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[George Siemens] June 12th, 2007 "...It's the change underlying these tools that I'm trying to emphasize. Forget blogs…think open dialogue. Forget wikis…think collaboration. Forget podcasts…think democracy of voice. Forget RSS/aggregation…think personal networks. Forget any of the tools…and think instead of the fundamental restructuring of how knowledge is created, disseminated, shared, and validated. But to create real change, we need to move our conversation beyond simply the tools and our jargon. Parents understand the importance of preparing their children for tomorrow's world. They might not understand RSS, mashups, and blogs. Society understands the importance of a skilled workforce, of critical and creative thinkers. They may not understand wikis, podcasts, or user-created video or collaboratively written software. Unfortunately, where our aim should be about change, our sights are set on tools. And we wonder why we're not hitting the mark we desire. Perhaps our vision for change is still unsettled. What would success look like if we achieved it? What would classrooms look like? How would learning occur? We require a vision for change. It's reflected occasionally in classroom 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 projects. But the tool, not change centric, theme still arises. We may think we are talking about change, but our audience hears hype and complex jargon. What is your vision for change?"

NB: I am tagging this post by George Siemens "Digital Promise" though it was published in 2007, because what he wrote then is very pertinent to the 2011 Digital Promise initiative.

"June 26, 2011, 6:16 pm by dotSUB This is a guest post by Kirti Vashee, VP Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online and member of dotSUB's Board of Advisors. You can also read Kirti's blog eMpTy Pages, where he writes about translation technology, localization and collaboration. The phenomena of a crowd or community stepping forward and doing real translation work, often for no direct financial compensation is something that troubles many in the professional translation world. Mostly because they see this activity as work being taken away from legitimate professionals or they see it as a ploy to reduce prices. While in some cases their fears may actually be justified, in the most successful uses of this approach I think it is clear that this is not true.If we look at some of the most successful examples of crowdsourced translation in practice, we can see that they have many if not all of the following elements in common."

Catharine McNally - April 27, 2011 "...For those of you who are still on the fence about Twitter, let me assure you that it is not always full of self-promoters or useless babble. When Twitter is "done right" it is a powerful tool for people to tell you what's going on - in a "little d democratic" kind of way. These 140-character statements challenge one to be tactful in how they write, to be understood, interpreted, and actionable. Effectively, the character limit forces one to cut through the fluff to get to the point. For a deaf person like me, Twitter is really helpful. It's kind of a digital version of my friend who sat next to me at lunch in middle school, who I would (often) turn to and ask, "Hey, what's everyone laughing about?" That person-bless her heart-would re-iterate the joke for me concisely and quickly, and of course, I would then laugh when everyone else had stopped laughing. ..."

Not "Breaking News" (see date) but likely to lead to developments

June 21, 2011, 8:00 am By Prof. Hacker Lewis Carroll's logic game[This is a guest post by Anastasia Salter, Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore in the school of Information Arts and Technologies. Her academic work focuses on storytelling in new media; she also writes the Future Fragments column for CinCity. Follow her on Twitter at AnaSalter.--@jbj] "...With that said, perhaps the most important takeaway from LEEF is that it's not all about expensive toys. Learning games don't have to be hi-tech to be effective. There's a lot to be learned from Space Vikings, the conference's ARG-that's alternate reality game, not its augmented reality cousin. Unlike augmented reality, which requires technology to mediate an environment, alternate reality is a playful imposition of story onto a physical space. In Space Vikings, a number of us dedicated conference attendees were drawn into a mission to save our tribes from a "pedagogical wasteland." How did we accomplish this feat? By hunting down "anomalies"-read masking tape clues, QR codes and posters-with answers to questions to submit in a digital educational games theory scavenger hunt. This is just one example of a conference ARG, and designers were at LEEF to report on lessons learned from others like DevLearn's Zombie Apocalypse. (For more ideas on educational uses of Alternate Reality, check out Think Transmedia.) These same ideas can scale and transform to a number of settings. For example, Melissa Peterson's Elmwood Park Zoo ARG is currently a project conducted with paper (though imagined for smartphones), and it's already doubling the engagement time of visitors to the local zoo. And on the other side, games like the Giskin Anomaly in Balboa Park are adding new layers of narrative to a popular and culturally rich tourist destination. And these games don't have to be location dependent. Case studies like the Radford Outdoor ARG Outbreak, a social inquiry game that puts st

"June 21, 2011, 6:52 pm By Marc Parry "What happens when you invite the whole world to join an online class? As The Chronicle reported last year, a growing number of educators are giving that idea a try by offering free "massive open online courses," or MOOC's, to anyone who wants to learn. Today, that experimental idea gained some more traction in mainstream higher education. The University of Illinois at Springfield announced a new not-for-credit MOOC devoted to examining the state of online education and where e-learning is heading. Nearly 500 people from two dozen countries have registered so far, with 1,000 expected to sign up by the time the course begins next Monday. (...) Not enough MOOC for you? Stay tuned. Starting in September, another group will organize what the MOOC pioneer George Siemens calls the "Mother of all MOOCs." In a blog post Monday, Mr. Siemens welcomed the growing interest from traditional universities. And he countered the more skeptical take offered by another open-education leader, David Wiley, who wrote recently that "MOOCs and their like are not the answer to higher-education's problems." (...)"

Cory Doctorow. Make. June 2011. "Consider the iPad for a moment. It's true that Apple's iTunes Store has inspired hundreds of thousands of apps, but every one of those apps is contingent on Apple's approval. If you want to make something for the iPad, you pay $99 to join the Developer Program, make it, then send it to Apple and pray. If Apple smiles on you, you can send your hack to the world. If Apple frowns on you, you cannot. What's more, Apple uses code signing to restrict which apps can run on the iPad (and iPhone): if your app isn't blessed by Apple, iPads will refuse to run it. Not that it's technically challenging to defeat this code signing, but doing so is illegal, thanks to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to circumvent a copyright-protection technology. So the only app store - or free repository - that can legally exist for Apple's devices is the one that Apple runs for itself. Some people say the iPad is a new kind of device: an appliance instead of a computer. But because Apple chose to add a thin veneer of DRM to the iPad, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act applies here, something that's not true of any "appliance" you've ever seen. It's as if Apple built a toaster that you can only use Apple's bread in (or face a lawsuit), or a dishwasher that will only load Apple's plates. Apple fans will tell you that this doesn't matter. Hackers can simply hack their iPads or shell out $99 to get the developer license. But without a means of distributing (and receiving) hacks from all parties, we're back in the forbidden-knowledge Dark Ages - the poverty-stricken era in which a mere handful of ideas was counted as a fortune."

We discussed this article in the forum of lascuolachefunziona.it. Someone objected that the iPad was a great tool and gave far more liberty to developers than traditional print publishers. I retorted that it was precisely because the iPad was such a great tool that its proprietariness about content for it was irritating. Then Elena Favaron made an illuminating comparison: "There are also people who make coffee machines that work only with dedicated coffee capsules, and there are folks who even buy them..."

"June 23, 2011, 6:20 pm By Jie Jenny Zou California State University's Accessible Technology Initiative suggests in a report released this week that universities limit their campuswide use of Google's free Web services based on what it calls a variety of inaccessibility issues for the blind and those with other disabilities. The report, "ATI Google Apps Accessibility Evaluation," looked at the accessibility of Google Apps for Education, a free software suite available to colleges and elementary and secondary schools. Hundreds of colleges have adopted Google Apps as their official campus e-mail and communication service for students."

for update to posts about Google Apps

"June 8, 2011, 7:01 pm By Marc Parry A budget approved by a legislative committee last week would force the University of Wisconsin to return $39-million in federal grants awarded to expand high-speed Internet access across the state, state education officials said. The plan would also require all University of Wisconsin institutions to withdraw from WiscNet, a nonprofit network cooperative that services the public universities, most of the technical and private colleges in Wisconsin, about 75 percent of the state's elementary and high schools, and 95 percent of its public libraries, according to David F. Giroux, a spokesman for the university system. (...) Another provision in the plan would bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced networks connecting research institutions worldwide, according to Mr. Evers's memo. For example, the Madison campus would have to withdraw from Internet2, a high-speed networking consortium, said Mr. Giroux."

That's what Lessig had in mind when he said: "Think about the question of broadband policy. (…) The US has been a dismal failure in this respect. As we watch the US going from number 1 in broadband penetration, now to, depending on the scale, number 18, 19, or 28. And that change is because of policies that effectively block competition for broadband providers. Their answer, these broadband providers brought to our government, and got our government to impose actually benefited them and destroyed the incentives for them to compete in a way that would drive broadband penetration. (…)" From Lessig's Keynote Address at g8 7:48 - 8:42 - http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/C6wmjKWrZwlP/

"August 1, 2011, 5:51 pm By Rachel Wiseman College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes-basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition. (...) The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard. (...) But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the [NFB]. "The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students," he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.) (...) This entry was posted in Gadgets."

In "(Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.)" the words "in the past" are linked to http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695/ , about a Spanish work book inaccessible to blind students, with a reference to the lawsuit against Arizona State U over the adoption of the Kindle. So classifying this post in "Gadgets" is particularly paradoxical: in fact one reason why Arizona State U. was sued over the adoption of the Kindle was that Amazon presented its text-to-speech as a gadget.

June 17, 2011, 5:11 pm By Marc Parry "Colleges and libraries have been up in arms all week over a proposed budget that would have forced the University of Wisconsin to return $39-million in broadband grants and withdraw from a nonprofit high-speed networking cooperative. Well, state lawmakers have changed course-for now, anyway."

June 17, 2011, 11:00 am By Jason B. Jones "[My Online Summer is a weekly series chronicling my first effort at teaching a class entirely online in our campus's LMS. Read previous installments here.] Most of the early adjustments to teaching online ranged from disconcerting to irritating to anxious. But this week, I wanted to mention one thing that has been infinitely better in an all-online course: grading. It has been much easier for me to grade the work of online students than those from a conventional class."

"August 25, 2011 In the U.S., as recently as last Summer, tablet and eReader owners tended to be male and on the younger side. But according to Nielsen's latest, quarterly survey of mobile connected device owners, this is no longer the case. Back in Q3 2010, for example, 62 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and only 10 percent were over the age of 55. By Q2 2011, only 46 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and the percentage of those over 55 had increased to 19 percent. Looking at the data by gender underlines key changes in the eReader category. Sixty-one percent of all eReader owners are now female, compared to a mere 46 percent in Q3 2010. (Smartphone owners are now evenly split between male and female and tablets remain primarily male.)"

Sept. 6, 2011 "Matt Richtel's panoramic essay, "In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores." weighs in this morning on the topic of "Grading the Digital School." I found myself cheering and jeering alternately throughout this piece. Why? Because it so quickly confuses "standards" with "standardized test scores" and technology put into classrooms with "preparing kids for a digital future (actually, the digital present: it's here, it's now, like it or not). These confusions are so pervasive in our culture and so urgent that I want to take a moment to focus on them. "

Ernesto Belisario 23 luglio 2011 "Proprio con riferimento all'ambito pubblico, ho notato che aumenta sempre più la distanza culturale tra l'Italia, dove molti Enti - addirittura - bloccano ai propri dipendenti l'accesso a questi siti, e gli altri Paesi in cui si moltiplicano le esperienze di Amministrazioni che scelgono i social media per dialogare con i propri cittadini-utenti. In questi casi, gli Enti dedicano grande attenzione all'adozione di documenti (le cosiddette "Policy") in cui spiegare le ragioni per cui l'Amministrazione si serve degli strumenti social e in che modo un dipendente pubblico deve usarli."

See also the embedded Social Media Policy video for staff of the Department of Justice (Victoria, Australia) by VictoriaGovDOJTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iQLkt5CG8I

Great graphic

For a textual version, see the original post: http://blog.nj.com/njv_kelly_heyboer/2010/01/digital_divide_the_internets_h.html