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"Ahmed ElAmin Published Jul 20, 2011 at 9:18 am (Updated Jul 20, 2011 at 8:01 am) Belgians have invented Smurfs, make some of the best beer in the world, and know how to fry a potato chip. However, one must say the country's leading newspapers scored an own goal when they took Google to court last year for listing their content in the search engine's news section and won on copyright. I guess they didn't look at how people arrive at a typical online newspaper site, which derives up to 50 percent or more of their visitors from Google. In addition to taking the group of papers out of its news section, Google also stopped indexing them in its search engine. Now the newspapers are complaining that they are being discriminated against unfairly! (...) Google has big power and the danger is how the company wields it in pursuit of profit. It brings traffic to websites, but the company that claims to "do no evil" can also taketh away ostracising those for good and bad reasons. The company is also stepping up its aggregation news service by trying to attract more volume through the "gamification" of Google News. Google is following a trend among news sites to bring readers in. With their consent, readers will be rewarded with "news badges" based on their reading habits. Badges of varying levels will be given out depending on the amount and types of articles you read. About 500 badges are available to suit a wide range of topics. Google News indexes about 50,000 sources. Keep reading and get those badges! Maybe."

"New world report shows more than 1 billion people with disabilities face substantial barriers in their daily lives Governments should step up efforts to enable access to mainstream services and to invest in specialized programmes to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities News release 9 June 2011 | New York - WHO and the World Bank today revealed new global estimates that more than one billion people experience some form of disability. They urged governments to step up efforts to enable access to mainstream services and to invest in specialized programmes to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities. World report on disability provides global estimates The first-ever World report on disability provides the first global estimates of persons with disabilities in 40 years and an overview of the status of disability in the world. New research shows that almost one-fifth of the estimated global total of persons living with disabilities, or between 110-190 million, encounter significant difficulties. The report stresses that few countries have adequate mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of people with disabilities. Barriers include stigma and discrimination, lack of adequate health care and rehabilitation services; and inaccessible transport, buildings and information and communication technologies. As a result, people with disabilities experience poorer health, lower educational achievements, fewer economic opportunities and higher rates of poverty than people without disabilities. "Disability is part of the human condition," says WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. "Almost every one of us will be permanently or temporarily disabled at some point in life. We must do more to break the barriers which segregate people with disabilities, in many cases forcing them to the margins of society.""

Direct link to the report download page: http://www.who.int/entity/disabilities/world_report/2011/en/index.html

Joy Resmovits Aug. 5, 2011 ""We have become increasingly concerned with the proposed contract," Michael Mulgrew and Richard Iannuzzi, who respectively head New York City's and the state's teachers' unions, wrote in the note. The letter is addressed to New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, state Commissioner of Education John King, Jr., and copied to State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized student database for personal information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news gathering tactics, including the hacking of private voicemail accounts," the letter reads. Murdoch acquired 90 percent of Wireless Generation for about $360 million last November. At the time of the acquisition, Murdoch said he saw K-12 education as a "$500 billion sector." Murdoch's first general move in the education sector had come just a few weeks earlier, when he tapped Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City's schools, to lead his education ventures. The Wireless Generation contracts were approved while Klein still ran the district, leading to speculation about the chancellor's intentions."

"Rupert Murdoch uses eG8 to talk up net's power to transform education News Corp chairman claims 'Victorian' schools are 'last holdout from digital revolution' Kim Willsher in Paris guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 May 2011 18.10 BST Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation founder and chairman, used his address to the eG8 Forum in Paris on Tuesday to call for more investment in education and "unlocking the potential" of the world's children. Murdoch said it was not a question of putting a computer in every school, but concentrating on opening up opportunities for youngsters to flourish by using targeted and tailored software. News Corp moved into the $500bn (£310bn) US education sector in late 2010, paying about $360m in cash for 90% of technology company Wireless Generation, which provides mobile and web software to enable teachers to use data to assess student progress and deliver personalised learning."

"Would it not be better to train teachers in adapting whatever software is generally available, be it desktop or on the cloud, to fit their and their specific students' needs?' I disagree with this analysis. Software not created for educational purposes will only adapt so far. It is, for example, word processing substituting for paper and pencil. That's worthy of doing but really makes no difference in instruction. When software is created specifically for learning, it can reach much more deeply into the learning processes. It's not just peripheral but central to learning. You can adapt lots of software to education in lots of ways, and I've read of many very clever adaptations. Almost all could be done without the use of a computer, albeit somewhat less efficiently but nonetheless effectively. I read Murdoch's call, which echoes something I've been saying for many years, as meaning that we have to build software that answers the necessities of learning. We don't have much today.

Taking up your example of word processing as substitute for pen and pencil , Harry: true, and that's what I retorted in the late 1990's to a digitalophobe academic, when we met about the Italian translation of one of his books, and he boasted of having got a letter from a publisher saying he was their last author to deliver typescripts on paper and not as a digital file. I pointed out that cut and paste, copy and paste (the things he particularly hated the ease of in digital media) existed in the real world looooooong before computers, let alone PCs, let alone the Web. And yet... in 2007 I was asked to set up at very short notice an intensive preliminary French workshop for participants in a master course in intercultural studies: though in Lugano, the course was to be in French and English. I asked for access to the Moodle for the course, to store course materials there etc. The organizers refused: "The Moodle will only be explained to the students in the first week of the course proper". The idea that graduate students needed to have a Moodle explained to them in 2007 seemed peregrine, but rather than arguing, I set up a for-free wiki instead. At our first meeting, the students asked why we weren't using the Moodle, I repeated the official explanation, they laughed and got the hang of the wiki immediately. Then, for reading comprehension, they chose one of the assigned texts for the course: a longish book chapter they had received by e-mail as a grayish PDF based on a low-resolution scan, based on a reduced photocopy to make 2 pages fit on an A4 sheet: i.e. with no margin to take notes on. So we printed the PDF, separated the pages with scissors, pasted the separate pages with glue sticks on new A4 sheets, to get wider margins to write in. And then we made a wiki page for it, copied in it the subheadings, between which the students, added the notes they were taking, working in groups on the new paper version. Result: http://micusif.wikispaces.com/Vinsonneau