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In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.

Education Minister Ng Eng Hen officially entered the blogosphere on Oct 1, joining the likes of Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan and Foreign Minister George Yeo.

Dr Ng told MediaCorp via email that penning his thoughts in cyberspace is an avenue for him to engage the public in a more personal way. His foray online "is an additional platform for me to communicate with parents and the public",

Apart from blogging about events or trips he had attended, Dr Ng also shares pictures taken during his official functions and visits. Dr Ng has also written on issues facing the education system.

Wired.com photographers have the enviable job of shooting the coolest stuff and most intriguing people in the technology world. Now we’re giving away many of those photos to you, the public, for free. Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream.

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Facebook is such a popular application that is so widely used for personal and business uses, it makes no business sense to ban it. If companies do not address this they could be at the mercy of corporate suicide

Social networking is like food and drink to Generation Y workers, they are so used to communicating in a more open and collaborative way. Therefore, forward looking companies should be aiming to encourage social media activity amongst their employees rather than stifling it

CIT used to have an e-Portfolio service that did not have a high take up rate. There are several reasons for this that I can think of: It was provided under the build it and they will come model. I believe not enough was done to convince students and teaching staff about the benefits of building e-Portfolios. Consequently, no one was willing to integrate this into their course, as part of reflective learning. Keeping an e-Portfolio was seen as extra work, which neither students nor staff were keen on. Perhaps the software itself was not very conducive to building e-Portfolios. One key area with users seem to be that the e-Portfolio should have a customisable design and layout (at least on its public face). Our system was not flexible in that aspect. In fact, in the latter years, the option to publish the e-Portfolio was taken away entirely. The e-Portfolio service was a walled garden. It wasn’t easy to bring in digital artefacts, which may have resided on other public services, nor was it easy to repurpose that information into useful formats – personal reference, actual resume, showcase of work. No one figured how students would access the e-Portfolios after they graduated as it was all based on our single sign-on system.