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The Holy See delivered this statement on 18 June 2013 at the Marrakesh Diplomatic Conference on a WIPO Treaty for the Blind. Statement by His Excellency Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN and Other International Organizations in Geneva at World Intellectual Property Organization Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities Marrakech (Morocco) "...Mr. President, The primary goals of the copyright system is the dissemination of creative works to enhance the common good. Copyright has never been an end in itself. Increasingly, technological developments have strained the capacity of copyright law to limit the ways in which the public accesses creative works. As stated by Jean Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Laborem Exercens, "It would be radically unworthy of man, and a denial of our common humanity, to admit to the life of the community, and thus admit to work, only those who are fully functional. To do so would be to practise a serious form of discrimination, that of the strong and healthy against the weak and sick" [2] . Since all persons are called to contribute to society, it is fundamental to create an international instrument that could give even to impaired people a variety of opportunities to discover their potential, understand their environment, discover their rights and put to the best use their talents and resources both for personal fulfilment and for their contribution to society. This common good must be served in its fullness, not according to a reductionist vision subordinated only to the advantage of some people; rather, it is to be based on a logic that leads to the acceptance of a comprehensive responsibility. "The common good corresponds to the highest of human inclinations [3], but it is a good that is very difficult to attain because it requires the constant ability and effort to see

La difesa incondizionale da parte del Vaticano di un trattato OMPI per i ciechi e altre persone che non possono adoperare testi stampati è particolarmente interessante: in incontri precedenti su questo trattato - sotto il Papa precedente - il Vaticano si era allineato sui paesi ricchi del cosiddetto "Gruppo B" dell'OMPI nel chiedere di seppellire questo trattato.

"Hi, Today we made some changes at Ning. I want to share with you the email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees: Team, When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us. So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy. As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies. I've never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months. We'll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus. Thanks, Jason Rosenthal I know many of you will have que

Chris Hoofnagle, director of BCLT's privacy programs | 3/6/13 "...We need to be less infatuated with "the cloud," which to some extent is a marketing fad. Many of the putative benefits of the cloud are disclaimed in these services' terms of service. For instance, a 2009 survey of 31 contracts found that, "…In effect, a number of providers of consumer-oriented Cloud services appear to disclaim the specific fitness of their services for the purpose(s) for which many customers will have specifically signed up to use them." The same researchers found that providers' business models were related to the generosity of terms. This militates towards providers that charge some fee for service as opposed to "free" ones that monetize user data. We should charge our IT professionals with the duty of documenting problems with outsourced services. To more objectively understand the cloud phenomenon, we should track the real costs associated with outsourcing, including outages, the costs of managing the relationship with Google, and the technical problems that users experience. Outsourcing is not costless. We could learn that employees have simply been transferred from the operation of CalMail to the management of bMail. We should not assume that systems mean fewer people-they may appropriately require meaningful staffing to fulfill our needs. As the expiration date of system wide Google contract approaches in June 2015, these metrics will help us make an economical decision. Finally, there are technical approaches that, if effective, could blunt, but not completely eliminate, the privacy problems created by cloud services. Encryption tools, such as CipherCloud, exist to mask data from Google itself. This can help hide the content of messages, reduce data mining risks from Google, and cause the government to have to come to Berkeley officials to gain access to content. The emergence of these services indicates that there is a shared concern about s

Attenzione alla data: alcune cose potrebbero essere cambiate nel frattempo.

"Sparky Sweets' self-styled "gangster" approach to education is bringing books like Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird to new audiences. Miranda Dobson meets him For those students who hastily scan SparkNotes, Wikipedia or CliffNotes before a seminar, the latest comedy sensation to hit YouTube could be a godsend. Sparky Sweets PhD invites his viewers to join him as he gives the lowdown on the great and the good of literature, urging his Twitter followers to, "Educate yo'self, son", by using his Thug Notes. Hailing from the streets of L.A. and claiming to have a doctorate in Classics, Dr Sweets delivers literary summaries and analysis in his "original gangster" style, in a way that he hopes will both entertain book nerds and educate/enlighten those who aren't into their literature. With an unprecedented surge of YouTube fans, Sparky has over 99,000 subscribers to his channel, and counting, and nearly 506,000 views on his most popular "drop" on classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Also included on Sparky's reading list are George Orwell's 1984, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and popular culture's latest literary buzz courtesy of Baz Luhrmann's film, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sparky tells me the idea for Thug Notes came about as a result of his "frustration with the world of academia." "In my opinion," he says, "an academic's job should be to utilise their passion for the classics to make the gift of literature available to everyone. Unfortunately, in my experiences, that is not the case." Sparky believes academia is "enshrouded by a veil of unnecessarily convoluted terminology and intellectual one-upmanship", which negates the whole point of education. "Instead of promoting the universality of these works, they are building them up to a virtually inaccessible plane and saying 'If you want to truly understand classical literature, you have to get on my level.' So Thug Notes is my way of tri

Il video che illustra l'articolo è quello delle Thug Notes per Hamlet.

January 22, 2014 | By Katitza Rodriguez "We aren't going to let the NSA and its allies ruin the Internet. Inspired by the memory of Aaron Swartz, fueled by our victory against SOPA and ACTA, the global digital rights community are uniting to fight back. On February 11, on the Day We Fight Back, the world will demand an end to mass surveillance in every country, by every state, regardless of boundaries or politics. The SOPA and ACTA protests were successful because we all took part, as a community. As Aaron Swartz put it, everybody "made themselves the hero of their own story." We can set a date, but we need everyone, all the users of the Global Internet, to make this a movement. Here's part of our plan (but it's just the beginning). Last year, before Ed Snowden had spoken to the world, digital rights activists united on 13 Principles. The Principles spelled out just why mass surveillance was a violation of human rights, and gave sympathetic lawmakers and judges a list of fixes they could apply to the lawless Internet spooks. On the day we fight back, we want the world to sign onto those principles. We want politicians to pledge to uphold them. We want the world to see we care. Here's how you can join the effort: Send an email to rights (AT) eff.org confirming your interest in participating in this action and receiving updates. Let us know what you would like to do in your own country so we can send you more information and amplify your voice. Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org and Take Action. Join your fellow global citizens and, sign the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles here: https://en.necessaryandproportionate.org/take-action/EFF Use social media tools to announce your participation. Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to encourage others to participate. Be creative -- plan your own actions and pledge. Go to the streets. Promote the Principles in your own country. Then, let us know what your plan is, s

11 febbraio: giornata di azione contro la sorveglianza globale tipo PRISM della NSA. Vedi anche i 13 "Princìpi internazionali in materia di applicazione dei diritti umani alla sorveglianza delle comunicazioni" https://it.necessaryandproportionate.org/text . Tra i firmatari, in Italia: Agorà Digitale, Electronic Frontiers Italy - ALCEI, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights,

"Published on March 18th, 2013 | by Guest Author [Kate Lee] Infographics are becoming an increasingly popular method of communicating information quickly and clearly. Great designs can reduce the complexity of information, making a process, product or service easily understandable and accessible to the general public. And a good infographic means that all of that information is presented in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to boot. But have infographics become too good at streamlining information? Have they become the fast food of graphic design - quickly digestible, but lacking in substance? Infographics: Guilty As Charged The web has lots of criticisms levelled at infographics and it's true that many are poorly created, failing to fulfil their purpose, using Papyrus or other crimes against design. The main complaints when it comes to infographics are: 1. Creates confusion: the data is presented in a manner that takes a long time to interpret, is difficult to follow and creates additional complexity instead of providing clarity. 2. Inaccurate information: [...] 3. Too long: [...] 4. General ugliness: [...] The problem with infographics is that so many people think it's easy to create them, when in fact it's a particular subset of skills in an already specialised profession.[...] Data Visualisation Requires Thinking That being said, there are truly great infographics out there that tick all the boxes: accurate information, presented in an effective visual manner that helps the audience interpret and understand quickly. And so we come to the point of this post: with complex information rendered so comprehensible, without the need to read long reports and with the ability to look at pictures and share it with all your friends - is there a danger that infographics cause the audience to stop thinking? In short, the answer is no. In most cases where the audience needs to think, the data isn't simple anyway. The mission of infographics is to re

Titolo volutamente provocativo. Ottima presentazione delle "infographics", di cosa dovrebbero e potrebbero essere ma purtroppo spesso non sono, e degli risvolti cognitivi del loro uso.

"...Teachable moments As is often the case in awkward cases - where the system does not quite work as intended - a few things can be drawn from this episode. YouTube's Content ID system - http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/improving-content-id.html - is, in fact, intended to act as a buffer between the sometimes conflicting interests of content holders and uploaders: rather than forcing content holders to either ignore infringing content or go straight to a DMCA takedown notice. YouTube compares content that is uploaded to huge numbers of files of copyright works supplied by content owners, as do external agencies contracted to content owners. Content owners are able to set their own parameters, and determine what action YouTube should take - whether that is allowing, monetizing or blocking the content. One problem with this setup is that mechanical systems, while necessary to sort the vast amount of content being uploaded to YouTube and other video sharing sites every moment, are short on nuance. One can make assumptions and built rules based on quantifiable properties - if there are five minutes of rightsholder-owned content scattered across a 30 minute video, for example, that content is more likely to be being used for illustrative purposes in a review than uploaded in an infringing fashion - but ideas like fair use are generally decided by humans, and can only be approximated by mechanical systems. So, the rights holder, the agency pursuing monetization on the rights holder's behalf, the uploader and YouTube have connected but not identical interests. This may go some way to explaining the lacunae which took this example from a formality to a three-month epic. And, in this particular case, there are unusual elements - for example, the double claims, for first audiovisual and then visual content. The system is not intended to enable this kind of double jeopardy

Daniel Nye Griffiths descrive un caso reale di disputa sul copyright nel caso di un remix video pubblicato su YouTube. Da lì, spiega come funziona il sistema YouTube che individua possibili violazioni di copyright ma consente anche di contestare tali individuazioni. Ci sono anche link alle fonti dirette. Cosa buffa: il caso reale riguarda il copyright di una serie TV intitolata "The Twilight Zone", l'area crepuscolare tra giorno e notte. Sono capitata su questo articolo cercando di capire se un episodio del 1960 di questa serie era ancora sotto copyright oppure era caduto nel pubblico dominio. Prima avevo provato con lo strumento Digital Copyright Slider dell'associazione delle biblioteche US - http://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/ - che aveva cautamente risposto "Forse", con una nota che spiegava che dipendeva se il copyright originale era stato rinnovato, e link a lunghi e complessi documenti su come fare per scoprirlo... quindi sono tuttora nella "Twilight Zone" in merito.

" We look forward to continued dialog with the Department of Justice regarding the requirements of the ADA and options for compliance. Yet we do so with the realization that, due to our current financial constraints, we might not be able to continue to provide free public content under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice to the extent we have in the past. In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access. Please know that we fully intend to exhaust every available option to retain or restore free public availability of online content. It is our hope that we will find an appropriate resolution with the Department of Justice that allows us to serve the extended seeing- and hearing-impaired community and continue to provide free online content."

Risposta di Berkeley alla lettera del Dipartimento di Giustizia US sulla non conformità dei materiali di corso con i requisiti della legge.

Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the E-books Press Conference Washington, D.C. ~ Wednesday, April 11, 2012 "Earlier today, we filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, against Apple and five different book publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. In response to our allegations, three of these publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster - agreed to a proposed settlement. If approved by the court, this settlement would resolve the Department's antitrust concerns with these companies, and would require them to grant retailers - such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble - the freedom to reduce the prices of their e-book titles. The settlement also requires the companies to terminate their anticompetitive most-favored-nation agreements with Apple and other e-books retailers. In addition, the companies will be prohibited for two years from placing constraints on retailers' ability to offer discounts to consumers. They will also be prohibited from conspiring or sharing competitively sensitive information with their competitors for five years. And each is required to implement a strong antitrust compliance program. These steps are appropriate - and essential in ensuring a competitive marketplace. Beginning in the summer of 2009, we allege that executives at the highest levels of the companies included in today's lawsuit - concerned that e-book sellers had reduced prices - worked together to eliminate competition among stores selling e-books, ultimately increasing prices for consumers. As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles. During regular, near-quarterly meetings, we allege that publishing company executives discussed confidential business and competitive matters - including Amazon's e-book retailing practices - as part of a conspiracy

"Posted by Dario Taraborelli on August 2, 2012 Improving the quality of articles has long been one of the primary aims of contributors to Wikipedia, and is one of the Wikimedia movement's 2010-15 strategic priorities, but measuring it objectively has remained a challenge. In 2005, Nature famously reported that Wikipedia articles on scientific topics contained just four errors per article on average, compared to three errors per article in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica objected to the report, but Nature stood by it, and the report remains widely cited today. Since that time, however, there have been relatively few independent analyses of Wikipedia article quality, despite the enormous growth of the project. Wikipedia today counts more than 23 million articles across languages (more than 4 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone) compared to 3.7 million total articles in 2005; today it ranks 6th by overall traffic according to Alexa, while it ranked 37th in 2005. (...) The Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the release of a pilot study conducted by Epic, an e-learning consultancy, in partnership with Oxford University - "Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Alternative Encyclopaedias: A Preliminary Comparative Study Across Disciplines in English, Spanish and Arabic." The study compared a sample of English Wikipedia articles to equivalent articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Spanish Wikipedia to Enciclonet, and Arabic Wikipedia to Mawsoah and Arab Encyclopaedia. 22 articles in the sample were blind-assessed by 2 to 3 native speaking academic experts each, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The small size of the sample does not allow us to generalize the results to Wikipedia as a whole. However, as a pilot primarily focused on methodology, the study offers new insights into the design of a protocol for expert assessment of encyclopedic contents. For our editor community a

"Overview - This course is offered by University of Zurich with Prof Paul-Olivier Dehaye and his students. This lesson plan is created by Dilrukshi Gamage (www.sdgamage.weebly.com) a MOOC student from this class due to few reasons. 1. Course started with giving some ideas, but now it appears no more ideas facilitated 2. Forums are closed and we have no clue of what to do 3. Students who take this course or any of coursera for the first time will be wondering and might lose the context of learning. 4. This lesson plan will guide us to collaboratively find solution to be in synchronized and learn from the time we invest in this. Introduction - The course named Teaching goes massive : new skills needed. It is our responsibility to find out what are the skills we need when we are teaching to a massive class.. or any class. Prof.Paul mentioned some experiments which we can do and previous forums already started and gone very well until suddenly closed everything. So let us drive this MOOC , learn to learn ourselves how to be organized and learn from each other. Anyone can suggest things but not like as forums it has to be much more effective. This document will contain how to participate and what can you do in contributing to expand your learning. Don't worry this will not stop suddenly as we the students are in charge. First step lets set some objectives so we can see did we achieve when we finish this course. Objectives - After you complete this course 1. You will learn how to learn yourselves to work without a real teacher or a lecturer. 2. You will learn to make communications and build a network where you can share and learn throughout your interest. 3. You will learn to work on inclusive projects in the same course ( by inclusive what I mean was anyone can work in one project or more) 4. You will gain knowledge on what skills you need and how to handle it when teaching is massive Where to contact - Please use the links provided in collaborating

vedi anche http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/ di George Siemens per un ottimo riassunto e altri link utili

e https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg , il Pad dove Dehaye spiega il contesto della sua decisione. Se qualcuno ne ricancella il contenuto, usate la storia delle revisioni: funziona come PiratePad

"The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC Each chapter of this guide looks at one of the first MOOCs and some early influences. It contains these parts: - a description of the MOOC, what it did, and what was learned - a description of the element of MOOC theory learned in the offering of the course - practical tools that can be used to develop that aspect of a MOOC - practical tips on how to be successful Contribute to this Book You are invited to contribute. If you participated in a MOOC, add a paragraph describing your experience (you can sign your name to it, so we know it's a personal story). If you know of resources or can add information about an element of MOOC theory, add to or edit the text that already exists. If you know of tools, provide a link to the tool, a short description, and your assessment of the tool. If you have a tip, add the tip. In order to participate, please email or message your contact details, and we'll you to the list of people who can edit pages. Send your request to stephen@downes.ca Your contributions will be accepted and posted under a CC-By license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Thanks for your participation. The finished product will be published online and made freely available on the web. Stephen Downes"

Trad: Questo documento ha un doppio scopo: - offrire una storia online dello sviluppo del Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - adoperare questa storia per descrivere elementi importanti di un MOOC. Ogni capitolo di questa guida esamina uno dei primi MOOC ed alcune delle influenze iniziali. È composto di: - una descrizione del MOOC, di cosa vi si è fatto ed imparato - una descrizione dell elemento della teoria dei MOOC imparato nell'offrire il corso - strumenti concreti che possono essere adoperati per sviluppare quell'aspetto di un MOOC - consigli concreti per la riuscita Contribuite a questo Libro Siete invitati a contribuire. Se avete partecipato a un MOOC, aggiungete un paragrafo dove descrivete la vostra esperienza (potete firmare il vostro nome, così sapremo che si tratta di una storia personale). Se conoscete risorse o se potete aggiungere informazioni su un elemento della teoria dei MOOC, aggiungetelo al testo esistente o modificatelo. Se conoscete strumenti, date un link allo strumento, una breve descrizione, e la vostra valutazione dello strumento. Se avete un consiglio, aggiungete quel consiglio. Per partecipare, mandateci un e-mail o un messaggio con i dati per contattarvi, e vi aggiungeremo alla lista di coloro che possono modificare le pagine. Mandata la vostra richiesta a stephen@downes.ca I vostri contributi verranno accettati e pubblicati sotto una licenza Creative Commons BY (attribuzione) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Grazie della vostra partecipazione. Il prodotto finito verrà pubblicato online e reso liberamente accessibilie sul web Stephen Downes.

"Author: Andy Carvin , EDC Center for Media & Community | December 7th, 2004 You may have noticed recently that lots of websites now contain little graphical buttons with the word XML on them. For example: XML button When you click on the button, all you see is a bunch of jumbled text and computer code. What's this all about? It's an RSS feed, and they're changing the way people access the Internet. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technical format that allows online publishers to share and distribute their content to other websites or individual Internet users. It's commonly used for distributing headlines on news websites. Bloggers use it to distribute summaries of their blog entries as well. RSS is written in the Internet coding language known as XML, which is why you see RSS buttons labeled that way. If a website publishes an RSS page, commonly known as an RSS "feed," this feed will contain summaries of all the recent articles posted on that site. For example, Yahoo News publishes news related to world headlines, national news, sports, etc. These you can all read by going to the Yahoo website. But they also publish RSS feeds for each of these subjects. Each RSS feed contains a summary of the most recent news stories posted. Similarly, the Digital Divide Network publishes RSS feeds for our news headlines, events listings and other content on our website. I even have my own RSS feed for articles that I publish on my personal blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. But why do RSS feeds look like a jumbled mess when I click on them with most Web browsers? It's because RSS feeds are meant to be read by machines rather than people. Software and websites can understand the data contained in RSS feeds and make it available to people on personalized websites, through software known as news aggregators, even through email. So when you aggregate RSS feeds, you're having a computer collect content from many different websites and organize them in a convenient pla

Linkato in http://iamarf.org/2013/04/20/racconti-ltis13/ , commento 42. RSS come empowerment.

"4. Titles 4.1 Content Rejection and Removal We may, in our sole discretion, at any time, and without notice to you (a) reject Content; or (b) remove, or refuse to list or distribute any Content on or from any CreateSpace E-Store, Amazon Property or other sales channel. You will remain liable for all fees and other amounts that you may owe under this Agreement in connection with any Title or Content we remove because of a violation of this Agreement or our Content Guidelines. You may withdraw your Title from the Services at any time, but we will have 30 days from the date of a Title's withdrawal (or termination of this Agreement) to remove all applicable Content. However, we may fulfill any Customer orders pending as of the date we remove such Title from the Services. If we request that you provide additional information relating to your Content, such as information confirming that you have all rights required to permit our distribution of the Content, you represent and warrant that any information and documentation you provide to us in response to such a request will be current, complete, and accurate. You authorize us, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider appropriate to verify your rights to permit our distribution of the Content and the accuracy of the information or documentation you provide to us with respect to those rights."

"We now require captcha on many social features, such as following people, joining groups, etc. For a very nominal fee, you can upgrade yourself to "Social Membership," which would grant you full social features without capcha, plus a lot of other goodies. We expect to stop the vast majority of the spammers with this simple measure. We'd like to elaborate more about Social Membership and its pricing and our thoughts behind the decisions. As long-time Diigo users know, Diigo is a personal knowledge management tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community on the other hand. While it is perfectly fine to use Diigo solely as the former, we do believe that the value of the knowledge-sharing community could be substantial, as the number of active users increases, and as the spam is minimized. As a result, we have decided to set the social membership annual fee at $5/year on Oct 1, 2014, and will increase the price gradually thereafter according to a pre-determined formula, as the number of active social members increases. To reward existing users, an attractive promotion price of $2/year will be available until Oct. 1, 2014. For future years, you will continue to pay the low annual price you paid in the first year, as long as your credit card stay valid for automatic renewal. We have also taken this opportunity to re-adjust our pricing plan to better align users needs with our business model. Existing basic and premium users will be automatically upgraded to Standard in the new pricing plan."

Attenzione a quel "new pricing plan" https://www.diigo.com/premium che limita drasticamente il numero dei gruppi per le formule meno care, ma non è chiaro cosa succederà ai gruppi creati con formula gratuita.

Posted on July 11, 2013 by JimS By Harry Keller "...I don't really see the rush, the extreme hurry exhibited by districts to buy expensive iPads, and forgo other expenditures to do so, when this development in computing devices is still playing itself out. The next great device could be announced tomorrow and could put iPads on the shelf until Apple manages to come out with a newer model. Manufacturers are scrambling to entice consumers to their particular device, while almost entirely ignoring the problems that schools face. When a school chooses widespread adoption of a consumer or business product, it's taking a risk. Often, it's bowing to parental pressures at the same time. While we should applaud schools for overcoming traditional education inertia, we should also realize that some of these new things are just fads or early examples of an incompletely developed new technology. The fact that so many districts are going in so many directions indicates strongly that we don't know where these trends will end. Until we do, I think that wholesale adoption of iPads by high schools is a mistake. My specialty is science. I have yet to see a great science app for high school on an iPad. Mostly, they're just games, animations, and other ordinary stuff. My disclaimer here is that I run a company that puts out an online science application that I consider to be great and am currently porting to the Chromebook, iPad, and Android tablets. Vendors have to cover all bases eventually. I'd rather not have to spend all of this money on fads, but major customers are demanding it. The result will be higher prices."

Capisco, ma sai com'è: se utilizzi una piattaforma unica e costruita per essere ben integrata, ti troverai sempre senza (seri) problemi, al di lla di quale sia il sistema che adotti. Per quanto riguarda le tue esperienze pregresse non so proprio che dirti: per questioni legate alla clientela (ovvio che un consulente non può che adattarsi!) opero da sempre su sistemi senza la i davanti e non mi riconosco nella tua storia tormentata... Che ciò possa dipendere dal fatto che mentre da una parte ci mette le mani chiunque (magari malamente) dall'altra il tutto risulta piuttosto "blindato"? La mia è solo un'ipotesi sia chiaro! Ma appunto: pur seguendo una certa logica, non posso lamentare i problemi che hai avuto tu. Per "certa logica" intendo dire che non mi sono mai fiondato ad aggiornare un sistema operativo con l'ultima versione appena uscita (anzi: per la verità attendo sempre almeno il service pack 1 quando non il 2: attualmente lavoro ancora con Windows XP!!!), ne ammetto facilmente e con leggerezza l'installazione di utilities, add-onn, plugin ed amenità varie. Io però noto che, usando questo ambiente e software prevalentemente opensource, non ho mai riscontrato problemi a scambiare informazioni con altri, nemmeno con gli utenti con le "i" davanti da quali pur arriva in genere robaccia carica di fronzoli quantomeno inutili quando non fuorvianti. In ogni caso lungi da me criticare chi opta per apple: libero di farlo se si tratta di una scelta! Per la scuola invece sarei sinceramente molto più propenso ad utilizzare ambienti più aperti, meno costosi e meno "blinda utenti"!

Ma, sarà ma io non ho problemi nemmeno a interfacciarmi con utenti che usano altre piattaforme. E la mia esperienza negativa con Windows (o con Winzzoz come lo chiamano a volte in Toscana) è condivisa da tutti i miei colleghi che si trovano a usare i computer dei nostri laboratori. Forse i nostri tecnici non fanno corretta manutenzione (però anche noi abbiamo XP e non installiamo con facilità utilities varie, perché la password ce l'hanno solo gli amministratori, cioè i nostri ITP). Ci stiamo trovando bene invece con Linux, gli stessi vecchi PC con Linux girano 10 volte meglio che con Windows, quindi in una mia ipotetica classifica, il sistema operativo di Bill lo metterei in coda. Però hai ragione, per la scuola (soprattutto per i PC), sistemi e software aperti sono sicuramente la soluzione migliore. Via libera al pinguino ;-)

"Are you curious about the Helpouts experience? Take a free test spin with a member of the Helpouts Team! You'll get a firsthand tour of the product and see just how easy it is to receive help over video chat. Schedule a time with one of our Helpouts Specialists, or see who is available now! Our team of knowledgeable specialists looks forward to showing you how it all works. If there is a long queue to join this Helpout, feel free to watch our intro video instead!"

La mia recenzione di questo "helpout sugli helpout": "Ronnie was very patient and gave very clear answers. As to whether people from other countries than Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, U.K., and the U.S. (see https://support.google.com/helpouts/answer/3164468?hl=en&ref_topic=14126 ) would be allowed to offer helpouts in future, he said this is planned. As to the difference between helpouts and hangouts, he explained that though helpouts are using the hangout platform, they are a different service. And when asked if helpout participants can use the live captioning app that can be used in hangouts (see https://hangout-captions.appspot.com/ ), he said no. When I asked why the "Introducing Helpouts by Google" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-VFC9AQM1k video is uncaptioned, and the video embedded in the "Find out what it's like to get a Helpout!" https://helpouts.google.com/111421743141645456280/ls/b41c1faef6b76d0f page is not only uncaptioned, but also uncaptionable via e.g. streaming it to amara.org, because if you try to open it on youtube, you get to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=picasacid , which says: "An error occurred during validation. This video does not exist. Sorry about that." he candidly said he couldn't answer and suggested using the feedback, which I'm doing. Same reply when I asked if Google planned to caption these videos. Sure, I would have preferred to get more hopeful answers to the questions about accessibility, but it was great to get candid ones, which can now be reported to the discussion lists of the Collaborative for Communication Access via Captioning - http://ccacaptioning.org/ . " No, è vero, Ronnie è stato bravissimo. Chissà quanti helpout si sarà sorbito quel giorno, e paffete arriva una che comincia a rompergli le scatole e il nuovo giocatolo Google, portandolo a riconoscere implicitamente che insomma, meglio gli hangout veri e propri..

"Here's the lastest video educator's are jacked about: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UFpe3Up9T_g ] I like much about this video. I like the message. I like the way it's shot. I like the girls. What I don't like is the perception that this is the girl's invention. It's not. These girls are likely no more into inventing and making than most girls their age. While I might be able to look past that, and I can, I don't like the perception that this is authentic as it suggests. Which raises the larger question of authentic student voice. I remember first being struck by this when this video came out about 6 years ago: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_A-ZVCjfWf8 ] It's an iteration of Michael Wesch video using college aged students. When I saw the k-12 version it just didn't sit well with me. The signs the students held seemed to be the language and ideas of adults. I had a hard time thinking any 5 year old would use the phrase "engage me". But still I thought the video had value but I never used them to share with others. (...) If you're still jacked about the little girls video, that's okay, show it to your young girls, encourage them to explore science but let's have enough awareness to know when we're being sold something. My point with this little wander through video is let's advocate for student voice but not fake ones. Our students do have a voice. Most of them are childlike, full of child like ideas and most aren't as eloquent as adults because they aren't adults. That's what we're supposed to be doing, helping them develop that voice. Yet we do have some that are ready for prime time and we should provide ways for them to share. I know some districts have had students keynote. I think that's great, as long as the core of their story is their own, not the districts or their teachers. I'd way rather listen to a student share a less polished message that was their ow

Vedi anche il commento di Stephen Downes in http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=61423

January 9, 2013 by Jeffrey R. Young "...Setting the Price The company also revealed more details about how it would award certificates and how much it would charge for them. Students who want a verified certificate will have to decide early in the course and pay upfront. Paying that fee will put students on what the company is calling the "Signature Track." The company and colleges are still struggling to decide what to charge for the certificates, though in its latest announcement Coursera said the price would run $30 to $100. "It's a huge decision: You're essentially setting a market," said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, in an interview this week with The Chronicle. "No one has ever priced this before." Officials also stressed that they would offer financial aid to students who demonstrated that they could not afford the fees but could benefit from the verified certificates. Ms. Koller said Coursera would continue to offer free unofficial certificates to students who passed some of its courses. So why would someone pay for the verified certificates? Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, which plans to offer one of the courses in the new pilot, said each free certificate would have a clear disclaimer on it: "It says something to the effect of, We cannot vouch that the person who got this document took the course or did the work." The new Signature Track could mean serious revenue for Coursera, and for the 33 partner colleges that will get a cut of it. Exactly how the colleges will divide that revenue is still being worked out, it seems. Mr. Lange said the question was on the agenda at the next monthly meeting of Duke's Advisory Committee on Online Education." So, when Coursera staff offered free Statements of Accomplishment as "Recognition" to the volunteers of the Global Translator community, they did so in full awareness of their lack of value and of the mentioned disclaimer

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Vero quanto dice la descrizione, però c'è un mucchio di annunci pubblicitari pulsanti. Perciò meglio aprire una nuova scheda del browser per fare altro mentre si scarica il file audio. Utile quando l'audio YT è debole, come in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvI0dMcNCcA dopo i primi 28 secondi (su 56 minuti e 9 secondi)