Don’t mistake a tool for the goal

  • HP Facebook Research: “Rhythms of social interaction”

    Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have released a brief paper outlining some Facebook research entitled “Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network.” They worked with a huge data sets: “headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook…during a 26 month interval.” Wow! It’s a good paper and it’s relatively short…

  • Free Facebook Panel hosted by NCSU

    North Carolina State University’s Division of Student Affairs has announced that they are hosting a panel discussing “The Facebook Phenomenon” on January 30, 2007. They will be webcasting the panel and attendance, real or virtual, is free. The will be five panelists, four of whom are from NCSU and one of whom is from UNC.…

  • Students’ technical know-how and distance ed preferences

    Two relatively recent news items discuss college students’ technical know-how (actually, the report is more limited – more on that in a bit) and students’ and employers’ preferences for distance education. First, ETS recently released preliminary findings from their new Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment. The results aren’t surprising for anyone who has followed…

  • Recent copyright & fair use news

    Three recent items related to the issues of copyright, fair use, and how colleges and universities deal with and relate to those issues have appeared lately. The first item is a revision of a white paper released in 2003 entitled “Background Discussion of Copyright Law and Potential Liability for Students Engaged in P2P File Sharing…

  • Whither due process?

    We’re all struggling with copyright infringment and our students’ changing views of and relationship with copyright. Although there are still some who have not made the necessary and proper investment in the equipment, training, and skills necessary to deal with most of the bandwidth issues (with a tiny handful throwing in the towel completely and…

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