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"Shows like To Catch a Predator  sensationalize and feed the fear of parents having their child exposed to a child predator. It is a real fear and certainly a serious consideration.The facts however support evidence that over 90% of child predators are family members, close family friends, or clergy. We do not ban family picnics, playgrounds, family reunions, or church functions. There are no laws addressing these issues.The best way to defend our children against these threats is to educate them. Warn or rather teach them of the dangers,make them aware of the possibilities.Or, we can lock them away, effectively banning them from the outside world in which they will eventually have to live, leaving them to use whatever they picked up on their own about responsible digital citizenship, a topic probably not stressed outside of education."

"On whether college still serves its traditional role of leveling the playing field and equalizing opportunities "No, and that's really unfortunate. It was always seen as the great leveler in this country, especially after World War II. One of the most disturbing numbers I came across in research for this book was that if you come from a family with a family income above $90,000, you have a 1 in 2 chance of getting a bachelor's degree by the time you're in your mid-20s. If you come from a family under $35,000, you have a 1 in 17 chance. "One of the fears, and one of my fears, is that we might become a country where the next generation is less educated than the generation that preceded it.""

Thanks for sharing this article, Matt. In my curriculum theory course with Scott Richardson, I began exploring the history of education in the US and the difference between "schooling" and "educating." Have our colleges starting schooling now? It will definitely be interesting to watch this especially as potential standards are implemented at the college level.

"It felt to me that this year we've entered into a post-recession reality in how families are paying for college," said Sarah Ducich, senior vice president for public policy at Sallie Mae and an author of the study. "Even though college costs continue to increase, the amount that families are spending is holding steady, meaning they're making choices in a mostly cost-conscious construct."

"I'm not a radical, or anti-establishment - I've loved and respected working at every university I've joined. I just happen to have moved into a different learning delivery model because I knew it would give me greater flexibility to continue with my academic interests and spend more time with my family. It's a model that fits around my life. That's something I share in common with my students. They aren't unusual either. They just choose to study online because the flexibility suits them. Online higher education means students can combine education with employment - often fast-tracking their careers as a result - or fit study around family commitments."

Brandon, like many blue-collar millennials, is stuck on a journey to adulthood with no end in sight. His own parents, who had just high-school degrees, were married, steadily employed at the college, and homeowners well before they reached his age. But working-class kids today are growing up in a world where taken-for-granted pathways to adulthood are quickly eroding. Since the 1970s, stable blue-collar jobs have rapidly disappeared, taking family wages, pensions, and employer-subsidized health insurance along with them. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who followed a well-worn path from school to the assembly line-and from courtship to marriage to childbearing-men and women today live at home longer, spend more time in school, change jobs more frequently, and start families later.

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

"Youth move between sites quickly. For example, Instagram is a current favorite among youth. Instagram is a photo-sharing site where users can post photos, "like" other people's photos and share them. Snapchat is also popular. This is a mobile service where users can take a photo, send it to someone else, and schedule it to delete within a few seconds. What is important to remember is that both are just services, and they share the same properties as many of their popular predecessors (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Chatroulette). There will always be new services that children move in and out of fluidly. Given the choice between trying to block children from a site and teaching them how to use it maturely, my hope is that parents do the latter. Especially as children are joining new services at increasingly young ages, how they use it becomes as important as what they use."

"The rising discount rate, coupled with enrollment declines at several of the institutions surveyed, is a reflection of the myriad forces that are making it harder for colleges to get students and their families to pay top dollar for a college education. Those forces include a decline in the number of traditional-aged college students, increased competition for students with the ability to pay, decreased household incomes, increased scrutiny of tuition hikes, and more questioning of the value of a college degree."

"The law driving this is called the Family Education Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA states that schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information about a student. "

"Social networking entails "following" people and exchanging personal information about one's family, work, life, travel and so on. And pictures of your cat. When Google launched Google+ in 2011, social networking was on the rise. Social media, on the other hand, is when you share memes, articles, photos and videos taken by someone else-pictures of someone else's cat-and other content that is not about your own life."

Social Media today is impacting every aspect of our lives whether it is our social, working, education or family life. However, what about using social media for collaborating on research projects and communicating scientific knowledge? This talk will explore how social media can be and is used to play a critical role in the full academic research cycle. We will look at how we can use a variety of social media tools to collaborate on identifying, creating, quality assuring and disseminating scientific knowledge

"Being consumed in constant judging leaves us with the feeling of being mediocre or, alternately, with narcissistic pride. Both antithetical perceptions absorb us in the vicious cycle of comparison with friends, family and unknown others. What's most important -- which I wish I had realised in my teens -- is to learn to be comfortable in our own skin."

"Now, there are more than 70 education-related chats on Twitter (see a list here, from retired teacher and librarian Jerry Blumengarten, @cybraryman1), like #ccss (Common Core State Standards), #mathchat and #gtchat (gifted and talented)-not to mention parenting chats. While principals like Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_principal) and Joe Mazza (@joe_mazza) are leading a movement to use Twitter for teacher professional development and family engagement, Twitter has also become a rich environment where parents form valuable bonds with one another, regardless of geographic or other boundaries."

It is hard to imagine holding a university-level class today in which students do not engage with the web or social media in one form or another, whether by using Google search, bookmarking or sharing an article, taking an online survey, posting or commenting on a blog, or using e-mail or text messaging. So, what rules should we, as instructors, follow to ensure no legal or Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) issues arise?

With Plug, your devices work as a group. They all contain exactly the same files. Just like if they were one single, unique device. Play with exactly the same content at all times, no matter which device you're using. Put thousands of movies on your iPad, even if you bought a small one. Watch family pictures on your connected TV, without having to transfer them. Share confidential folders with your colleagues without sending them to the Cloud companies. Send documents instantaneously.

"While universities have routinely collected information about students for years - from their family backgrounds to what books they take out of the library - increased computer power and better digital skills now offer the possibility to piece it all together. It could fundamentally change the way institutions operate - as well as raising challenging ethical and privacy issues. "It's almost waste stuff, generated as a by-product of communications, and previously we did nothing with it," says Rob Englebright, programme manager at Jisc, which champions use of digital technologies in education. "Now we can look at it and form patterns.""

"Instead of the parade you anticipated, you get the gift of FINALLY grasping the idiocy of your undertaking. You finally understand that there are roughly one billion other blogs.  And that the chances of yours being special is so microscopic as to be nonexistent. So now you have two choices: 1. You can accept defeat and go spend time with your family. 2. You can commit yourself to self-delusion. Lucky for me, I've been training in self-delusion all my life."

"Mass higher education, conceptually, is practical, low cost, skills oriented, and mainly concerned with teaching. It caught on because state legislatures and businesses saw it as a means of economic development and a supplier of personnel, and because families saw it as a way of ensuring a place in the middle class for their children. Research universities, on the other hand, grant extraordinary freedom and empowerment to a small, elaborately trained and selected group of people whose mission is to pursue knowledge and understanding without the constraints of immediate practical applicability under which most of the rest of the world has to operate."

"The chart below shows the number of deleted posts every day since April among a sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 users in mainland China. On September 28th, the most tumultuous day of the protests, deletions hit a record: 15 of every 1,000 posts, more than five times normal levels. Mentions of "Hong Kong police" and any posts with a #HongKong hashtag fell afoul of the censors. The data were compiled by Weiboscope, a censorship-monitoring programme at the University of Hong Kong. FreeWeibo, a website developed by GreatFire.org, another Chinese censorship watchdog, captured many of the deleted posts. Most were written by ordinary users: people with a few thousand followers whose non-censored messages revealed otherwise unexceptional lives, of dinners with family and frustrations with traffic jams."

Fully half of the 2012 graduates from high-income families borrowed money for college, double the share that borrowed in 1992-93.