. It involves observing small public green spaces in Tokyo, sharing images and thoughts online in a diary format and connecting with other people online and in person. I've maintained the site for three years out of passion.