""I think Google is likely 75% fucked," Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist, wrote in an email to Mashable. "Nothing's totally fucked, but... they're at a precipice, and no one is calling them on it." Just a few years ago - heck, even a few months ago - that statement would have come across as utterly out of touch with reality. Even now, it probably reads as mostly hyperbolic. Mostly."
"The map uses freely available data retrieved Alexa on August 12th, 2013. The company has provided website analytics since 1996. Alexa collects data from millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions, and the data used for this visualization were calculated "using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to a site and the estimated number of pageviews on that site from users in that country over the past month"."
"Japan will soon start trialling electronic textbooks in primary schools, enhancing the role of IT in the classroom for a generation of "digital natives" born in the wired age. Under the "future school" project, 10 elementary schools will give all their under-12 pupils tablet PCs and fit their classrooms with interactive electronic blackboards starting as early as next month."
He briefly warns of cable giants who may prevent the free flow of content across the net.
The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.
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,"
"Your savings are gone. You've lost your house. Accept the challenge to see if you can make it through the month on your last $1,000, learning quickly how changes in employment, housing, medical costs and other expenses can create an unexpected shortfall."
What a great little game that would generate loads of discussion and topics for further study.
"Ask an expert and they will tell you, the iPad sucks. They a only any good for media consumption, You can only do what Apple allow and it doesn't do Flash. All in all, it is a severely gimped toy, an expensive one to boot. So, I've had my iPad now for about 8 months now and with the release of iPad 2 imminent, I thought I would have a go at tackling some of the more ridiculous criticisms of the device."
"The last four months have been tumultuous ones for our university. With the end of educational discounts for our island in Second Life, we faced a tough decision. Second Life's steep learning curve and our local system of incentives and rewards for faculty had discouraged any use of virtual worlds in our curriculum."
"Our infographic to end the week is one of the better ones I've run across recently. It's about data centers, one of the more talked about topics in recent months. This one explores power consumption by making comparisons between standard usage and what can be accomplished with more efficient technologies."
The new web-centric PCs made by Samsung and Acer - dubbed "Chromebooks" - were announced at Google's I/O event overnight. The computers, which boot in seconds, will be available in the US and Europe next month.
"Over the last few months, Facebook has launched several initiatives and features to help you keep your account and data secure. Back in May, the company revealed it was switching over to the secure HTTPS protocol and announced details of its login approvals feature.
Facebook has also teamed up with Web of Trust to help protect you from scam websites and recently added its social reporting tool to its mobile website. In addition, the company has launched a bug bounty program that rewards security researchers for finding flaws in the social network's security systems.
To help you understand the social network's security features and how to protect your account, a Guide To Facebook Security has been launched. The guide, which you can download from Facebook, is 14 pages long and offers all kinds of tips on how to protect your account, including how to spot and avoid scam apps and clickjacking."
he job of teaching
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Wendy Berliner
Guardian Professional, Monday 3 October 2011 18.30 BST
Article history
Teacher Daniel Hartley from Chulmleigh Community College, Devon. Photograph: Apex
Back in the summer we decided here at GTN HQ that, with our membership rocketing, it was the right time to mark our first six months in operation with a survey to find out what members thought about teaching today. There were questions across a wide spectrum of topics and, at the end, we left a free text box for teachers to add any comments they wanted to share.
It was the dying days of the summer holiday - August 25 - when it went out just after lunch. We knew the survey would take ten or 15 minutes to complete so we weren't quite expecting what happened next, but within those first few hours after its release, we realised you had started something big.
By 10.30pm that night we'd had several hundred questionnaires back, which in itself was impressive with many teachers perhaps still away on holiday or back but busy preparing for the new term. The most impressive thing of all was the content of those text boxes.
There was just so much of it. Some people wrote several hundred words at a time, speaking clearly from the heart and arguing cogently against the things they felt were going wrong in education.
A love of teaching and vocational pleasure felt working with children and young people emerged but it was emerging from a fog caused by far less pleasant aspects of the job - disrespect from society and governments, bullying by senior management, other teachers, parents and students, despair at the parenting skills of some homes and despair with government targets and league tables that were funnelling education into an ever thinner tube feeding stuff that improved Sats and exam results rather than nourishing a lifelong love of learning.
One former solicitor questioning the sense of the switch into teaching said: " M
"Last month, 16 teachers from across the country got together at Google's Seattle office for the YouTube Teachers Studio - a sort of bootcamp to learn how to best use YouTube in the classroom.
Jon Corippo, a Google Certified Teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator, was among the group, and came back with ideas about what YouTube was great for."
"Vanished" is a two-month-long game, which debuted the week of April 4 and stems from an initial scenario revealed in recent video messages on the site. The premise is that people living in the future have contacted us in the present, to answer a question: What event occurred between our time and theirs that led to the loss of civilization's historical records? Students must decode clues in hidden messages, and in response find and provide information about Earth's current condition, such as temperature and species data, to help people in the future deduce what wound up happening. "
"A while back I wrote about my thoughts on the ipad craze. At that time I didn't own one. I do now and have had it for about 4 months. I like it. I'm not WILD about it, but I like it. I enjoy going out and finding apps that I think might help me be more productive on it, and I like finding challenging games, and I like the interface a lot.
Would I buy a cart full of them for school. Absolutely NOT."
"Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."
"That's what Peter Langenhahn does. He goes to a sport event, takes about 3,000 photos, and then picks around 300 to create a 100-gigabyte image over the course of three months. The results are fun and extremely neat. "
George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier - have had over 10,000 participants in the various courses we've run since 2008. The learning experience has been terrific. We've refined our pedagogical approaches, improved the software (well, actually, just Stephen did that), and developed a research agenda around learning in networks in open online courses... If you are interested in joining, please register for the course. We will be posting more information over the next few months.