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"Last night, minutes before the Spurs demolished the Heat in Game 3 of the NBA finals, San Antonio's 10-year-old mariachi singer Sebastien De La Cruz offered a wonderful rendition of the National Anthem at AT&T Center. While he may be used to adoring audiences, as seen in last year's America's Got Talent, not everybody liked his performance - he was met with applause in the stadium and scorn on the internet. Apparently, other "Americans" were none too pleased that a "Mexican" was performing the national anthem, a privilege they only consider theirs."

I have told her to name names. I'm not sure it'll have much of an impact, but just as the Reddit community now must deal with the increased scrutiny on its machinations and culture, I'd hope that a little more transparency and openness about academia's own culture will do it a lot of good.

"still think education struggles culturally, not just technologically, with some of these very "warning message" issues. In many ways, the Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who don't believe that educational content like syllabi and handouts should be freely and openly available on the Web. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that the Web is dangerous and there are predators and trolls just waiting to steal your intellectual property or hijack your forums. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that students' work should be private, shared only with the instructor-of-record. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that they are in charge of a learner's online experience - that they can dictate where learners go, what they see, what they read, and at the end of the semester, they control when access to all that goes away."

This was such a great link - I have been reading through Audrey Watters blogs and finding information and links that are very important to my efforts with ePortfolios right now. Thank you!

"In addition to all the lies, the story was laced with creepy sexual imagery: I'd had my "panties ripped off" and was like "a dog wagging her tail trying to attract a mating partner." I felt overwhelmed; it was as if something heavy were pressing into my forehead. I wanted to fight back, and I also wanted to hide. I haven't been able to do either."

Why expose oneself to Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists? It doesn't "pay." It doesn't explicitly count for tenure or promotion. In fact, it puts one at risk of being labeled a popularizer or even being criticized by one's own colleagues as a less-than-serious scholar. But having opened the door to public engagement, I can't walk away now.

"Most Google+ fans I know don't mourn its closure as much as they mourn the loss of Google+ circa 2014. Imagine a social network where geeks have higher follower counts than celebrities. Where there's no advertising. Where trolls get crushed and ordinary people have a voice. Where smart people gather for long, detailed and interesting conversations. Where most streams aren't algorithmically filtered. Where photographs appear at full quality. Where social networking engagement leads to actual, real-life friendships. Imagine a social network that strikes fear into Facebook, and forces them to improve the site for their users. It's all hard to imagine. But for about three years, this was Google+. Google+ is dead. But the best version of the site died in 2014. We should all mourn its loss."

"Welcome to the other side of the uncanny valley of profile photographs. The attention of generated imagery has so far focused on "deepfake videos," in which a real person's face is grafted semi-realistically (for now) onto someone else's body. There's a different impact with deep-learning AI-generated fake still-photo faces that look realistic but aren't attempting to match the appearance of any actual person. And they're so new that these images have yet to get a name-perhaps deepfaces will win out. Deepfaces have a greater potential to add to the noise of troll farms, social-media griefers, and outright scammers and fraudsters because they look legitimate and fail reverse-image searches. As Craig Silverman, a long-time exposer of online frauds and BuzzFeed media editor, says, "I think it presents a big challenge for some of the existing approaches used by investigators, journalists, and police and others to follow a breadcrumb trail.""

"The idea is simple (although the software is so complex it took a year to build): before posting a comment in a forum or below an article, users must rate two randomly selected comments from others for quality of argument and civility (defined as an absence of personal attacks or abuse). Ratings are crunched to build up a picture of what users of any given site will tolerate, which is then useful for flagging potentially offensive material."