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"Code of Ethics Canons. Protect society, the commonwealth, and the infrastructure Promote and preserve public trust and confidence in information and systems. Promote the understanding and acceptance of prudent information security measures Preserve and strengthen the integrity of the public infrastructure. Discourage unsafe practice. Act honorably, honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally Tell the truth; make all stakeholders aware of your actions on a timely basis. Observe all contracts and agreements, express or implied. Treat all constituents fairly. In resolving conflicts, consider public safety and duties to principals, individuals, and the profession in that order. Give prudent advice; avoid raising unnecessary alarm or giving unwarranted comfort. Take care to be truthful, objective, cautious, and within your competence. When resolving differing laws in different jurisdictions, give preference to the laws of the jurisdiction in which you render your service. Provide diligent and competent service to principals Preserve the value of their systems, applications, and information. Respect their trust and the privileges that they grant you. Avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof. Render only those services for which you are fully competent and qualified. Advance and protect the profession Sponsor for professional advancement those best qualified. All other things equal, prefer those who are certified and who adhere to these canons. Avoid professional association with those whose practices or reputation might diminish the profession. Take care not to injure the reputation of other professionals through malice or indifference. Maintain your competence; keep your skills and knowledge current. Give generously of your time and knowledge in training others. Organizational Ethics Plan of Action Peter S. Tippett has written extensively on computer ethics. He provided the fol

"Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "

Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.

 if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."

When I started using social media in the classroom, I looked for and began to learn from more experienced educators. First, I read and then tried to comment usefully on their blog posts and tweets. When I began to understand who knew what in the world of social media in education, I narrowed my focus to the most knowledgeable and adventurous among them. I paid attention to the people the savviest social media educators paid attention to. I added and subtracted voices from my attention network, listened and followed, then commented and opened conversations. When I found something I thought would interest the friends and strangers I was learning from, I passed along my own learning through my blogs and Twitterstream. I asked questions, asked for help, and eventually started providing answers and assistance to those who seemed to know less than I. The teachers I had been learning from had a name for what I was doing -- "growing a personal learning network." So I started looking for and learning from people who talked about HOW to grow a "PLN" as the enthusiasts called them. Learning innovator Will Richardson led me to Shelly Terrell, who genuinely lives out her "collaborate for change" maxim.

Personal Learning Networks can be important in helping you find authorities in a field. A collection of professionals, a network of enthusiasts on a subject, can provide checks on opinion and fact.

Digital Introspection and the Importance of Self-Knowledge MAR 18 2011, 11:00 AM ET By Shelley Hayduk As the world changes, for better or worse, we continue to assimilate new experiences and ideas that define who we are. With the advent of new social networking tools, we can join the web of digitized relationships to connect with people and share these views. But in addition to connecting outward we also need to turn inward to reflect on our ideas and the relationships that we hold implicitly in our own minds. The connections we make in our head are unique to every individual. It's a fascinating journey to try and understand what they are. So how do we examine ourselves -- our thoughts and experiences? One method is introspection, and it's going digital. SELF-ANALYSIS THROUGH LANGUAGE Language and writing are key vehicles for introspection. Many people keep diaries of their thoughts and experiences to get to know themselves. Some people even write autobiographies. In fact, a key premise of psychotherapy (in the Freudian sense) is to become explicitly conscious of your feelings and subconscious beliefs by talking through them, i.e capturing your understanding in language. In expressing underlying forces of your life through words you can identify relevant psychological angst and formulate a better way to live. In each case, we capture our feelings and implicit views with words, articulating their meaning through language. Now technology gives us the ability to take this a step further, but before we get to that, a word about mental models. YOUR MENTAL MODEL We are the aggregation of how all our thoughts, feelings and experiences connect. This gestalt forms a perspective of the world as we see it. It's kind of like a miniature version of the world in our heads -- a "mental model" if you will. We use our mental models to store, analyze and decide everything. When we make a decision we check our mental models and use them to try to predict what will happen in the

We've finally figured out how to monetize social interaction, and Rushkoff, an award-winning author and media theorist who writes and speaks regularly on these topics, has reservations.

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.

"How to Analyze Information A Step-by-Step Guide to Life's Most Vital Skill We are living now through the early decades of the Information Revolution, and it's a miracle of human energy and ingenuity. Never before has so much information been available, so easily and inexpensively, about so many subjects. And the most important thing we've learned is that information is like water. It's vital to our lives; we cannot survive without it. But if too much pours over us - we drown. To keep from drowning in information we must learn to use it properly, which means figuring out what the information is telling us. After all, it isn't the information itself we use to make decisions; it's the knowledge within the information that we use. This is why we must learn how to analyze information - how to determine just what information we need to make the decisions we face, how to get that information, and then - this is the most crucial step of all -- how to reach inside this information to grasp the knowledge it contains."

"Videatives come to you in five ways Streaming Video, Instant Downloads, CDs, eCourses, Bi-weekly Blog The word videative [vid´-é-ã-tive] refers to the combination of text and video segments to create an integrated viewing experience (video + narrative = videative). The text explains the video and the video exemplifies the text. Use videatives to see how children think, to see how to support their learning, and to see how to prepare environments that engage children in rich problem solving. Use videatives to add authenticity to your lectures or clarity to your training sessions. Share videatives with parents to help them understand the value of play and the subtle ways a teacher can help children reflect on their own experiences."

3rd World Farmer is a new kind of game. An experiment in the genre of Serious Games, it simulates some of the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd World countries. In the game, the player gets to manage an African farm and is soon confronted with the difficult choices that poverty and conflict can cause. As a farm and family management game it has an emotional impact on many players because usually these types of games play out in much easier settings, where it's always possible to prosper by playing cleverly and making the right game choices. It's not always like that in 3rd World Farmer. Just like real people are dying from starvation in desperate situations that they never asked to be put in, all it takes for things to go wrong in this game is one bad harvest, an unfortunate encounter with corrupt officials, a raid by guerillas, a civil war, a sudden fluctuation in market prices, or any of the many other game events, that might never happen to families in industrialized countries. By letting players experience this - albeit in a harmless, fictional setting - we hope to open their eyes to the problems and to motivate them to make positive social change. Our aim is to have everybody play the game, reflect, discuss and act on it. The game is a great starting point for discussions of 3rd World issues, so we encourage teachers to use it in class.

""Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" by Neil Postman (Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)"

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you're smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process). "

There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.

This site, recommended by Suzie Boss, et al, contains several ideas about how to make thinking visible - akin to the Metacognitive Conversation work from WestEd - a worthwhile site to explore.

"Fundamentals are not "because I said so" facts and figures; they're the tools, the equipment, we need to get to the real stuff, the critical thinking and the creativity in any endeavor. When you hear a jazz musician riffing at a million miles an hour, he is absolutely improvising; he is not winging it. He's giving his brain the freedom to be brave, to explore, unencumbered by the burden of needing to actively cogitate on those fundamentals. He knows his art so thoroughly that he has the discipline to toe the line, the freedom to confidently act outside preconceived parameters, and-most importantly-the wisdom to know when to do one or the other."

The Age of Connection now takes its place alongside these earlier epochs in humanity's story. We are being retribalized, in the midst of rising urbanization. The dynamic individuality of the city confronts the static conformity of the tribe. This basic tension forms the fuel of 21st century culture, and will continue to generate both heat and light for at least the next generation. Human behavior, human beliefs and human relations are all reorganizing themselves around connectivity. It is here, therefore, that we must begin our analysis of the toolkit.

"Be like Socrates: assume people are unaware of their own ignorance (including yourself) and politely, warmly, probe to sort out the difference."

control turning around failing schools? Hardly. Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein continue to run the New York City schools. Boston and Chicago mayors will still have their appointees overseeing schools. Business and civic leaders' faith that mayoral control is the key to "real" reform may be tarnished somewhat by D.C., Detroit, and Baltimore but it continues to entrance venture fund entrepreneurs and policy wonks inside the Beltway. Other mayors will learn from Fenty's loss that voters can turn on you if you fail to heed your community and give your

How to Disagree The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do-in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.