Group items tagged

"The Senate has forced the Australian Electoral Commission to disclose the source code of the software that counts Senate preference votes after the organisation refused to release it in response to a freedom-of-information request. "

The issue of cyber bullying of school children goes to the zeitgeist of our age. It is a collision point between three competing forces: educating our children to be responsible, autonomous individuals; the intervention of the state; and the seemingly unfathomable reach of technology. This week the new Commonwealth Director of Cyber Safety Policy and Programs. begins sifting through the many submissions responding to the government's cyber safety discussion paper. Twenty years ago who would have even imagined such a position would need to exist?

The issue of cyber bullying of school children goes to the zeitgeist of our age. It is a collision point between three competing forces: educating our children to be responsible, autonomous individuals; the intervention of the state; and the seemingly unfathomable reach of technology. This week the new Commonwealth Director of Cyber Safety Policy and Programs. begins sifting through the many submissions responding to the government's cyber safety discussion paper. Twenty years ago who would have even imagined such a position would need to exist?

"Since I started this Experiment to use Evernote in every aspect of my classroom, I wasn't really sure what I was going to discover. I was sure there would be some way that Evernote was not going to meet my needs and I would be forced to add another tool to my chest while I continue the experiment for the school year. One way I was weary of was lesson planning. I have used the the traditional planner book for years and it has always been very good to me. I could easily flip back and see what I what I did the year before as I planned the upcoming school year. I'm not a big fan of trying to fix things that are not broken, but I figured I needed to give it a try in the name of the Experiment. Needless to say, I was not disappointed."

"This book is designed to provide teachers and parents alike an insight into the bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) revolution sweeping across entire school communities in Australia, the US and UK, and explain the immense implications of these developments. In time all schools in the developed world will move to students using their personal mobile technology in class, rather than it being provided by the school. It is not a case of if, but when. BYOT is like a tsunami coming across the horizon. The forces impelling the change and the potential educational, social development, economic, technological and political opportunities opened by the development will not only bring about its introduction but will soon fundamentally change the nature of schooling, teaching, the technology used, home-school relations and the resourcing of schools."

Cheap Android tablets, namely from Amazon, could boost Android tablet sales numbers past the current dominating force known as the iPad, according to research firm IDC.

A few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as "How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity." Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

When the first version of HTML5 published in 2008, it raised more questions than it answered. Would it be a force of unification or division? Would content producers, browser programmers and device manufacturers agree to new standards? And would it finally solve issues related to multi-platform development? Its fate was uncertain for some time, especially as heavyweights Apple and Adobe duked it out in the mobile arena. The future of Flash, the standard for streaming video on the web, hung in the balance.

But the good news is that, despite the hobby's sprawling growth into new areas like digital, cloud and social games, once you've mastered the basics, grasping more offbeat turns of phrase quickly becomes second-nature. (Or you could do what even the best of us are often forced to do in a pinch: Google the darn term.) Consider the following gaming dictionary a crash course in all things interactive entertainment -- memorize it, and who knows? You may even become proficient enough to talk with your kids about the latest games without making them burst into tears of laughter.

"Reading is inherently time consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line. Traditional reading also consumes huge amounts of physical space on a page or screen, which limits reading effectiveness on small displays. Scrolling, pinching, and resizing a reading area doesn't fix the problem and only frustrates people. Now, with compact text streaming from Spritz, content can be streamed one word at a time, without forcing your eyes to spend time moving around the page."

"The day when your hat can extrapolate your mood from your brain activity and make a spa appointment on your behalf may not be far away. The next big thing in the digital world won't be a better way for you to find something. If a confluence of capabilities now on the horizon bears fruit, the next big thing is that information will find you. Welcome to contextual search, a world where devices from your phone to your appliances will join forces in the background to make your life easier automatically."

"Madeline McSherry of Slate says it best:  "Coding is the hottest skill on the job market, the modern-day language of creativity, and a powerful force in the economy." Here are four reason why I believe students should be coding:"

PISA, the OECD's triennial international assessment of 15 year olds in math, reading, and science, has become one of the most destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational authoritarianism, and most serious, directs the world's attention to the past instead of pointing to the future. In the coming weeks, I will publish five blog posts detailing each of my "charges," adapted from parts of my book Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education.

"Call someone a 'cyber-utopian' and it's likely to be taken as an insult, according to leading media theorist Ethan Zuckerman. But we'll meet some self-confessed utopians (of the digital variety) who are out of the closet and proud! While cyber-utopianism - that is, the idea that the internet is the ultimate empowering force - can get a little disconnected from reality, cyber-utopians say that's what they like about it. It's a testing ground for future opportunities they say -- a way of encouraging us to think big and make the most of the Internet and new technologies."

Their Youtube channel has some excellent videos *especially* the RSA Animate ones - incredible! "The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action."

Tim Berners-Lee has dubbed Facebook a threat to the universality of the world wide web. Next month marks the twentieth anniversary of the first webpage - served up by Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva - and in the December issue of Scientific American, he celebrates the uniquely democratic nature of his creation, before warning against the forces that could eventually bring it down. "Several threats to the Web's universality have arisen recently,"

Another way to sync data across computers. Ideal for me as I use Ubuntu at home but forced to use Windows at school.

Wednesday, 01 July 2009 Education Minister Bronwyn Pike announced today that CSG Services Pty Ltd will join forces with the Brumby Labor Government to deliver the Ultranet project to every Victorian government school and to secure more than 55 new jobs over the next year.

"Scientists admit they'll be forced to throw out valuable data because today's computers aren't powerful enough to process all the information that will be generated by a proposed new super telescope. The planned $2.3 billion dollar Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the largest and most sophisticated radio telescope ever built."

Rent escrow is a legal process tenant is may use to force landlord in rental property; tenant landlord laws; tenant definition; Rent escrow baltimore city