San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Mike Cassidy column [San Jose Mercury News, Calif.]

July 23--The hardest thing about imagining the future of public education is that the present is so terribly bleak.

Budgets are being slashed, schools closed, teachers laid off. Comparisons of students around the world show that our students are falling behind. Employers, tech industry employers in particular, are squawking about how we simply are not preparing U.S. kids to be the workers they'll need.

Story continues below ↓


How can we think about tomorrow when sometimes it seems we won't last through today? But maybe the dreary present is exactly why we need to envision a better future. Money will always be a problem, which makes the lack of it a lousy excuse not to try.

We need to embrace experiments -- the riskier, the better. We need to try something new before we lose a generation of minds. Some things will work. Others won't. That's OK. We'll keep the good and toss the bad.

A few Silicon Valley schools are about to try a program that shows some promise in not only getting kids interested in learning (imagine), but also forcing them to exercise the kinds of skills they'll need if they ever hope to get a decent job in the 21st century. It's called Globaloria (hey, I didn't name it) and in essence it turns middle and high school kids into game designers.

The program, developed by the New York nonprofit World Wide Workshop Foundation, requires students to distill concepts they learn in standard classes -- math, science, literature, social studies and other subjects -- and build a game that teaches the concepts to their peers. In the process, students learn to plan, prototype and program. They learn to work together, manage a project. They learn to try and fail -- and try a different way. They learn to blog about their progress and to take suggestions from other Globaloria students in other schools. They learn that they can create something.

And they learn it all in a world where they live -- a world of digital gizmos and social networks; a world of instant feedback, a world where a text or instant message is as comfortable as a conversation.

"Kids are really tech-savvy these days," says Genvieve Dorsey, who's been training this summer to teach Globaloria to fifth- and sixth-graders in the AdVenture science, technology, engineering and math program at Herman Intermediate School in San Jose. "I thought that we needed to step up our game and provide something like this." The program will launch in the fall at Herman and in a special seventh-grade curriculum at Christopher Elementary School in the Oak Grove district. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley will also run an after-school version at the Levin clubhouse in South San Jose.

Yes, it costs money -- to run Globaloria's digital platform, to train teachers and in some cases to buy computers -- which is where the Globaloria project in Silicon Valley might point to the future in another regard. The program relies on big hitters to help.

Globaloria in the valley will be supported by a three-year, $950,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which works to promote civic engagement. The plan is to build the program from one that serves 150 students in Silicon Valley at the start to an ongoing effort that reaches 5,000 students three years from now, says World Wide Workshop President Idit Harel Caperton. The goal will require the Knight Foundation's money and more. And so, Caperton is turning to Silicon Valley companies in hopes that they will see how a brilliant workforce works to their advantage.

"Right here in Silicon Valley we have this situation where if we invest two or three years in these kids," she says, "they can be amazing employees right in this region." The model combining support from schools, foundations and corporations is already working in West Virginia, where 66 schools are participating; and in New York, as a pilot at a middle school; and in Texas, where East Austin College Prep Academy Principal Marisol Rocha says that Globaloria has helped raised test scores in math and writing.

"We have seen some tremendous gains in the writing area and in the higher-level thinking skills," she says.

One key to success at East Austin? A $243,000 grant from Advanced Micro Devices' foundation, which is paying for two computer labs and helping pay teachers' salaries.

No question this is a dark time for public schools. But the ideas to make things better are out there. And it turns out, so is the money. It's just a matter of getting those who are able to to step up.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.

___ To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercurynews.com.

Copyright (c) 2011, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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July 22, 2011 | 2:20 PM | By Tina Barseghian

DIGITAL DIVIDE
For At-Risk Youth, is Learning Digital Media a Luxury?
FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, digital media, mobile-learning



Email PostPermalink
S. Craig Watkins
S. Craig Watkins maintains that teaching students to use digital media is not a luxury, but a necessity.
For schools in low-income communities, the idea of investing money, time, and energy into a digital media program or mobile-learning program might seem superfluous. Administrators and teachers already have so much to contend with - safety issues in high-crime communities, chronic student truancies, debilitating health issues due to poverty, families in constant state of flux, not to mention blocked access to wide swaths of the Internet.

In those cases, the idea of investing precious dollars or the attention of already overtaxed administrators seems unlikely.

But what if some of these very issues could be solved by creative ways of using digital technology in schools? That's the argument coming from S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future, and a professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film at The University of Texas at Austin.

"We need to build a more compelling narrative that digital literacy is no longer a luxury but a necessity."
"My concern is that as schools are now struggling with budget cuts, digital media and digital literacy is looked as a luxury as opposed to a necessity," Watkins says. "I understand the enormous pressure that teachers and administrators are under, especially in the public school system. But we need to build a more compelling narrative that digital literacy is no longer a luxury but a necessity."

Watkins points to research from the recent Horizon Report, as well as the pilot study with Project K-Nect, which clearly show the benefits of engaging students (even those considered "at-risk") through mobile phone programs and curriculum.

"They're already seeing the potential of mobile devices in science, art, and math classes," Watkins says. "So it's no longer a theoretical conversation - it's already happening, but only in 'islands of innovation.' The real challenge is, are those opportunities to encounter those types of learning being evenly distributed?"

Probably not, he says. So even though studies have shown that kids in communities that are considered marginalized are actively online with their mobile phones, and we're seeing plenty of evidence showing the benefits of mobile technologies in learning, the discussion around the achievement gap gets pulled back into the "no money" conversation.

BEYOND TEXTING AND FACEBOOK

Beyond just allowing kids to use their mobile phones in schools rather than telling them to shut it off - which is already a blasphemous idea in most schools - Watkins argues in a recent article on his blog that at-risk students need to be taught how to use these important tech tools beyond just texting and posting updates on Facebook.

"The educational environments that will thrive, the ones that will be the most innovative, and the ones that have most impact will be the ones that create opportunities for kids to create digital media literacies that we all recognize as important and that have social implications, educational implications and civic implications, as well," he says. "So we have to equip kids with skills that help them not just to consume, but to become architects of their information environment and that requires different skills in using mobile devices and using the Internet."

"They felt like they'd developed a new skill, but more broadly, it influenced their disposition towards learning and as learners."

Watkins witnessed the powerful impact of helping low-income kids use technology to create digital tools that are directly relevant to them: A group of high school students who were charged with designing a playable game about green technology and green architecture.

"Every single day during one of the hottest summers on record, they showed up enthusiastic, and with very little involvement from teachers, created this game," he said. "The whole project was student-centered, totally collaborative, and it was pretty incredible to see."

But could a short-term, summertime project result in any kind of lasting impact on these kids' lives after the project is over?


University of Texas
S. Craig Watkins
"For some, it will ignite passion for learning that will translate to the formal learning space," he says. "They felt like it was a powerful experience and one they could take with them into other endeavors. It gave them confidence, self-efficacy as learner. They felt like they'd developed a new skill, but more broadly, it influenced their disposition towards learning and as learners."

All of which points to the importance of teaching students how to create content - not just consume, play with, or pass along to friends.

In continuing his work in this realm, Watkins is working on a number of initiatives.

Knowing the depth of impact of digital literacy on low-income kids, Watkins is now focusing his efforts on figuring out how to connect these skills to what he calls "civic outcomes" - issues that have a direct bearing on disenfranchised communities. "To teach them how to become community activists, and showing them how technology can be a powerful tool in problem-solving," he says, such as conducting original research about health challenges in their communities, such as H.I.V., diabetes, asthma - "problems they face in real and tangible ways."
With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Watkins and Mimi Ito, among others will be embarking on a three-year study that examines how kids from low-income communities are "craftily navigating the digital world." "What are the learning outcomes, what are the learning potentials, what are the obstacles?" he asks. In addition to a national survey of up to 1,000 people, there will be three case studies involving 100 to 150 students in four areas: Austin, Boulder, Southern California, and London.

July 22, 2011 | 11:48 AM | By Tina Barseghian

DIGITAL DIVIDE
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, digital media, digital-divide, mobile-learning

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/07/ignore-the-potential-of-mobile-learning-risk-widening-the-digital-divide/

The Young and the Digital
From S. Craig Watkins' blog The Young and The Digital. In the following post, Watkins talks about how he's witnessing these trends in his field work.

By S. Craig Watkins

During a recent research related visit to New York City I decided to take a stroll down 125th Street in Harlem. Among the assortment of shops and vendors on the famous stretch that is home to the legendary Apollo Theater were an abundance of mobile phone providers. Even a few of the street vendors offered mobile phone accessories such as cases, covers, and car adaptors. It struck me that while you could easily purchase a mobile phone on 125th Street you could not purchase a desktop or laptop computer. Not that long ago the assumption that African Americans were a viable market for mobile phones did not exist.

Is it possible that mobile devices are reproducing some of America's most enduring inequalities?
As far back as 2007 data started to emerge that suggested that black and Latino households were much more likely to go online via a mobile phone than a desktop or laptop computer. We are also learning that a surging number of poor households are choosing to go with a mobile phone over a landline, largely because they cannot afford both. My fieldwork is consistently suggesting that the future of black and Latinos digital lives are linked, for better or worse, to mobile devices. The growing appeal of the mobile phone among African Americans and Latinos has not gone unnoticed by the press. In fact, several news outlets have even reported that mobile phones may be closing the digital divide. Is this true? Is there any evidence, empirical or anecdotal, that mobile is closing the digital divide?

The answer to that question depends on how you define the digital divide. For example, if you define the digital divide as largely a question of access to technology than the answer, arguably, is yes. Internet capable phones, to the degree that poor and working class communities can afford them, certainly bridge the access gap. In 2009 the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that African Americans were more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to go online via a mobile phone. But what if you define the divide in terms of participation rather than access? Is it possible that mobile devices are reproducing some of America's most enduring inequalities? Truth is, there are some large gaps in our knowledge that make answering this last question difficult. But here is a start.

Much of the empirical data over the last three to four years consistently suggests that when it comes to using their mobile devices to play games, watch video, listen to music, or manage their online social networks that black and Latino youth are much more active than their white and Asian American counterparts. Nielsen recently reported that African Americans are thirty percent more likely to visit Twitter than any other racial or ethnic group. We began reporting two years ago that black and Latino teens were using Twitter largely via their mobile phones.

This is the myth of the "digital native" narrative, the notion that youth can thrive in the digital world without any adult support, mentoring, or scaffolding of rich learning experiences.
It is unclear what kinds of phones black and Latino teens from low-income and working class homes are adopting. Are they more likely to own smart phones or feature phones? The functionalities of the former afford powerful social, recreational, and informational opportunities while the capabilities of the latter are much more limited. And while we know that black and Latino youth have turned to mobile as a source of anytime, anywhere media does this mean that they are largely consumers rather than creators of content?

As we begin to learn more about the media ecologies of black and Latino teens an inevitable question arises: is there any evidence that their engagement with media technology is producing behaviors and learning outcomes that might impact the academic achievement gap? There is an abundance of evidence that suggests that the informal learning environment (i.e., leisure, extracurricular and enrichment opportunities) of middle income students is just as important as the formal environment (i.e., schools) in their academic achievement.

The academic achievement gap takes root in early childhood and is related to the formal and informal learning ecologies that kids navigate throughout life. Different parenting practices and household resources mean that middle income kids enter kindergarten with richer language skills and greater exposure to books than their low-income counterparts. Throughout schooling these early learning divides expand. What role, if any, do digital and mobile media platforms play in America's learning divides?

The issue, of course, is not that young people's adoption of mobile phones causes an achievement gap that began long before any of us ever heard of the Internet or mobile phones. Rather, what is the potential for learning and engagement with mobile media in closing the learning divides that exist between low and middle income students? The mere adoption of mobile phones is certainly not the solution to the achievement gap. Technology-social network sites, laptops, smart phones, games, tablets, interactive books and maps-alone will never close America's learning divide. This is the myth of the "digital native" narrative, the notion that youth can thrive in the digital world without any adult support, mentoring, or scaffolding of rich learning experiences. While a greater diversity of young people are using digital and mobile platforms than ever before not all media ecologies are equal. Thus it's very possible that if poor and working class students adopt technologies like mobile phones in environments that do not offer adult engagement and scaffolding the potential benefits in terms of learning and empowerment may not be realized.

Currently, I'm involved in a series of case studies that examine how adult educators and mentors are creating innovative learning experiences that encourage young people, for example, to view their mobile device as a powerful data collection resource and gateway to cultivating new literacies and forms of civic engagement. What I see is promising in terms of igniting young minds and young citizens. While only a small percentage of young people are using mobile devices as a powerful learning tool today the percentage is growing. The real challenge is not if rich and meaningful mobile learning ecologies will develop. As a 2011 NMC Horizon report shows, they already exist. Rather, the real question is, will they be distributed in ways that close or maintain America's learning divide?

By Valerie Strauss
-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/advice-to-education-dept-on-newest-race-to-the-top/2011/07/20/gIQA9n8tQI_blog.html

This was written by Monty Neill, executive director of The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, known as FairTest, a non-profit organization that works to end the misuses of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair and valid.

By Monty Neill

Will a torrent of tests now rain down on little kids?

Under the latest Race to the Top program - the Early Childhood Challenge (ELC) - that scenario has become much more likely. This could mean pre-school children losing play time and experiential learning in order to start practicing for standardized tests. That is already happening in kindergarten as testing pressure flows down from grade 3. Young children do not need a developmentally inappropriate focus on narrowly conceived "academic" skills. Drilling little ones with phonics cards won't make them better readers when they are 10 or 20 years old.

But now RTTT proposes that winning states commit to testing all pre-schoolers to see if they are "ready" for kindergarten, as part of a "Comprehensive Assessment System."

States are to compete for ELC funding for pre-school programs that serve children from low-income families (meaning, as usual, most states will lose and their children see no benefit). The Education Department solicited comments on its proposed "requirements, priorities, selection criteria and definitions" for ELC. (Mine are about half-way down page 2 of 349 comments.)

The proposed requirements seem often reasonable, but the results will likely do more harm than good. Consider "Priority 1: Using Early Learning and Development Standards and Kindergarten Entry Assessments to Promote School Readiness." In theory, standards induce program improvements, while assessments identify how to better help children learn and develop.

State standards must be "developmentally, linguistically, and culturally appropriate." They are to cover the "Essential Domains of School Readiness" - which, unfortunately, leave out some essentials. The "Domains" do include "physical well-being and motor development, and social and emotional development."

However, the early childhood standards must align with the state K-12 academic standards in reading and math, and efforts to ensure programs have lasting effects must focus on reading and math results under No Child Left Behind.

The danger is that states will emphasize the academic components to "prepare" students for the high-stakes standardized tests in grade 3 (or earlier in some states). Pushing down inappropriate instructional practices even to kindergarten is already rampant. Meanwhile, other subject areas get short shrift: while science is mentioned in the "Essential Domains," social studies and the arts are not. Thus, the Education Department needs to expand the required domains so they are more appropriate for young children's all-around growth.

A winning state also must construct a "Comprehensive Assessment System," to include a "common, statewide kindergarten entry assessment." Most current "readiness" tests are notoriously narrow, often based on IQ tests.

Using standardized tests on young children can hurt them in many ways. Test results frequently convince children they are failures at a young age. Having been emotionally and socially hurt, they are less likely to engage in school or believe they can succeed. And educators may believe the tests and conclude children are less able to learn than they really are.

On a positive note, however, states could use assessments such as the Work Sampling System. The WSS is a means of organizing a wide range of evidence of student learning and development. It is not a one-shot test or "assessment." If children are in a program that gathers and organizes evidence, using WSS or something comparable, there is no need for a one-shot readiness test.

Despite this possibility, the Department has, again, opened the door to a test-driven approach. States could administer an array of isolated, disconnected tests purporting to "measure" the various domains. That might be cheaper, at least at the start, even if inappropriate and dangerous to the children.

The federal government should ensure assessment quality and appropriateness, requiring changes if the state fails to implement comprehensive, developmentally appropriate assessments based on classroom-based evidence gathered over time. Further, as there is no good reason to have one state-wide "readiness" test if the assessments are all based on the state's standards, the department should drop this requirement.

While the department says the assessments are not high stakes, some states could use the results, even if based on weak tests, to coerce changes or close programs. Or they could start the downward spiral of "interim" and "formative" tests aimed at increasing scores on the test that counts, which will really turn pre-school into test prep. The Department should bar states from using RTTT-funded child assessment information for high-stakes accountability purposes for children, program staff, or programs.

If past experience is a guide, the department will at most make minor changes to its regulations. Advocates for quality early childhood education must pressure their states to make this program help children instead of deform early childhood programs as testing has deformed elementary and secondary schools.

-0-

President Obama's unusual education roundtable

By Valerie Strauss
President Obama hosted an education roundtable at the White House on Monday and I'll give you one chance to guess who wasn't high on the guest list.

Educators.

Below is a list of people who were invited to the event, which was described on the president's schedule this way:

"The President hosts an education roundtable with business leaders, Secretary Duncan, Melody Barnes, and America's Promise Alliance Chair Alma Powell and Founding Chair General Colin Powell."

The invitees, according to a news release from the White House, include:

· Marguerite Kondracke, president & CEO, America's Promise

· Alma Powell, chairwoman, America's Promise

· General Colin Powell, founding chairman, America's Promise

· Craig Barrett, former president & CEO, Intel

· Glenn Britt, CEO, Time Warner Cable

· Steve Case, former chairman & CEO, America Online

· Brian Gallagher, president & CEO, United Way Worldwide

· William Green, president & CEO, Accenture

· Fred Humphries, senior vice president, Microsoft

· Rhonda Mimms, foundation president, ING

· Kathleen Murphy, president, Fidelity Personal Investments

· Ed Rust, CEO, State Farm

· Randall Stephenson, chairman & CEO, AT&T

· Bill Swanson, chairman & CEO, Raytheon

· Laysha Ward, foundation president, Target

· David Zaslav, president & CEO, Discovery Communications

· Former governor Bob Wise, president, Alliance for Excellent Education

· Anne Finucane, chair of the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Bank of America

What's more, new initiatives worth, collectively, more than $100 million were being announced in conjunction with the roundtable that will supposedly help keep kids in school, help bridge the achievement gap, etc., among them:

*America's Promise Alliance Grad Nation Community Impact Fund will raise $50 million to support the goal of ending the dropout crisis and prepare young people for college and careers, the release said.

* Microsoft Education is putting $15 million into research and development for immersive learning technologies, including game-based instruction and the creation of a lifelong learning digital archive, the release said.

The president would have been better off talking to these people about job creation than education reform, not only because they aren't the right people to be talking to about improving classroom dynamics, but also because employing the unemployed with kids has been shown to improve educational outcomes.

It would certainly do more to help education than any of the high-stakes test-based reform policies that we have seen in the past decade, stretching over the administrations of president George W. Bush and Obama.

There's no reason not to believe that Obama personally has respect for teachers and the hard job that they have. The problem is that his policies don't show it, and education roundtables with corporate leaders serve only to underscore that sad reality. America's CEOs have enough problems keeping their own businesses running. They should leave education to educators.

Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it!

By Valerie Strauss | 03:41 PM ET, 07/18/2011

How XSEDE will facilitate collaborative science

by Warren Froelich, San Diego Supercomputer Center

How will XSEDE provide private, secure environments that have all the resources, services and collaboration support users need to be productive? Along with other project experts, J.P. Navarro, senior HPC administrator with Argonne National Laboratory and deputy manager for Software Development & Integration with XSEDE, outlines how XSEDE plans to achieve that vision.



Q. Scientists need to form communities with their peers. What innovations/tools and space is XSEDE creating to facilitate knowledge sharing, collaboration, and community building?

A.Expanding on the concept of project- or allocation-based groups, XSEDE will provide new services enabling user groups to self-organize to create and share information.

For community or group formation, a new GO-Team group management service will be launched to help registered XSEDE users create collaborations, determine membership, establish membership roles, and arrange and manage compute, data and other resources. This service, to be available in Year 2, will allow these self-managed groups to control and share their content within or outside the project team, providing links to other system components, including a specified email list and a specified wiki, in addition to relevant XSEDE resource allocations. Group administrators will specify criteria that allow membership requests and other group-management tasks to be handled autonomously.



Q. Networking is fundamental to collaboration. How will XSEDE provide a reliable, high-performance, interoperable, effective, network infrastructure to conduct collaborative science?

A.XSEDE's networking vision includes an infrastructure that can meet near-term needs with sufficient flexibility and growth options to extend and evolve to an expanding set of users, campus, and resources.

During the first year, XSEDEnet will provide dedicated 10 Gbps connectivity to all current core XD Service Providers (Indiana, NCSA, NICS, NCAR, PSC, Purdue, SDSC and TACC) using National LambdaRail's (NLR) FrameNet services. By building on NLR's FrameNet service, XSEDE will significantly lower the entry barrier for institutions and collaborations to provision high-performance connections from their resources to XSEDEnet.

In Year 2, XSEDE will build on the framework established in Year 1 with a service that will allow research collaborators to gain access to a high-performance network without having to commit to permanent infrastructure. Specifically, XSEDE is investigating NLR's FrameNet Dynamic VLAN Services for reservation-based (on-demand) high-performance networks between XSEDE service providers and many other potential sites around the country, to enable collaborative teams and their research.



Q. A key component of collaborative science is the ability to manage, store and efficiently move data. How will XSEDE make this functionality easy to use and transparent to a team of users?

A.XSEDE will provide a collection of data replication, remote data access, high-performance data movement, and data collection publishing services that allow collaborative science teams to create, use, manage, and share their data products.

To support transparent management and shared access to data, XSEDE will provide both a parallel wide-area file system with high-performance access from all XSEDE resources and a global, federated file system (GFFS) that will provide transparent file-system level access to a collection of XSEDE data resources to machines outside of XSEDE.

To support data movement, XSEDE is providing a new GO-Data service, a Globus Online-hosted solution providing integrated data management and storage capabilities. Initially, GO-Data will provide site-to-site and desktop-to-site managed data movement and replication. In future months, XD-Datawill incorporate data mirroring (keeping multiple copies in sync), publication (registration of metadata in XD-Registry), allocation and management of "scratch" storage, and other related functions.



Q. How will XSEDE assure users that collaborative data, shared across the network, will remain private and secure to that community?

A. All XSEDE services will be designed and operated to ensure that only authorized users and teams can access the data.

Services that create or move data will require user authentication and enforce file-access permission based on user-controlled permissions. Users will be able to determine when they want to share their data with the public by advertising it in the XD-Registry service and by placing it in publicly accessible storage space.



Q. All XSEDE users need to be able to move their computational work and their data between and among members of their community, using a diversity of technologies that may not be limited to the NSF XD program. How will XSEDE provide these services to user communities in a seamless manner?

A. XSEDE will offer a variety of tools and service to create a consistent user environment for research teams that employ a wide range of technologies both inside and outside the XSEDE program.

To access remote data, for example, users will have a couple of options:

They can choose between moving data using GO-Data managed data movement services and the Globus Connect client package.
They can directly access remote data using the GFFS software and service, which enables communities to plug their file-systems into an XSEDE-wide global file-system that can be transparently accessed from XSEDE and non-XSEDE resources.
Using both of these approaches XSEDE will ensure that users can benefit from the usability and performance characteristics that best match their data access requirements.

To easily move data from campus servers, laptops, and desktops, XSEDE will provide the Globus Connect software that can easily be installed to Mac, Windows, and Linux machines, allowing high-performance data movement to and from XSEDE resources. Globus Connect requires only outbound connections to transfer data and thus works behind most firewalls and NATs.

The GFFS will allow external resources to be included into the federated file system, allowing non-XSEDE data resources to be directly accessed from XSEDE workflows. Using the GFFS, most users will never have to explicitly move data from one site to another, but can access data as if they were local regardless of their location.



Q. Many user communities have advanced, specialized needs. What are XSEDE's plans to help these communities with specialized modes of computation which they need to produce scientific advances?

A. Many users have specialized compute and data-related needs-that may not be shared by many others-that nevertheless are critical to their research. XSEDE services collectively will address specialized needs in multiple ways.

First, services like GO-Job and GO-Data will provide multiple programmable interfaces, allowing users with advanced requirements to access many different resources and services in an integrated manner directly from their applications and software.
Second, XSEDE will provide the XD-Registry service and the Digital Product Advisor that enable registration and exploration of a broad spectrum of computing, storage, data, software, tutorial, and other digital resources. These services leverage and extend the successful TeraGrid Integrated Information Service.
Finally, communities requiring advanced, specialized, and customized capabilities can leverage XSEDE's Science Gateway support framework to design and build their own science gateway infrastructure so they can access XSEDE's many resource-level services and high-level user services. For example, highly customized and targeted science gateways available to XSEDE users on day one can directly access low-level data, file-system, computation, and information resources and services, or to leverage XSEDE's high-level software services-GO-Data, GO-Job, GO-User, GO-Team-which can integrate service complex activities that XSEDE operates and supports. These software services are built on the same principles as the highly successful Software-as-a-Service "SaaS" Web 2.0 services provided by Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
Q&A contributors: Mary Bass, Maytal Dahan, Ian Foster, Andrew Grimshaw, Wendy Huntoon, Christopher Jordan, Stuart Martin, J.P. Navarro, Warren Smith, Steve Tuecke, Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, and Linda Winkler.

Education, and Outreach Service mission is driven by the critical need to advance computational science and engineering by recruiting, preparing, and sustaining a large and diverse scientific academic and industrial workforce. This workforce will be prepared to advance scientific discovery through the application of computational science and engineering using the XSEDE cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. The resulting workforce will be capable of designing, developing, utilizing, and supporting digital resources and services to advance CS&E in all fields of scholarship to benefit American competitiveness and society.

The XSEDE Education and Outreach Services have three primary goals:

Prepare the current and next generation of researchers, educators and practitioners to effectively utilize digital services in support of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM),
Create a significantly larger and more diverse workforce in STEM, and
Inculcate the use of digital services as part of their routine practice for advancing scientific discovery.
The diagram below illustrates the range and focus of these services to be provided to address user requirements. The fully integrated services are focused on supporting and expanding the XSEDE user community. These services will work to engage and sustain new and novel projects to broaden community participation in utilizing XSEDE resources and services.

There are multiple entry points for community members to become involved in XSEDE. The community may be engaged through XSEDE outreach activities that seek to make people aware of the resources and services available to benefit their research and education, through education activities that prepare the next generation of users, or through training activities that prepare current and potential users to make effective use of XSEDE. XSEDE will work with these new communities to create novel resources that empower them in new and innovative ways. The community members will become full partners in XSEDE.

https://www.xsede.org/education-and-outreach

I wrote about how to protect yourself against cell phone hacking for HuffPo and SafeKids (http://www.safekids.com/2011/07/20/how-not-to-be-a-phone-hacking-victim/) but Anne took it a step further by smartly focusing on the kid angle http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=30606

We don't need to spread panic (Murdoch is so good at that) but we do need to educate kids and the rest of us on how to protect ourselves.



--

Larry Magid

The New Academic Publishing: Digital First
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/the-new-academic-publishing-digital-first/
Filed in: Schools
Filed by Sarah J.

7.11.11 | A growing group of academics are wondering whether the web can offer a better model for academic publishing than the traditional peer review. PressForward, created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, will use technology to highlight underappreciated work that doesn't make it into academic journals: conference papers, white papers, reports, scholarly blogs, and digital projects.
Alternatives to Peer Review: How the Web is Changing Age-Old Scholarly Practices
With their long publishing deadlines and limited room for multimedia or comments after publication, some scholars argue that peer review articles are outdated in today's fast-paced communications environment.
"Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy - as they have existed for decades, even centuries - aren't becoming obsolete," Dan Cohen, the center's director, told The New York Times last year.
With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PressForward will create a review process that publishes work digitally first and takes advantage of open web filters as well as the best scholarly review processes. From the "about" page:
The web beyond academia has had to develop mechanisms for filtering for quantity, on sites such as Techmeme and The Browser; the academy has honed a set of methods of filtering for quality, through peer review. PressForward aims to marry these old and new methods to expose and disseminate the very best in online scholarship.
The site plans to launch with five publications covering a variety of fields, with more to come: American History Now, Data Curation Now, Global Perspectives on Digital History, Digital Humanities Now and Proceedings of THATCamp-unconferences held worldwide. The only one currently live is Digital Humanities Now, which works by searching scholarly Twitter feeds for relevant articles, blogs, projects and announcements.
"What's key is, it's digital first," Cohen told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "It's not something that is print first and then we put a facsimile of it online. It starts out on your Web site. It gets aggregated into a site that is run by the community. It might make it to some featured status for a day. And then, if you're doing really good work, it will make it into a quarterly, best-of compilation that will act like a journal."
Cohen says that in addition to the automatic aggregation, there is also room for community members to curate and make revisions to the content on the sites. He plans to release the open-source code so scholarly organizations can create their own relevant content streams.

Dispiriting Numbers on Education, Civil Rights
http://education.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/dispiriting-numbers-on-educati.php?mrefid=site_search

The Education Department released new data last week showing that educational disparities are still very much a reality, despite the best efforts of policymakers and school administrators. Here are some of the findings:

* About 3,000 schools serving nearly 500,000 high school students offer no algebra II classes.

* Some 7,300 schools serving more than 2 million students have no access to calculus classes.

* Schools serving mostly African-American students are twice as likely to have teachers with just one or two years of experience.

* Students with limited English proficiency make up 6 percent of the high school population, but are 15 percent of the students for whom algebra is the highest-level math course taken.

* Only 2 percent of students with disabilities are taking at least one Advanced Placement class.

The data is part of a massive new effort by the Education Department to identify where the gaps are in education achievement and access. It covers a multitude of topics such as access to guidance counselors, bullying policies, prevalence of math and science courses, and where the best (and worst) teachers are clustered.

The results may be depressing, especially for those who have been working for years on making sure all kids get the schooling they need. But they also provide crucial information that could suggest where education policy should go from here. "This new information reiterates that the federal government's role in ensuring an equal education for all students is just as critical as ever," said House Education and the Workforce Committee ranking member George Miller, D-Calif.

How can data on education disparities help national policymakers? How can local school districts benefit from a database that reflects education access across the entire country? Should people in the education community be surprised that disparities continue, despite 10 years of No Child Left Behind? What goals should policymakers set in light of the new data? Is the civil rights aspect of education more or less salient now than it was after the passage of No Child Left Behind?

-- Fawn Johnson, NationalJournal.com

Authors:
Committee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce Pipeline; Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy; Policy and Global Affairs; National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine
Authoring Organizations

Description:
In order for the United States to maintain the global leadership and competitiveness in science and technology that are critical to achieving national goals, we must invest in research, encourage innovation, and grow a strong and talented science and technology ...

This book is Free on line

FCC Proposals Aimed at Stopping Unauthorized Charges on Phone Bills

http://benton.org/node/81367

Submitted: July 12, 2011 - 3:44pm
Originally published: July 12, 2011
Last updated: July 12, 2011 - 3:45pm
Source: Federal Communications Commission
Author: press release
Location:
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 445 12th Street SW, Washington, DC, 20554, United States
The Federal Communications Commission took action to protect Americans from "mystery fees" and "cramming," which is the illegal placement of an unauthorized fee onto a consumer's monthly phone bill.

Specifically, the FCC proposed rules that: (1) would require landline telephone companies to notify subscribers clearly and conspicuously -- at the point of sale, on each bill, and on their websites -- of the option to block third-party charges from their telephone bills, if the carrier offers that option; and (2) strengthen the Commission's requirement that third-party charges be separated on bills from the telephone company's charges. In addition, both landline telephone companies and Commercial Mobile Radio Service ("CMRS") providers, such as wireless telephone companies, would have to include, on all telephone bills and on their websites, a notice that consumers may file complaints with the FCC and provide the Commission's contact information for the submission of complaints.

These proposed rules would help landline telephone consumers detect unauthorized charges that may come from third parties by keeping all third-party charges separate from all telephone company charges, and would also help consumers block those charges. Most landline phone companies now allow consumers to block third-party charges, but may only tell consumers about that option after they have complained about an unauthorized charge. Because many consumers complain that it is difficult to get unauthorized charges resolved, the new rule on FCC contact information would let consumers know they can come to the agency for help if they need it.

In addition, today's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeks comment on several other measures that could help consumers detect, rectify, and prevent cramming. This Notice asks whether landline telephone companies should be: (1) required to offer subscribers the option to block third-party charges from appearing on their telephone bills; (2) required to notify consumers that they do not offer blocking service if they do not do so; (3) prohibited from assessing an additional fee for blocking services; and/or (4) prohibited from including third-party charges on telephone bills altogether.

The Notice also seeks comments on whether landline telephone companies and/or CMRS providers should be required to: (1) provide accurate contact information for third-party vendors on their telephone bills; and/or (2) screen third parties for prior rule violations or other violations of law before agreeing to place their charges on telephone bills. Finally, the Notice seeks comment on whether the same rules that apply to landline telephone companies also should apply to CMRS providers and to providers of interconnected Voice-over-Internet-Protocol ("VoIP") service.

Links to Sources

FCC Proposals Aimed at Stopping Unauthorized Charges on Phone Bills

07/26-29/2011 -- International Space Station EarthKAM Summer 2011 Mission. Middle school educators are invited to join NASA for the International Space Station EarthKAM Summer 2011 Mission from July 26-29, 2011. ISS EarthKAM is a NASA sponsored project that that allows students to take pictures of Earth from a digital camera aboard the International Space Station. Over 14,000 middle school students from 132 US schools and 39 international schools participated in the spring mission (April 5-8). Since 1996, ISS EarthKAM students have taken thousands of photographs of Earth by using the World Wide Web to direct a digital camera on select spaceflights and, currently, on the International Space Station. For more information about the project and to register for the upcoming mission, visit the EarthKAM home page www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu

ttp://civiccommons.org/2011/06/building-a-civic-commons/

Why We're Building a Civic Commons - And How You Can Be Part of It
| By Andrew McLaughlin

Walk down any major street in any city in the world and you'll pass by hundreds of pedestrians - and, let's be honest, more than a few drivers - typing into smart phones. Each of these individuals holds in one hand more computing power than the entire NASA space operation that delivered men to the moon and back in 1969.
It can be hard to recognize how fast and how deeply information technology is changing our day-to-day lives, and how profound the implications can be. Every year, thanks to Moore's Law, the speeds of our laptops and devices go up even as the cost of computing goes down. Internet bandwidth gets ever faster and cheaper, and wireless connectivity ever more ubiquitous. As a result, the cost of creating, organizing, analyzing, and distributing information has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. Today, an ordinary individual can communicate instantly with any connected person anywhere in the world; she can broadcast her ideas globally, readable by anyone with an interest.
Thanks to the ever-improving economics of computing, a company like Facebook can offer hundreds of millions of individuals the ability to tap a vast computing infrastructure optimized to publish their writings, deliver their messages, and store vast and growing oceans of multi-megapixel images - and all for free, funded by tiny incremental payments from advertisers. That's how efficient and cheap computing power has become.
To put that in context, consider this: It currently costs about $150 to buy a hard disk with a terabyte of data storage, and it sits on the corner of your desk; as recently as the early 1990s, you would have had to spend over $1.5 million to buy the same thing, and it would have taken up a full corner of your room.
Or this: The iPad 2 is roughly 1,500 times faster than the CDC 6600, NASA's fastest supercomputer in 1969. The cost of an iPad 2 is currently $499; the cost of a CDC 6600 in 1969 was roughly $58,000,000, in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars.
Amazing, right? But here's the problem: As William Gibson puts it, "the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed." In particular, our governments - the agencies and departments and legislatures and courts that our democratic processes have ordained to serve the public - are finding it extraordinarily difficult to understand, much less embrace, the possibilities created and imperatives imposed by the technological advances we take for granted in our private lives.
Civic Commons, the new initiative I'm pleased to be joining today, is an effort to answer that problem. We believe that governments - especially the cities, towns, and counties that are on the hook to deliver public services every day - can now take advantage of the same technologies and techniques that have generated such enormous efficiencies and enabled such impressive new services by private enterprise. In a digitally interconnected world, cities don't have to operate in isolation. They don't have to reinvent (or re-procure) the wheel every time they face a problem that technology could help address. Cities can pool their resources - their talents and ever-shrinking budgets - to build shared technologies. Just as open standards (e.g., the Internet protocols), shared infrastructures (e.g., cloud computing), and collaborative software (e.g., open source projects like Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Apache Hadoop) have powered astonishing advances in personal and enterprise computing, it is now time for governments to put them to work for the public good.
We believe that governments can now build and deploy shared technologies - open standards, common infrastructures, collaborative projects, and open source software, together with proprietary systems - to improve public service delivery, transparency, accountability, public participation, and management effectiveness, all while spending less.
In sum, Civic Commons is built around two central convictions: first, that wave after wave of innovation is delivering amazing new capabilities to the people and organizations that can take advantage of them, and second, that, with a little help, governments can absolutely understand and seize the opportunities created by the rapid evolution of information technology.
So how are we going to do it? Civic Commons will operate as a neutral and expert non-profit that (a) helps cities and other governments understand the possibilities and pitfalls around shared technologies, (b) provides technical assistance, (c) facilitates the creation and management of collaborative technology projects, (d) connects interested cities with peers, collaborators, experts, vendors, and other supporters, and (e) creates high-quality information - such as guides, checklists, how-to's, and a comprehensive catalog of civic technology - that is as comprehensible and useful to mayors, city managers, and citizens as it is to software engineers.
We've already got a great set of projects underway (for example, Open311), an active and engaged set of city and other government collaborators (NYC, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, just to name some big ones), a growing community of motivated, civic-minded technologists, and a set of plans to broaden participation, especially by smaller cities and towns and those outside the U.S.
We also have a fantastic set of launch partners, including our major launch funder, the Omidyar Network; our incubator organizations, Code for America and OpenPlans; and our stalwart supporter, O'Reilly Media. (Huge thanks for their extraordinary contributions.)
Whether you are a mayor, a city CIO, a budding technologist, an open source veteran, a civic activist, an entrepreneur, or just an interested citizen, we hope that you will get inspired and get involved in Civic Commons. Check out our projects, contribute to our wiki, join our mailing lists, orcontact us directly.
Together, we can tap everyday technological innovation to make government work better and cost less.
Andrew McLaughlin
Executive Director
Civic Commons
(For more information about Civic Commons, read the full release for the announcement.)

National Museum of the American Indian Hosts Inka Road Satellite Chats

PR Newswire - Tue, Jul 5, 2011
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To: NATIONAL EDITORS
WASHINGTON, July 5, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is hosting a series of public satellite broadcasts with a multinational team of researchers, engineers and archaeologists in Peru on the origins and engineering of the Inka Road of South America. For the full press release and high resolution images, visit http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/national-museum-american-indian-Hosts-Inka-Road-Satellite-Chat.

The series of four broadcasts will take place in the museum's fourth-level classroom Friday, July 15; Sunday, July 17; Tuesday, July 19; and Wednesday, July 20 from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. The final two broadcasts will be webcast at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/webcasts. Audience members across the world are invited to submit questions for the research team via the museum's Facebook page and Twitter feed.

One of civilization's most impressive engineering achievements, the Inka Road (or Qhapaq nan, "The Royal Road") was built without the use of iron, the wheel or stock animals. While much has been written about the Inka Empire as a whole, little has been published on how the Inka planned and built the road, which united the four regions of the ancient empire that encompassed large territories of present-day Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. At its height, the Inka Road and its attendant "chaski" (runner) system was the fastest communication network in the New World, and the system of roads remains an integral part of infrastructure for present-day indigenous communities.

These broadcasts will explore new theories and discoveries about the construction of the Inka Road and how these ancient techniques can be applied by modern engineers and city planners. The research will also be highlighted in a subsequent exhibition at the museum in Washington, D.C.
The research team in Peru is led by the museum's Latin America scholars Ramiro Matos and Jose Barriero, and joined by Cliff Schexnayder, Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Arizona State University; Ed Jaselskis, the inaugural Jimmy D. Clark Distinguished Professor in Construction Engineering and Management at North Carolina State University; Wu Chueh Hung, professor of civil engineering at National Taiwan University; Manop Kaewmoracharoen, professor of engineering at Chiang Mai University in Thailand; and students from the Universidad de Piura in Peru, the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Argentina, the Universidad Catolica de Chile, the Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja in Ecuado and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Media website: http://newsdesk.si.edu

Media only: Molly Stephey (202) 633-6614; StepheyMJ@si.edu
SOURCE Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Suppose someone showed you a novel gadget and told you, "Here's how it works," while demonstrating a single function, such as pushing a button. What would you do when they handed it to you?

You'd probably push the button. But what if the gadget had other functions? Would it occur to you to search for them, if your teacher hadn't alluded to their existence?

Maybe, maybe not. It turns out that there is a "double-edged sword" to pedagogy: Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery. A study by MIT researchers and colleagues compared the behavior of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, finding that children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.


Gabriella, 5, plays with the researchers' toy in the PlayLab at Boston's Children's Museum.
Photos: Patrick Gillooly
According to Laura Schulz, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT, this is rational behavior, as teaching is meant to impart skills quickly and efficiently. The danger is leading children to believe that they've learned all there is to know, thereby discouraging independent discovery. "If I teach you this one thing and then I stop, then you may say, 'Well that's probably all there is,'" Schulz says.

Bop it, twist it, pull it, flick it!

To study this phenomenon, the researchers built an original toy, an appealing tangle of colored tubes with four different functions: pull on a yellow tube and it squeaks; press a button and a blue tube lights up; touch a pad to hear different music notes; and look through a black tube to see a reversed mirror image of your face.

They took the toy to Boston's Museum of Science, where they recruited 85 preschool-age children to interact with the toy under one of four conditions: pedagogical, interrupted, naïve and baseline.

In the pedagogical condition, the experimenter said, "Look at my toy! This is how my toy works," and demonstrated the squeak function twice (but made no mention of the other functions).

The interrupted condition was identical to the pedagogical condition, except that immediately after the squeak demonstration the experimenter interrupted herself, saying, "I just realized, I forgot to write something down over there. I have to go take care of it right now!"

In the naïve condition, the experimenter pulled out the toy and said, "I just found this toy! See this toy?" She then "discovered" the squeak function as if by accident, and said, "Huh! Did you see that?" while repeating the action, as if surprised.

In the baseline condition, the experimenter simply said, "Wow, see this toy? Look at this!" and put it on the table, without demonstrating any function.

In all four conditions, after the experimenter's dialogue, the child was left to play with the toy on his or her own, and researchers observed the ensuing behavior.

A double-edged sword

Many children in the pedagogical condition failed to discover even one function in addition to the squeak, while children in the other three conditions found, on average, one or two functions they had not been taught. What's more, children in the pedagogical condition spent less time playing with the toy - less than two minutes, on average - than children in the other conditions, whose times ranged from slightly more than two minutes in the naïve condition to longer than three minutes in the baseline condition.
Six-year-old Keenan participates in one of the researchers' experiments, conducted at Boston's Children's Museum.
Photo: Patrick Gillooly

These results suggest children are extremely sensitive to the subtleties of a teaching scenario, Schulz says: What matters is not if children are shown a function, but how they are shown that function. If they believe that an informed teacher has taught them everything, they will be less motivated to explore.

In a related experiment, the researchers replicated their results among children who were indirect observers of others being taught: Those who were given the toy after merely watching an adult interact with another child, using the same paradigms as the first study, did less exploring when they'd witnessed the pedagogical scenario than any of the other three scenarios.

The results of both experiments are described in a recent paper published in the journal Cognition; in addition to Schulz and her graduate student, Hyowon Gweon, the paper's co-authors are Elizabeth Bonawitz, a former graduate student of Schulz's, now a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley; Patrick Shafto, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville; and Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

"The whole double-edged sword concept is really interesting," says Susan Gelman, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "In almost any domain and across different cultures, we engage in spontaneous teaching. It doesn't have to be in the classroom, we just naturally do this with young children - we show them how things are done, point out what's important. This study shows how sensitive children are to the kind of cues that signal teaching." Further experiments may want to examine differences in children's behavior across cultures, she adds.

Urging humility

So what's a teacher or parent to do? Schulz is quick to point out that the study is not an argument against instruction. "Things that you're extremely unlikely to figure out on your own - how to read, how to do calculus, how to drive a car - it would make no sense to try to learn by exploration," she says.

Rather, the study underscores the real-world trade-offs between education and exploration, and the importance of acknowledging what is unknown even while imparting what is known. Teachers should, where possible, offer the caveat that there may be more to learn.

"Teachers can say things like, 'I'm showing you what we think is true, but there are a lot of other possibilities you should consider,'" Schulz says.

In short, she says, "a little humility can go a long way."

SmartPhone - Dumb School
Peter Pappas » 26 May 2011 » In Commentary, Social Web, Web 2.0 »

http://www.peterpappas.com/2011/05/smartphone-dumb-school-education-web-mobile-context.html

This week I attended a panel discussion sponsored by Mobile Portland entitled "The Myth of Mobile Context." I was treated to an all-star panel that tacked tough questions exploring challenges, opportunities, design considerations and the user experience in the mobile context.

Through the talk, I kept thinking about a quote from my previous post - The Future of Schools - Three Design Scenarios

"With rare exceptions, schools currently treat the digital revolution as if it never happened. Computers, more often than not, still sit in dedicated rooms, accessible only with adult supervision.

… When students step out the door of the institution called school today, they step into a learning environment … in which one is free to follow a line of inquiry wherever it takes one, without the direction and control of someone called a teacher… If you were a healthy, self-actualizing young person, in which of these environments would you choose to spend most of your time?

… The more accessible learning becomes through unmediated relationships and broad-based social networks, the less clear it is why schools, and the people who work in them, should have such a large claim on the lives of children and young adults…"

While I've seen some cutting edge schools / teachers that have effectively embraced mobile technology and social networking, too many educators see smartphones as a distraction from learning. Many schools block Facebook, Twitter and the rest of social web as if it was pornography.

So where's this put our students? For many it means that they must leave their smartphone at the classroom door and surrender themselves to an information culture controlled by the adults. What's the mobile context in schools? Not much, it's banned as subversive to learning.

Every day in school, students must "forget" about the information control and functionally their phone gives them to browse, research, monitor, network, shop and entertain. While they might view a photo just posted to Facebook from a friend's mobile as the catalyst to a conversation, their teacher considers it a distraction from learning.

Mostly technology in school offers an "illusion of modernity" - automating routine tasks like word processing, or watching a teacher having fun at the smartboard. If students do get online in school - it often involves viewing "filtered" web content with limited functionality. Of course students need lessons in "digital hygiene." But curating all their web content and interactions doesn't teach them responsible use, it just sequesters them behind a firewall. "Suspicion invites treachery" ~ Voltaire

When students do get on a school workstation (laptop or desktop) they quickly realize that it doesn't "know" them as well as their phone does. Their personal device carries a wealth of information that's important to them - contacts, photos, data, memories. To the school desktop, students are just a user on the network with a limited range of permissions. The biggest problem with the school computer is that it doesn't do "place" at all. That's a stark contrast to students' mobiles, which geo-browse via the growing number of locational apps and geo-tagged information stream.

Mobile context in schools? Not much.

Maybe it was a bit harsh to entitle the post "Smart Phones - Dumb Schools." But try doing without your smartphone tomorrow and see if that doesn't feel like a pretty dumb idea.

For thoughful insights on the mobile web watch this great Slideshare by Yiibu.
Go to the original site to see the video.

La difference' is stark in EU, U.S. privacy laws
EU citizens well protected against corporate intrusion, but red tape is thick

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221111/ns/technology_and_science-privacy_lost/t/la-difference-stark-eu-us-privacy-laws/

George Steinmetz / Corbis file
An Automatic Number Plate Recognition system set up at a mobile checkpoint near Manchester, England, checks whether passing motorists have paid their vehicle tax. Those that haven't are arrested by a bit farther up the road by a waiting police car.

By Bob Sullivan
Technology correspondent
msnbc.com
updated 10/19/2006 11:19:45 AM ET

It started, some say, with Alexandre Dumas, famed French author of "The Three Musketeers."
Dumas was an aging French literary star when he embarked on a somewhat scandalous love affair with Adah Isaacs Menken, a 32-year-old Texas actress. Entranced with the still-young technology of photography, the two posed for clearly scandalous photographs. The photographer, smelling a quick profit, set out to sell them, and Dumas sued.
A Paris appeals court quashed this early paparazzi moment. In a ruling tha
t sounds quaint to the modern American ear, the court decided that posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.
"Any sale by a person who had momentarily 'forgotten his dignity' had to remain effectively voidable,"

Yale law professor James Whitman wrote of the ruling in a paper titled "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty." "One's privacy, like other aspects of one's honor, was not a market commodity that could simply be definitively sold."

European courts and lawmakers have been wrestling with the implications of technology and privacy ever since, often coming to conclusions that are foreign to their American counterparts.

In Europe, privacy is different
Some of those rulings might seem like a panacea for Americans who believe their privacy is slowly slipping away
In many parts of Europe, for example:

Personal information cannot be collected without consumers' permission, and they have the right to review the data and correct inaccuracies.
Companies that process data must register their activities with the government.

Employers cannot read workers' private e-mail.

Personal information cannot be shared by companies or across borders without express permission from the data subject.

Checkout clerks cannot ask for shoppers' phone numbers.

Those rights, and many others, stem from The European Union Directive on Data Protection of 1995, which mandated that each EU nation pass a national privacy law and create a Data Protection Authority to protect citizens' privacy and investigate attacks on it.

National laws come in several flavors, and emanate from varied traditions. But taken together, they are the backbone of a basic European principle: Privacy is a human right.

In this clear declaration, Europe ventures far from the patchwork approach taken by U.S. lawmakers. But a privacy heaven, it's not.
European trust government more
With those privacy protections come other, curious laws and regulations that would fluster most Americans.
Authorities in some European countries can veto a parent's choice for their baby's name in the name of preserving dignity, for example. Government officials also often cloak themselves in dignity to limit freedom of the press and evade public scrutiny.
Most important, while companies face severe regulations limiting their use of consumers' personal information, governments are largely exempt from such limitations. While the use of credit reports is rare in Europe, wiretapping is not. In the Netherlands, for example, wiretaps are 130 times more common than in the U.S. Many Europeans carry some kind of national ID card, still unthinkable for many in the U.S. In Germany, every citizen and long-term visitor must register his or her address with the police.
The reason that privacy laws in Europe and the U.S. are so different springs from a basic divergence in attitude: Europeans reserve their deepest distrust for corporations, while Americans are far more concerned about their government invading their privacy.
As a result, U.S. federal agencies have been given little power to limit the potentially privacy-invading behaviors of private companies. The Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with protecting U.S. citizens from such intrusions, rarely acts against U.S. firms. When it does, its remedies are generally limited to small fines and out-of-court settlements.
Each European nation, on the other hand, has its Data Protection Authority to monitor corporate behavior. Consumers can appeal to the authority, which in some countries boasts far-ranging subpoena power. Fines for misbehavior are common.
Legacy of the Holocaust?
Some privacy experts argue that heightened European sensitivity to privacy stems from the horror of the Holocaust, when the Nazis used public and church records to identify Jews to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. But others say the historical difference dates back much further - to Dumas, or even earlier, and the notion that governments are charged with actively protecting people.
"In Europe the first line of defense against private wrongdoing is the state," said Joel R. Reidenberg, privacy expert at Fordham University School Law School. "In the U.S. our instinct is more liberal: Let private actors sue each other."

These differences are more than theoretical, and several times have threatened to trigger trade and culture wars:
A post-Sept. 11 data sharing agreement that provided U.S. authorities with 34 pieces of information on each airline passenger entering the country on flights from Europe was ruled illegal earlier this year by the European Supreme Court. The dispute threatened to ground all flights into the U.S. from Europe until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the European Union announced a settlement on Oct. 6.
In June, the New York Times revealed that U.S. anti-terrorism officials are mining data from the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), which regulates most international banking transactions. Belgian officials opened an immediate investigation. Such data mining would be considered illegal under Belgian law.
In the late 1990s, e-commerce between Europe and the U.S. almost came to a halt after the EU's Data Protection Directive barred transfer of data to countries without comprehensive privacy protection laws. By EU standards, the U.S. falls far short of the requirements. Two years of negotiations ended in a "safe harbor" agreement promising privacy controls on EU data that flows into the U.S. Complaints about the system persist, however, from both sides.
Market efficiency vs. dignity
U.S. firms criticize the European limitations on data gathering, saying that regulations enforcing them are cumbersome and put Europe at a competitive disadvantage.
For example, only debtors who've defaulted on loans generally receive the European equivalent of a credit report, which places them on a sort of lending black list. Consumers who pay their bills on time do not get a "good" credit score.
Critics say that's a disadvantage because credit reports make consumer lending much safer for lenders, thereby reducing the cost of credit and increasing consumers' ability to borrow.
But defenders of the European system point to places like the U.K. and Ireland, where there's little evidence that access to mortgage loans is limited.

There is more on the site.