Re: Facebook closes in on winning ‘Face’ trademark — from wired.co.uk by Mark Brown
From DSC:
Do we really have to have a trademark on the word “Face”?! Come on — geez. And how is this going to be enforced? Is this the kind of thing we want tying up our legal systems even more?
What happened to civility? To discourse? To fair play? To trying to reconcile things before it gets to “the judge”? I think we take way too many things to the courts, and not nearly enough things to our hearts and our consciences. Clearly, we don’t trust each other to compete fairly — every man for himself and do whatever you can to “win”– that’s the world’s greedy way evidently. For those folks out there that think mankind is inherently good, how do you respond to this?
Luke 12:58 (New International Version, ©2010)
58 As you are going with your adversary to the magistrate, try hard to be reconciled on the way, or your adversary may drag you off to the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison.
The state of our hearts is not looking too good these days. But here’s the problem. The dangerous thing is that the power of the tools that are out there has never been seen before. In order to help others and make the world a better place, we need strong consciences and hearts of flesh like never before.
“The last time a technology company had access to a word as short, vague and ubiquitous as “Face”, things got a little bit out of hand. Game publisher Tim Langdell used his hold over the word “Edge” for years to bully game developers and instigate legal spats, until the courts finally stripped him of his ill-gotten trademark.”
iCivics (formerly Our Courts) is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy. iCivics is the vision of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who is concerned that students are not getting the information and tools they need for civic participation, and that civics teachers need better materials and support.
— above item from The Evolution of the Digital Coursepack by Joshua Kim
Teachers learning about digital citizenship — from techconnects blog
From DSC:
A great set of resources regarding digital citizenship, including:
Websites to Support Digital Citizenship
http://www.netsmartz.org Lesson cards http://www.netsmartz.org/resources/activitycards.htm
http://www.brainpop.com/spotlight/digitalcitizenship/
http://www.catholicschools-phl.org/images/Keeping_Kids_Safer_on_the_Internet.pdf
http://internetsavvy.wikispaces.com/
https://sites.google.com/site/lchslibrary/cc
http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
Shares of for-profit colleges tumble — from the LA Times
Investors flee the sector after Apollo Group predicts a plunge in enrollment, citing the U.S.’ attack on high student loan defaults.
Shares of for-profit education companies plunged Thursday after industry leader Apollo Group Inc. shocked Wall Street by predicting a sharp drop in enrollment amid growing government pressure in the industry.
Moodle.org upgrades to Moodle 2.0 — from MoodleNews.com by Joseph Thibault
Martin Dougiamas, Moodle founder and lead developer, announced Sunday that Moodle.org (the longest continuously running Moodle site) has been upgraded to Moodle 2.0 release candidate 1. If you’re curious to check out some of the new features on an install with loads of information to peruse and search: point your browser at http://moodle.org
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From http://foursquare.com/universities
Foursquare for universities helps students, alumni, and staff connect with each other, find new and interesting things to do, and earn rewards for exploring their campus and nearby areas. We combine a communication platform and a campus guidebook to create a fun experience for our users; students earn points, win ‘Mayorships’ and unlock badges for checking in to places and trying out new activities on campus.
Universities such as Syracuse, Harvard, Stanford, and Texas A&M have already launched a foursquare presence, and engaged tens of thousands of their students.
Mercy Corps Mobile Money Turns Phones Into Wallets for 100,000-Plus Haitians — from FastCompany.com
…heralds a new era in cyberwar.
San Francisco, California and London, England — A piece of highly sophisticated malicious software that has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories over the past year is the first program designed to cause serious damage in the physical world, security experts are warning.
The Stuxnet computer worm spreads through previously unknown holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and then looks for a type of software made by Siemens and used to control industrial components, including valves and brakes.
Stuxnet can hide itself, wait for certain conditions and give new orders to the components that reverse what they would normally do, the experts said. The commands are so specific that they appear aimed at an industrial sector, but officials do not know which one or what the affected equipment would do.
These two things — great ideas and the human connections they create — make TED a unique phenomenon. Other conferences, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos and D: AllThingsDigital in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, have similar elite A-list rosters. But TED, which takes place annually in Long Beach, California, is the only one that fully exploits the power of what you might call, with apologies to Cisco, the human network. In the nine years since publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED, it has grown way beyond a mere conference. By combining the principles of “radical openness” and of “leveraging the power of ideas to change the world,” TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it’s creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.
Also see the video; resource originally from Douglas Crets at EdReformer
3 million and counting — from insidehighered.com
WASHINGTON — Love ’em or hate ’em — and many of this city’s current power brokers seemingly fall into the latter category right now — for-profit colleges are attracting students in ever-growing numbers, as made powerfully clear by an Education Department report released Wednesday.
The report, an annual study of college enrollments, prices and degrees awarded, includes data on the number of students who enrolled in various types of postsecondary institutions throughout the 2008-9 academic year. As seen in the table below, the statistics show that for-profit colleges enrolled a total of 3.2 million students, 11.8 percent of the nearly 27.4 million students who studied at all institutions that year.