"Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches ...... What if it controlled your life?"It's an excellent read.
"The UK government has issued new guidelines to teachers on what to teach about creationism and intelligent design in science classes.
They are pretty explicit that creationsim and ID do not belong."
"No matter how much you love your job, you can't work for 10 hours straight.At a time when some employers are rushing to ban or prevent access to social networking sites perhaps they should take note, and remember the old saying, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
That's why there's Futility Closet — 2,100 anecdotes, epigrams, illusions and wonders; puzzles, prodigies, sublimities and horrors.
Read a few and get back to work. We'll keep finding more."
"Rice, the second-best British junior, and Broady, the national Under-18 champion, have had their funding withdrawn after they were deemed by the LTA to have breached contracts requiring them to act professionally. The LTA took the action after being alerted by the BBC to photos and confessions on the Bebo social networking website."The interesting thing about this story is that the LTA hadn't noticed that there had been anything wrong with their behaviour; the incriminating photographs on Bebo were discovered by the BBC who must have rushed to inform the LTA, and then produced a news article.
Nicholas Carr at Rough Type pointed me in the direction of another newspaper article this time at the Guardian simply entitled "Broadband beyond the grave offers web service for the dead""i think there must be dead people all over facebook. i mean, what happens when you die? if no one knows your password, they cant log in, so you will be stuck in cyberspace forever, never changing. very strange to think about. although, what would your status say, really?
Nikki Brady
is still deadUpdated eternally"
"Users of YouDeparted.com can issue posthumous instructions for everything from their funeral to feeding their pet, cancelling bills and magazine subscriptions, organising their will and other financial matters, sending final letters to friends - and foes - and delivering a valedictory video address summing it all up."The fathers of the internet must be turning in their virtual space.
"233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking."In the same article the BBC helpfully points to research undertaken at Sheffield Hallam University wondering whether social networking is changing the face of friendship. They find that
"Online social networks tend to be far larger than their real-life counterparts, but online users say they have about the same number of close friends as the real-life average person."In the second article the BBC report that
"Three council workers have lost their jobs for spending too long on the internet auction site eBay. One was sacked and two resigned after managers at Neath Port Talbot Council found some staff were spending up to two hours a day on the website."Against this sort of background I cannot help but wonder whether the rush to integrate social networking sites with PLEs is sensible.
"Zuckerberg attributed the power of Facebook to the “social graph, ” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service. He said, “It’s the reason Facebook works.”Since then many authorities, bloggers, software houses and academics have all started to use the phrase. If I am honest in my reading I have found use of the phrase confusing. In my mind a graph is usually a visual representation of some mathematical data and a social graph is a representation of a social network; the sort of things student teachers were asked to provide on teaching practice to illustrate classroom relationships.
“Its changing the way the world works,” he said, pushing information out faster than any big company can. “As Facebook adds more and more people with more and more connections it continues growing and becomes more useful at a faster rate. We are going to use it spread information through the social graph.” The net effect of the social graph is that groups and application can achieve exponential growth, he said."
"Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it."Inappropriate images are filtered out and should you not want your images appearing an opt out facility is available.
"It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about right now"
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"The initial version of the Courses application was created by Facebook to give you as much functionality as possible. As of today, we're turning off our version of Courses and have decided to turn this over to the developer community and let you – our users – decide which Courses application works best for you. In many ways, our developer community is the best suited to create the applications that help people connect, track, and collaborate with their teachers, professors, and classmates. Many of our developers are in school and have used some kind of collaboration software. Their experiences make them the ideal creators of useful education applications."I'm not convinced by this argument. Really what Facebook are saying here is we've grown and changed, many members don't come from college networks, so the Course application is no longer part of our core mission.
"Students will build applications for Facebook, then gather and analyze detailed information about how Facebook users actually use them. Students will focus on using detailed numerical measurements to guide software iterations, just like developers do on thousands of existing Facebook applications."Perhaps here we shall find a real purpose for Facebook in education. I can't find the course on the internet, but it has a group.
"Students in the class will work in groups of three, first developing an application designed to appeal to most Facebook users.It would be great if they come up with some really useful educational applications, because if we are honest not many exist ....... yet.
Groups will then develop a second application, more closely focused around helping students use Facebook for education, such as a way for students to share class notes with each other.
They’ll be graded based on how many Facebook users they can get actively using their applications."
