What is Pinterest?

For those that do not know and for those that do, this video is great and I just had to post it. And I am doing a workshop on web 2.0 later this week and will show this:

Vacation:)

Just and FYI to my readers. I am taking a few days off and am away with Becca and Kai:) I am not planning on posting to the blog until Sunday when my vacation ends.

Do you trust ‘information’ and ‘history’?

This is a very interesting tale of a professor whose class was designed to try and create a fake part of history via the web. They made up a person and a story about them. This is very fascinating and makes me wonder how much of history was made up? Are there things we believe that were simply the act of someone trying to trick us?

From the article:

“A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.

These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course Lying About the Past.

Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.”

Read the rest here: http://mashable.com/2012/05/16/fake-wikipedia-caught-by-reddit/

Vacation!

I will be on vacation for the next 48 hours so do not expect much activity on here. I am going to try very hard to avoid the internet, email, and news.

NYC passes social media law for K-12 Educators

I cannot say this is a bad law. While I wish it wasnt needed, unfortunately there are just so many problems that something like this needs to be in place. In fact, this probably just makes it easier for the teacher to say ‘no’ when their students ask because many students do ask their teachers to be facebook friends and it puts the teacher in an uncomfortable situation. Here is what the law says:

“NYC DOE Teachers cannot use social media accounts unaffiliated to the school on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Flickr to contact students regardless of the nature of the message.”

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/05/02/social-media-student-teacher-contact/

Now the good thing to point out here: These services can still be used as long as its for educational purposes. So the schools are not banning the tools. If they were, I would have a major problem with this. They are simply banning personal connections, which I believe is fine. I warn all of my K-12 pre-service to teachers to say ‘No’ to any student that requests them on facebook. Not that I think its bad in all cases but that it just avoids a potential future problem.

Here is a video on the topic:

Cloud Storage options…Which is best?

With many dropbox clones making their way into mainstream, I thought I would blog about each of them to show their strengths/weaknesses.

Dropbox – Works on mac, windows, iOS, Android

2GB – Free
50GB – $99 year
100GB – $199 year
Team option – need to contact for details

Box – Works on mac, windows, iOS, Android

5GB – Free
25GB – $9.99 month
50GB – $19.99 month

Microsoft Skydrive – will work on Windows and Mac and iOS

7GB Free
20GB – $10 a year
50GB – $25 a year
100GB – $50 a year

Google Drive – Works on mac, windows, iOS (coming soon), Android

5GB – Free
25GB – $2.49 month
100GB – $4.99 month
1TB – $49.99 month

BitCasa – Works on mac, windows, iOS, Android

Unlimited space for Free!

Apple’s i-Cloud – iOS, Mac, Windows

5GB – Free
10GB – $20 year
20GB – $40 year
50GB – $100 year

Amazon’s Cloud Drive – works on both mac and pc

5GB free
20GB – $20 a year
100GB – $100 a year
1000GB – $1000 a year

My recommendation: Dropbox or Box for ease of use. BitCasa for storage. Also, look out for deals from these services as they compete with each other. For instance, I got 50GB free for life from Box for downloading their Android app when it was first released.