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Now it has become a phenomenon especially in poorer and smaller communities, where computers and broadband connection are beyond the reach of the population.

“lan houses are places of intense sociability, and are occupying an important place in the life of the favelas”.

Research published in 2008 by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) shows that in Brazil 48% of all users access the Internet from commercial premises like lan houses. When it comes to people from the poorest classes D and E, this number jumps to 79% - a 60% increase from the 48.08% in 2006.

Playing video games is the main activity at lan houses for 42% of respondents, but an equal proportion access websites, culture, news and entertainment. Social networks, especially Orkut, and online chat are also very popular. In addition, the lan houses are also used for various research, school work and job searches.

the lan houses assert both their power to bring digital inclusion by providing access to the Internet for people with low-incomes and their unique characteristics: they provide a source of income for those who manage them and meeting points for youngsters.

The headline of the piece of news circulating on the Internet, and that almost certainly will be in the newspapers, is Alleged paedophile arrested in lan house with pictures of children, as you can see in this link from Terra [pt] and from the search on the topic on Google News. It is the lan house that is made infamous, shown in a bad light. Like a den of mismanagement and of corruption for teenagers. This is not the real picture [pt]. The lan houses suffer from the same dangers faced by any other sector of the economy. Lan houses, cyber cafes, telecentres and whatever, have a fundamental role to play in the process of inclusion in the knowledge infrastructure, from digital inclusion to innovation, as is demonstrated by this statistical presentation of the Brazilian market [of lan houses].

these laws want to hold them accountable for a problem whose main culprits are authorities and society itself.

As of now, there are more than 90,000 lan houses in Brazil, whereas the country has 2,000 movie theatres and 2,600 bookstores. Can they be a place for more than just playing games or updating orkut, or even to use citizenship and e-government services? Pedagogue Rita Guarezi says that lan houses already play a key role in distance learning [pt]:

Purdue's podcasting project arose from a desire to let students study without being tethered to their computers, according to Michael Gay, the university's manager of broadcast networks and services for information technology. "We're trying to give people as many options as possible if they miss a course and need to catch up — or if they just want to review," he says.

Duke University

Drexel University

Purdue University

American University

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Dentistry

"Everybody knows that when you say something in class, the first time, not everybody is paying attention," Mr. Jackson says. "But if you make your lecture available as a podcast, students can relisten to troublesome passages, and it's easy for them to slow things down."

St. Mary's College, in California

For a graduate-level course in quantitative analysis, Ms. Herkenhoff creates two different series of podcasts, each recontextualizing highlights from her lectures.

"When I talked about this with my colleagues, the first thing they all said was 'well, no one's going to go to class,'" says G. Marc Loudon, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue who has posted lectures for students as both audio and video files. Mr. Loudon offers a fairly unsympathetic rejoinder to those concerns: "If a podcast can capture everything you do in class, you deserve to have nobody coming."

started penalizing students a grade point for every class session they missed.

"Those of you who didn't come to class, but are listening to the podcast, should know that one of the answers to the next test is on the screen," he said. "But I'm not going to tell you what it is."

But most students are savvy enough to realize that coursecasts aren't an alternative to class,

"a great way to complement the presentation slides many professors already offer online."

Richard Smith, a lecturer in instructional technology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, hosts a weekly podcast on scholarship and education. But he is not convinced that the technology can revitalize pedagogy — because, he says, there is little evidence that recorded lectures will hold students' interest.

"I don't think most professors, no matter how good they are in the classroom, can avoid being boring as hell when they're recorded."

Students reared on iPods and the Internet do not come to class expecting to sit through an hourlong lecture, he says. Instead, they want to gather information on their own terms and spend their class time in discussion, not rapt attention.

"The 'sage on the stage' is dying, if not dead already," Mr. Jackson says. "Faculty members are no longer privileged sources of knowledge, so our job should be to get people to think critically and independently about things."

Coursecasting, he says, can help that process along. In Mr. Jackson's own courses, he has put lectures online as podcasts and asked students to listen to them before they come to class, a technique he refers to as "distance learning with a twist." "Think about how much classroom time you would save if you didn't have to lecture anymore," Mr. Jackson says. "You free up all this interactive personal space between you and your students. It changes the classroom experience."

The "decentered classroom," as Mr. Jackson calls it, can be unsettling for students who are not eager to let the lecture-hall experience bleed into their free time.

Richard Edwards, an assistant professor of communication at St. Mary's College, is building a course around a series of 30-minute podcasts about film-noir classics that he and a colleague had made. Students will listen to the podcasts and then elaborate on Mr. Edwards's talking points in class. "Instead of having to run through all of our thoughts on Double Indemnity," Mr. Edwards says, "we can actually start our discussion in the 31st minute, in media res, without setting up the movie for everyone."

Mr. Edwards has made the podcasts that will anchor his film-noir course available to the public free through a license from Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly and artistic material widely available online. "I want people to download this stuff so they can feel free to engage with it," he says.

Michigan's dentistry school, for example, keeps its coursecasts locked behind a firewall so that only students can listen.

Administrators received enough complaints that they formed a faculty committee that is now examining BoilerCast's intellectual-property implications. "The fundamental question is who owns a faculty member's lectures," Mr. Loudon says. "If these classes have intellectual value beyond the classroom, who owns that?"

we educators must first own these technologies and be able to take advantage of these networked learning spaces. In this way, we can fully prepare students not just to be Googled well, but to be findable in good ways by people who share their passions for learning and who may well end up being lifelong teachers, mentors, or friends.

So what literacies must we educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? It starts, as author Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, with an understanding of how transparency fosters connections and with a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks;

In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.

This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go. In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.