Group items tagged

The European Commission is organising an High-Level Conference on "Education in the Digital Era". It'll take place in Brussels on the 11th December. Discussion will also take place online. Themes will be adrressed in advanced, promoting an online debate feeding into the conference, and during the day allowing anyone to follow-up and contribute to the debate on spot. Bookmark the page and go back to it during the comming weeks. Ricardo Twitter: @ricbruno71

We rely on your support to further our mission to understand birds and other wildlife, to involve the public in scientific discovery, and to use our knowledge to protect our planet. Each day, bird watchers report tens of thousands of bird observations to citizen-science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contributing to the world's most dynamic and powerful source of information on birds.

Birding has been at the forefront of citizen science projects. In South Africa there are similar projects to the ones Cornell is doing. they are being run through the Avian Demographic Unit at UCT and strongly supported by Birdlife South Africa. Birdwatching is one of the areas where an ornithologist is often on an equal footing with amateurs, and sometimes behind professional guides, when it comes to field identification. It is therefore a suitable field in which citizen science can play an important role.

It is great that people are connecting with each other; however, we need to think about the influence of online social network on our Youth.

I think this is a valid concern, high schools around the country are permitting cell phone use in classrooms which is opening the doors to more group chat during and after class about everything but academics.

In a world dominated by technology there is no denying the significant influence of social media on our Youth. That being said, I think there is a critical demand for social media education in the classroom. I would love to see a stronger emphasis placed on employing technology as an instrument of education in the school system. Social media should be taught as a tool for research, collaboration and activism rather than a trivial pastime.

Interesting article on Twitters use outside of social interactions Twitter has been increasingly share-y with its enormous data set. Given the recent $10 million grant to MIT to analyze and put social media data to use, how grand are Twitter's research aspirations? Twitter reports about 500 million tweets are sent every day, from 271 million users (the population of the United States is 317 million) in more than 35 different languages.