open thinking

Tonight I presented “Popular Issues in (Digital) Media Literacy” to my EC&I 831 students. The presentation covered various topics such as: offensive content (bad taste, sexuality), viral videos & memes, misinformation (satire, hoaxes, scams, phishing), safety & cyberbullying, hate (racism & violence), social networks & privacy. It was very much a survey approach to the [...]

We were very fortunate to have Sue Waters as a guest for EC&I 831 last Wednesday (March 19/08). Sue had previously written a post related to the order for closure for Al Upton’s MiniLegends classroom blog. EC&I 831 was very interested in hearing more.
We used Skype to mediate the conversation, and the result was streamed [...]

 

 EC&I 831 Conversation with Sue Waters: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It looks like Microsoft has plans to test a new technology known as “Mediacart” in some grocery stores in the US.
Customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a Web site at home and type in their grocery lists; when they get to the store and swipe their card on the [...]

The PEW/Internet report Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency was recently released. In the summary of findings, they divide online adults into four distinct categories based on their online privacy (footprint) concerns.
1) Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online adults. They say [...]

In case you’ve been sleeping, and don’t know what Facebook Beacon is:
Beacon is a part of Facebook’s Ads system that sends data from external websites to Facebook, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements, and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Beacon was launched on November 6, 2007 with forty-four partner [...]