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Greetings,

Happy Reading for Today.

<Karen>

Have you been Swamped by Tweets?
U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt
BERKELEY _ When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.
Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.
The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.
Twitter, the micro-blogging service for cell phone users, allows messages up to 140 characters long. Twitter users can allow anyone they wish to join their network and receive all their messages. Buck has a large network, so Twitter gave him an instant link to the outside world.
But there are more mundane reasons to use this technology that's like group texting on the fly or push micro-moblogging (broadcasting miniblog posts on your phone to your contact list): keeping in touch with your family during the odd free moment on a business trip, spontaneously sharing your reaction to (and getting fast feedback on) a comment in a conference, sending a link or new contact info to a bunch of friends all at once, etc., etc.
Here's How Twitter Works" View of Twitter in a Wired blog and  "Can't live without Twitter? Don't believe the hype"

Videogame parental controls: New guide
The videogame ratings board and Parent Teacher Association have teamed up to help parents get a better handle on videogame safety. They've published a free parents' guide to both the ratings system and the parental controls on game consoles, including step-by-step instructions for the controls' settings on PLAYSTATION 3, the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and PSP, as well as the game controls in the Windows Vista operating system. You'll also find advice from "GamerDad" Andrew Bub about online gaming and a family discussion guide with talking points. "The booklets were distributed to all 26,000 PTAs, and are available in both English and Spanish on both the ESRB and PTA web sites.


Netglish is Textglish
If you want to learn texting lingo fast.
"Parental text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among younger generations. In the past two years, use of texting among people 45-54 increased 130%, the Post added, citing M:Metrics research - compared to a mere 41% increase among people 13-17.



The Future Of Libraries:

The future of reference, libraries, and everything has been influenced by:
Eric Alterman, in the New Yorker 3/31/2008, "Out of Print",
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman

Casey Bisson, "The Google Economy - The Wikipedia Entry" (August 29,2005),
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10773/wikipedia-the-google-economy

Jeffrey A. Scherer, FAIA - Principal in the firm of Meyer, Scherer and
Rockcastle, "Library Space: Is it the Last Frontier in the Digital Age?".
http://www.palinet.org/futures/malfuturesconference.aspx


JISC Libraries of the Future Web site:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/campaigns/librariesofthefuture.aspx

JISC Libraries of the Future Blog:
http://librariesofthefuture.jiscinvolve.org/



Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/science/25math.html



One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)
The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.
"They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night," Dr. Kaminski said. "It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information."


First look: Princeton researchers peek into deepest recesses of human brain



Invested in Community: Applied Ethnomusicology and Advocacy
2003 conference devoted to applied ethnomusicology view and hear on the web.
The website contains the conference program, abstracts, biographies, 
and videotapes of the presentations which may be viewed with your web 
browser. Presenters included applied ethnomusicologists inside and 
outside the academy as well as community scholars: Paul Austerlitz, 
Tom van Buren, Martha Ellen Davis, Judith Gray, Jonathan Kertzer, 
Wayne Newell, Svanibor Pettan, Anthony Seeger, Daniel Sheehy, Kjell 
Skyllstad, Blanche Sockabasin, Nick Spitzer, and Jeff Titon.




K-12 Teacher Suggested Use of Technology - What do you need to know?

1. Teachers and pre-service teachers should eliminate personal web pages such as "MySpace" and "FaceBook".  Any questionable behavior that may be alluded to on such pages--photographically or in text---can have negative repercussions upon one's career.

2. Do not give out your personal cell phone (or land line) number to students. A record of contact between you and a student leaves you open to a  potential "He said, she said" dilemma. In and of itself, it may be harmful.  However, in concert with other accusations, it will certainly aggravate, and not ameliorate, the situation. Leave your contact for students and parents to your school's phone and/or email.
 
3. Speaking of school email, remember that your use of your school computer is under the jurisdiction of your district.  They own the computer and can view any and all emails and computer usage records.  If you can access your school email account from home, your home computer could be commandeered if any official legal investigation would be launched against you that would involve school computer usage in any way. 
Bottom line on school computer/email usage: send no emails or view no sites that you wouldn't want your computer content viewed by members of your community on an electronic screen in your town square.
 
4. Teacher immorality cases have jeopardized even the most moral and professional of teachers. There is bad PR left behind after accusations were made by unscruplous students or parents against a perfectly innocent teacher.  Now, ignorant/inappropriate use of technology can bury your career,  regardless of your innocence or guilt on a criminal charge.

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