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if the metric you used to judge whether or not a new technology is a "pirate technology" is what percentage of its use was "unauthorized," you get a very skewed picture. Early on, all sorts of new and innovative technologies are mostly used for unauthorized copies... until the industry catches up. However, people don't often deal with trends very well, and they assume, quite incorrectly, that if a technology is initially used in an unauthorized manner, it must be a "piracy tool" and no amount of discussing how trends and adaptation works will convince them otherwise.

over time, things change. Content creators begin to embrace the new, realize that it might not be evil, and suddenly we see more and more interesting case studies. And that seems to be happening with BitTorrent. The recent MusicMetric analysis of BitTorrent downloads for the first six months of 2012 found that 31% of downloads were for authorized files. Now, you can argue that this is still less than half of all files -- but it's a big step up from the standard claims that somewhere between 1% and 10% were authorized. It seems quite likely that the trend is moving in the right direction.

the idea that BitTorrent is just for infringement may have to be officially considered debunked

a few guidelines to help understand how the study’s findings can be of practical use to students, and teachers who are looking to improve digital literacy in their classrooms

The internet has democratised access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis.

read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site

Playing video games is not addictive in any meaningful sense. It is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be

These areas of the brain — those that produce and respond to the neurotransmitter dopamine — are involved in just about any pleasurable activity: having sex, enjoying a nice conversation, eating good food, reading a book, using methamphetamines.

new research findings from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, has shown that screen time has very little practical effect on children’s sleep.

while the correlation between screen time and sleep in children exists, it might be too small to make a significant difference to a child’s sleep

Focusing on bedtime routines and regular patterns of sleep, such as consistent wake-up times, are much more effective strategies for helping young people sleep than thinking screens themselves play a significant role

Our new research into digital reading has found that young people who are the most engaged with reading are more likely to read both on paper and on screen than their peers who have low engagement with reading

Pupils eligible for free school meals and boys with the lowest levels of reading engagement are two of the groups most likely to benefit from using digital formats

young people who read above the level expected for their age read fiction both in print and on screen

[Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.

We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.

I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.

pedagogy (i.e., teaching practice) and not the medium (i.e., technological tools and resources, such as whiteboards, hand-held devices, blogs, chat boards) that made a difference in learning, stating that instructional media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition

there was no proof to show that a medium was capable of ensuring that pupils and students could learn more or more effectively. He saw the medium as a means, a vehicle for instruction, but that the essence of learning remained—thankfully—in the hands of the teacher

it is not the medium that decides how effectively learners learn

teens today are spending an average of nine hours a day online,

sedentary screen time

Not everybody in the medical community is on board with such an assessment

a group of more than two dozen doctors and researchers sent an open letter to the WHO in 2016, arguing that formalizing the disorder lacked scientific merit and could cause real harm to patients.

the current operationalization leans too heavily on substance use and gambling criteria, and the lack of consensus on symptomatology and assessment of problematic gaming

describing exemplars of technology integration is not synonymous with student-centered teaching. And student-centered teaching is not the same as “success” in student learning

Evidence of technology use in Europe, Asia, and the Americas  (see JECR PDF) have pointed out how powerful devices often end up being used to support teacher-centered instruction.

The all-important implementation question–too often overlooked, ignored, or forgotten by champions of new technologies–remains: have teachers altered their classroom practices as a consequence of using new technologies? Without such changes in teaching practices, then student learning and outcomes can hardly be expected to improve.

It’s amazing, he adds, that people don’t see that the alarm around tech is just a repeat of a very old storyline. “In the 1950s, fearmongers were saying the exact same thing about comic books, literally verbatim: it’s reducing kids’ attention spans; it’s causing them to commit suicide; it’s leading to mental health issues.” Distraction, he stresses, is an age-old problem that is far bigger than technology

the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.

It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information

the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

How can P2P networks go legit?'' My answer is, ``they already are

No one here would dispute that filesharing networks are used by those who would violate copyright. But this is not solely the domain of P2P; copyrighted software has been traded on electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) since their inception and has permeated every public communication protocol on the Internet. Filesharing is a social phenomenon, not a technological one - demonizing P2P based on one use of the technology is a mistake

BitTorrent is a P2P system that allows large, popular files to be downloaded quickly