tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
Amusing article on why you should be careful on what you post to social networking sites such as Facebook.
There are many good reasons for not having your boss as a Facebook friend, and Sydney call centre worker Kyle Doyle has just discovered the most convincing of them all.
BBC reports on how Hasbro the owners of Scrabble are going to sue the founders of Scrabulous.
Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, is suing the Calcutta-based founders of Scrabulous – a game available on Facebook.
Last week, an official version of Scrabble was released for Facebook users in Canada and the US.
Hasbro said that Scrabulous violates its copyright and trademarks and has separately asked Facebook to block it.
Scrabulous is one of the most popular apps on Facebook.
Photo source.
Facebook (probably after getting hit by a Zombie) is going to (try and) improve applications on its site.
The BBC reports
Social networking site Facebook is introducing a ranking system for good and bad application developers.
Announced at F8, the Facebook developers conference in San Francisco, it aims to improve the quality of applications on offer.
Dubbed Application Verification it will promote “secure, respectful and transparent” add-ons to the site.
I suspect we will still have the zombies….
Is your institution using Facebook?
According to a report, if you’re not then you could be missing out.
The Guardian reports:
Teachers and lecturers are getting the lowdown on how to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo in an educational way.
Most schools and colleges in the UK block access to the websites but they are missing out on their potential for education, a government-funded guide says.
Have a look at the full report.
BBC reports on how credit companies are using Facebook to advertise their wares.
Credit companies are using the Facebook social networking site to target young people, a debt charity has warned.
Credit Action says adverts promising cheap loans for people with poor credit ratings are appearing on the site and many break advertising regulations.
In particular, they are promoting two new products – payday loans secured against a salary or logbook loans secured against a car, it says.
It is an issue with any advertising based Web 2.0 service and one that you do need to consider if you are considering using Web 2.0 services within an educational institution.
Blocking the ads though may be considered one option, this generally doesn’t work for learners who are accessing the services outside the institution.
Even this blog has advertising inserted by WordPress.com over which I have no control and therefore if you found this blog through Google I suspect that there may be a credit advert embedded into the page.
On my eLearning Stuff blog this happens most times that a new viewer searches Google and finds a link to my site in the search results and clicks through as seen here.
I have no control over those adverts and they are based on the text of my entry (and who is visiting), therefore you could potentially have an unsuitable advert. Now these are text based adverts so offence is less likely.
I could of course move the blog to my own web host and lose all the advertising, but the advantage of WordPress.com is that it is a free service and I don’t need to pay for hosting or bandwidth. Of course the real price I then have to pay is on the inserted advertising.
No such thing as a free lunch!
However other Web 2.0 services (such as Facebook) use banner and image based adverts and therefore there could be some unsuitable advertising.
I recall looking at a video streaming service and the two I looked at Stickam and Ustream, I chose Ustream as the adverts on Stickam could potentially cause offence.
As with any website (or service) which depends on advertising, there is a risk that there may be unsuitable advertising content over which you have little or no control.
It’s all about making a compromise between paying for services through upfront costs or using free services which are funded through advertising. What should we do as institutions?
Personally I believe that the decision about which services we should use it being made for us, by our learners.
It would appear that I am not the only one fed up with Facebook applications. I do like the social and interactivity that Facebook provides, however I am fed up with the super pokes, the zombies, the quizzes and so on…
Mashable undertook a poll of their readers and the resounding response was people were fed up with Facebook.
The results were a fairly resounding “yes.” In our most active poll ever, only 13% of you said that you are “Not At All” fed up with the social network and are still enjoying it just as much as when you signed up.
Does this mean we are seeing the decline of Facebook (as we did with Friendster) and seeing an opening for a new social networking site?
Are you fed up with Facebook?
What is going to be the next “thing” that will replace Facebook?
BBC reports on how more than 25% of children between eight and eleven actively use social networking websites.
More than a quarter of eight to 11-year-olds in the UK have a profile on a social network, research shows.
Most sites, such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, set a minimum age of between 13 and 14 to create a profile but none actively enforce the age limit.
Ofcom’s survey of 5,000 adults and 3,000 children found 49% of those aged between eight and 17 have a profile.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this, by the time these children come to College or onto University, they will have been using and immersed into the world of social networking – unlikely I expect that they will be using Facebook or Bebo as who remembers Friendster?
However that they will be use to the concept of communicating socially online. I would also expect that they will also start to use these environments for working together on learning activities as well.
Obviously there are issues with putting personal and embarrassing information online as institutions and employers also have access to these sites and Google, but it would be a shame to focus on the negative aspects of these sites and forget the potential that these places have for learners to interact and engage with each other – in the same way they already do engage collaboratively for learning in the physical social areas within our institutions.
As I write this I am sitting in the cafe area of my college and there are learners here drinking coffee and talking, I know some are talking about non-learning stuff, but there are others who are talking and discussing what they just did or what they need to do.
We provide physical social environments for our learners to socialise and engage with each other, is it too much to ask to provide access to similar social environments which are online?
Originally written for e-Learning Stuff.
BBC Click reports on the evolution of social networking.
Recent reports of social networking’s demise may be slightly premature.
Sure, some users are completely fed up with receiving friends invites, being “bitten”, “poked” and indeed having sheep thrown at them.
And there has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to the larger social networks, Facebook and MySpace, between December 2007 and January this year.
But Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online which compiled the figures showing the decline, says: “The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It’s a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system.
I thought I would use this Hood 2.0 blog to mention and blog about various Web 2.0 sites and services that can be used for learning (or for just plain fun).
I will mention the classics such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, but also want to cover the less familar sites such as Wakoopa, Jaiku amongst others.
Watch this space.
