As technology advances, so do the threats posed to its users and their devices. One growing area of concern for colleges, highlighted in a report released today by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, is the increasing number of attacks on smartphones and their mobile Web browsers.

Smartphones’ small screen size and abundance of loosely monitored applications make them particularly vulnerable, says Mustaque Ahamad, co-author of the report,Emerging Cyber Threats.

“The resources we have on these devices are different from what you have on your desktop or laptop,” says Mr. Ahamad, who is the director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Small screens are a problem because they lead to reckless Web browsing. To free up screen space, the URL bar often disappears after the page loads, leaving the user unable to see the Web address after clicking a link. This makes it easier for a user to mistakenly land on a page containing viruses or other malware, including apps that can swipe user information.

Young people, particularly college students, Mr. Ahamad said, are at the forefront of smartphone users, possibly making them more susceptible to these threats. Because they are often more familiar with the devices, they may feel more comfortable than adults when taking risks with downloading apps and using the browser, he added.

This problem will become even more critical over the next few years as smartphone use increases.  Mobile Internet usage is expected to outpace desktop Internet usage by 2014, according to the report.

“The sense is that smartphones are becoming more powerful,” Mr. Ahamad said. “They are really computers now, not phones.”

In addition to smartphone vulnerabilities, the report noted two other emerging threats aimed at capturing and exploiting user data from any kind of computer. These were search poisoning, or using search-engine optimization to make malicious links appear higher in a search, and the use of stolen cyber data for marketing. Botnets, which are networks of computers enslaved to one remote computer that generally promotes malware, are also becoming more sophisticated as users continue to share more personal information over social-media networks, making it easier to capture this data and sell it to the highest bidder.

Bo Rotoloni, the director of the Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory at Georgia Tech and another author of the report, said that we can no longer assume our data is protected by the network security systems.

“Our best defense on the growing cyber war front,” Mr. Rotoloni said, “is found in cooperative education and awareness, best-of-breed tools and robust policy developed collaboratively by industry, academia, and government.”

 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/smartphones-present-growing-security-problems-on-campus-report-says/33627?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

iPad Revolution In Special Education

commentary by Shelby Till | September 13, 2011

Finally, the education system may have a solution that helps special needs students keep up with their classmates: the iPad! Even though the iPad and other tablets are fairly new in the technology world, it seems as though they are making great strides in helping people with disabilities, especially students. Each tablet is able to be customized to fit the needs of each person, no matter what their disability is. They are also lightweight, easy to transport and have a larger screen, which makes the information on the screen much more visible. A growing number of teachers and parents say that these tablets give the kids a sense of belonging in the large, ever-growing technological community. Apple reports that there are currently over 40,000 educational applications (apps) for students of all ages.

Many schools have been surprised by the results that the iPad has brought these children, so much so, that they are planning pilot programs for all of their students, not just those with special needs. The tablet is a great tool for students with autism and various communication disorders because they are able to use different apps to communicate their needs and interact with others.

“These children can access and enjoy everything a typically developing child would enjoy — they just have to access it differently,” says Gina Shulman, a social worker at the Lehmann Center, a special-needs school in Lakewood, N.J.

Students in Zeeland, Michigan are beginning the school year with 3,100 new iPads, as a result of a $5.3 million bond issue. $1.5million of the bond will be used for the tablets, says David Barry, superintendent of Zeeland Public Schools.

Kentucky’s Warren County public schools started the school year with 400 iPads. An additional 150 tablets have been purchased since, the district confirmed. This is after seeing how well the students have taken to the tablets.

Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, California, says the purchase of 840 iPads for students in their high school and middle school will cost about $546,000. The tablets; however, will eradicate the need for a number classroom materials. The school estimates to save over $60,000 in photocopy and textbook costs within the first year alone, headmaster Stephen Sharp says.

People are even beginning to create groups supporting the use of iPads for people with special needs. SNApps4Kids is a group of parents, therapists, teachers, administrators and experts sharing their experiences involving the Apple iPad, tables and all other touch devices to help special needs children of all ages. The group states that these devices are revolutionizing the lives of children, adults and seniors with special needs.

Jeremy Brown, a teacher for autistic elementary school students, is currently moderating the Facebook group iTeach Special Education, working together with other educators on the podcast EdCeptional and coauthoring the blog Teaching All Students. Even though the use of the iPad has not yet been approved in his school district, he considers the iPad a large supplemental technique of instruction, approximating 80 to 90 percent of his students with autism see great results when using these devices. Brown looks forward to his school district and others across the country utilizing iPads in the classroom.

08/31/2001 From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes this poignant piece on:

August 26, 2011Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age

By Cathy N. Davidson for the Chronicle

Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else. Because we can’t see what we can’t see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of the tosses among the people in white. I hadn’t seen the video back then, although it’s now a classic, featured on punk-style TV shows or YouTube versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The tape rolled, and everyone began counting.

Everyone except me. I’m dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.

When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who’d scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, “And who saw the gorilla?”

I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so. He’d set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness. Yes, there had been a trick, but he wasn’t the one who had played it on us. By concentrating so hard on counting, we had managed to miss the gorilla in the midst.

Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them.

It’s not easy to acknowledge that everything we’ve learned about how to pay attention means that we’ve been missing everything else. It’s not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we’ve been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.

Related Content

• Join Us for a Live Chat on How Brain Science Will Transform Education

I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that’s based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.

Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.

The Newsweek cover story proclaimed, “iPod, Therefore I Am.”

On MTV News, it was “Dude, I just got a free iPod!”

Peter Jennings smirked at the ABC-TV news audience, “Shakespeare on the iPod? Calculus on the iPod?”

And the staff of the Duke Chronicle was apoplectic: “The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom.”

What had those pundits so riled up? In 2003, we at Duke were approached by Apple about becoming one of six Apple Digital Campuses. Each college would choose a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus use for it. It would be a partnership of business and education, exploratory in all ways. We chose a flashy new music-listening gadget that young people loved but that baffled most adults.

When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were first-years or not).

This was an educational experiment without a syllabus. No lesson plan. No assessment matrix rigged to show that our investment had been a wise one. No assignment to count the basketballs. After all, as we knew from the science of attention, to direct attention in one way precluded all the other ways. If it were a reality show, we might have called it Project Classroom Makeover.

At the time, I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, a position equivalent to what in industry would be the R&D person, and I was among those responsible for cooking up the iPod experiment. In the world of technology, “crowdsourcing” means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem, but that term didn’t yet exist in 2003. It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread Internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, whether writing code (that’s how much of the open-source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) or creating a winning logo (like the “Birdie” design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks).

In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from “credentialing,” or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.

Once the pieces were in place, we decided to take our educational experiment one step further. By giving the iPods to first-year students, we ended up with a lot of angry sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They’d paid hefty private-university tuition, too! So we relented and said any student could have a free iPod—just so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it.

The real treasure trove was to be found in the students’ innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.

Interconnection was the part the students grasped before any of us did. Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate. In the School of the Environment, one class interviewed families in a North Carolina community concerned with lead paint in their homes and schools, commented on one another’s interviews, and together created an audio documentary that aired on local and regional radio stations and all over the Web. In the music department, students uploaded their own compositions to their iPods so their fellow students could listen and critique.

After eight years in Duke’s central administration, I was excited to take the methods we had gleaned from the iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet,” a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin’s inspiring bookThis Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), a kind of music-lover’s guide to the brain. Levitin argues that music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requiring different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing, and thus makes us think differently. Substitute the word “Internet” for “music,” and you’ve got the gist of my course.

I advertised the class widely, and I was delighted to look over the roster of the 18 students in the seminar and find more than 18 majors, minors, and certificates represented. I created a bare-bones suggested reading list that included, for example, articles in specialized journals likeCognition and Developmental Neuropsychology, pieces in popular magazines like Wired andScience, novels, and memoirs. There were lots of Web sites, too, of course, but I left the rest loose. This class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. “Participatory learning” is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another’s skills. “Cognitive surplus” is another used in the digital world for that “more than the sum of the parts” form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online.

We used a method that I call “collaboration by difference.” Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That’s what I was aiming for.

I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn’t understand that. Wikipedia is an educator’s fantasy, all the world’s knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to “stick” on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.

Given that I was teaching a class based on learning and the Internet, having my students blog was a no-brainer. I supplemented that with more traditionally structured academic writing, a term paper. When I had both samples in front of me, I discovered something curious. Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers. Term papers rolled in that were shot through with jargon, stilted diction, poor word choice, rambling thoughts, and even pretentious grammatical errors (such as the ungrammatical but proper-sounding use of “I” instead of “me” as an object of a preposition).

But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process? I hadn’t thought of that until I read my students’ lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if “research paper” is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?

Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University’s Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

The semester flew by, and we went wherever it took us. The objective was to get rid of a lot of the truisms about “the dumbest generation” and actually look at how new theories of the brain and of attention might help us understand how forms of thinking and collaborating online maximize brain activity. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively. To find examples, we spent time with a dance ensemble rehearsing a new piece, a jazz band improvising together, and teams of surgeons and computer programmers performing robotic surgery. We walked inside a monkey’s brain in a virtual-reality cave. In another virtual-reality environment, we found ourselves trembling, unable to step off what we knew was a two-inch drop, because it looked as if we were on a ledge over a deep canyon.

One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins’s ideas about the brain’s “memory-prediction framework.” My own interest is in how memories—reinforced behaviors from the past—predict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM’s from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation.

It was that kind of class.

“Jeff Hawkins thought it was odd that we decided to hold class when you weren’t there,” one student texted me. “Why wouldn’t we? That’s how it works in ‘This Is Your Brain on the Internet.’”

Project Classroom Makeover. I heard the pride. “Step aside, Prof Davidson: This is a university!”

“Nonsense!”

“Absurd!”

“A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Prof Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.”

Some days, it’s not easy being Prof Davidson.

What caused the ruckus in the blogosphere this time was a blog I posted on the Hastac, an online network, which I co-founded in 2002, dedicated to new forms of learning for a digital age. The post, “How to Crowdsource Grading,” proposed a form of assessment that I planned to use the next time I taught “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.”

It was my students’ fault, really. By the end of the course, I felt confident. I settled in with their evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow, a pedagogical shower of appreciation. And mostly that’s what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting.

Everything, that is, except the grading.

They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn’t get more 20th century than that.

The students signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out the critics were A+ students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong.

I was embarrassed that I had overlooked such a crucial part of our brain on the Internet. I contacted my students and said they’d made me rethink some very old habits. Unlearning. I promised I would rectify my mistake the next time I taught the course. I thought about my promise, came up with what seemed like a good system, then wrote about it in my blog.

My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn’t need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It’s all very adult.

But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers’ required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn’t pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work.

I also liked the idea of students’ each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That’s not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren’t we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn’t that another aspect of our brain on the Internet?

There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don’t believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will “count on the test.” As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it’s a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over.

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course—which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies—”This Is Your Brain on the Internet” was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning.

“I smell a reality TV show,” one critic sniffed.

That’s not such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I’ll try that next time I teach “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” They can air it right after Project Classroom Makeover.

Cathy N. Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. She served as the first vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at the university from 1998 until 2006, when she helped create the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. This essay is adapted from her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, just published by Viking.

09/01/2011 For how technology is being used for Information Literacy in a college in West Virginia see the Information Literacy Page 

08/31/2001 From the Chronicle of  Higher Education comes this poignant piece on:

August 26, 2011Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age

 By Cathy N. Davidson for the Chronicle

Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review

Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else. Because we can’t see what we can’t see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of the tosses among the people in white. I hadn’t seen the video back then, although it’s now a classic, featured on punk-style TV shows or YouTube versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The tape rolled, and everyone began counting. Everyone except me. I’m dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls. When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who’d scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, “And who saw the gorilla?” I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so. He’d set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness. Yes, there had been a trick, but he wasn’t the one who had played it on us. By concentrating so hard on counting, we had managed to miss the gorilla in the midst. Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them. It’s not easy to acknowledge that everything we’ve learned about how to pay attention means that we’ve been missing everything else. It’s not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we’ve been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.

Related Content

• Join Us for a Live Chat on How Brain Science Will Transform Education

I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that’s based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time. Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school. The Newsweek cover story proclaimed, “iPod, Therefore I Am.” On MTV News, it was “Dude, I just got a free iPod!” Peter Jennings smirked at the ABC-TV news audience, “Shakespeare on the iPod? Calculus on the iPod?” And the staff of the Duke Chronicle was apoplectic: “The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom.” What had those pundits so riled up? In 2003, we at Duke were approached by Apple about becoming one of six Apple Digital Campuses. Each college would choose a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus use for it. It would be a partnership of business and education, exploratory in all ways. We chose a flashy new music-listening gadget that young people loved but that baffled most adults. When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were first-years or not). This was an educational experiment without a syllabus. No lesson plan. No assessment matrix rigged to show that our investment had been a wise one. No assignment to count the basketballs. After all, as we knew from the science of attention, to direct attention in one way precluded all the other ways. If it were a reality show, we might have called it Project Classroom Makeover.   At the time, I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, a position equivalent to what in industry would be the R&D person, and I was among those responsible for cooking up the iPod experiment. In the world of technology, “crowdsourcing” means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem, but that term didn’t yet exist in 2003. It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread Internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, whether writing code (that’s how much of the open-source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) or creating a winning logo (like the “Birdie” design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks).   In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from “credentialing,” or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer. Once the pieces were in place, we decided to take our educational experiment one step further. By giving the iPods to first-year students, we ended up with a lot of angry sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They’d paid hefty private-university tuition, too! So we relented and said any student could have a free iPod—just so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it. The real treasure trove was to be found in the students’ innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure. Interconnection was the part the students grasped before any of us did. Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate. In the School of the Environment, one class interviewed families in a North Carolina community concerned with lead paint in their homes and schools, commented on one another’s interviews, and together created an audio documentary that aired on local and regional radio stations and all over the Web. In the music department, students uploaded their own compositions to their iPods so their fellow students could listen and critique. After eight years in Duke’s central administration, I was excited to take the methods we had gleaned from the iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet,” a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin’s inspiring bookThis Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), a kind of music-lover’s guide to the brain. Levitin argues that music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requiring different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing, and thus makes us think differently. Substitute the word “Internet” for “music,” and you’ve got the gist of my course. I advertised the class widely, and I was delighted to look over the roster of the 18 students in the seminar and find more than 18 majors, minors, and certificates represented. I created a bare-bones suggested reading list that included, for example, articles in specialized journals likeCognition and Developmental Neuropsychology, pieces in popular magazines like Wired andScience, novels, and memoirs. There were lots of Web sites, too, of course, but I left the rest loose. This class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. “Participatory learning” is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another’s skills. “Cognitive surplus” is another used in the digital world for that “more than the sum of the parts” form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online. We used a method that I call “collaboration by difference.” Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That’s what I was aiming for. I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn’t understand that. Wikipedia is an educator’s fantasy, all the world’s knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to “stick” on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper. Given that I was teaching a class based on learning and the Internet, having my students blog was a no-brainer. I supplemented that with more traditionally structured academic writing, a term paper. When I had both samples in front of me, I discovered something curious. Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers. Term papers rolled in that were shot through with jargon, stilted diction, poor word choice, rambling thoughts, and even pretentious grammatical errors (such as the ungrammatical but proper-sounding use of “I” instead of “me” as an object of a preposition). But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process? I hadn’t thought of that until I read my students’ lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if “research paper” is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University’s Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing. The semester flew by, and we went wherever it took us. The objective was to get rid of a lot of the truisms about “the dumbest generation” and actually look at how new theories of the brain and of attention might help us understand how forms of thinking and collaborating online maximize brain activity. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively. To find examples, we spent time with a dance ensemble rehearsing a new piece, a jazz band improvising together, and teams of surgeons and computer programmers performing robotic surgery. We walked inside a monkey’s brain in a virtual-reality cave. In another virtual-reality environment, we found ourselves trembling, unable to step off what we knew was a two-inch drop, because it looked as if we were on a ledge over a deep canyon. One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004),  a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins’s ideas about the brain’s “memory-prediction framework.” My own interest is in how memories—reinforced behaviors from the past—predict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM’s from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation. It was that kind of class. “Jeff Hawkins thought it was odd that we decided to hold class when you weren’t there,” one student texted me. “Why wouldn’t we? That’s how it works in ‘This Is Your Brain on the Internet.’” Project Classroom Makeover. I heard the pride. “Step aside, Prof Davidson: This is a university!”   “Nonsense!” “Absurd!” “A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Prof Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.” Some days, it’s not easy being Prof Davidson. What caused the ruckus in the blogosphere this time was a blog I posted on the Hastac, an online network, which I co-founded in 2002, dedicated to new forms of learning for a digital age. The post, “How to Crowdsource Grading,” proposed a form of assessment that I planned to use the next time I taught “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” It was my students’ fault, really. By the end of the course, I felt confident. I settled in with their evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow, a pedagogical shower of appreciation. And mostly that’s what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting. Everything, that is, except the grading. They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn’t get more 20th century than that. The students signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out the critics were A+ students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong. I was embarrassed that I had overlooked such a crucial part of our brain on the Internet. I contacted my students and said they’d made me rethink some very old habits. Unlearning. I promised I would rectify my mistake the next time I taught the course. I thought about my promise, came up with what seemed like a good system, then wrote about it in my blog. My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn’t need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It’s all very adult. But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers’ required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn’t pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work. I also liked the idea of students’ each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That’s not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren’t we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn’t that another aspect of our brain on the Internet? There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don’t believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will “count on the test.” As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it’s a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over. Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority. Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course—which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies—”This Is Your Brain on the Internet” was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning. “I smell a reality TV show,” one critic sniffed. That’s not such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I’ll try that next time I teach “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” They can air it right after Project Classroom Makeover. Cathy N. Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. She served as the first vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at the university from 1998 until 2006, when she helped create the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. This essay is adapted from her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, just published by Viking.

http://chronicle.com/article/Collaborative-Learning-for-the/128789/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

8/29/2011 An article about Spam and e-books from EduKindle eReaders for Educators

Book Spam: Seven Steps to Identification for Teachers and Students

August 22, 2011

There was a news story this summer that has been a long time in the making: SPAM hits the world of e-books. Anyone who has been following the Amazon Digital Text Platform since its beginnings has seen this coming a long way off. A search for a copy of Pride and Prejudice as recently as a few months ago brought up so many results that the average book buyer had no way of picking among them.

8/22/2011 From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes their annual report. This part of the report focuses on new technologies in Higher Education. 

Almanac of Higher Education 2011

College Tech Goes Mobile

                                                      Stuart Bradford for The Chronicle

8/19/2011 This website is about “marketing electronic resources“ “evidence of ways that libraries are marketing their electronic resources”  in which she gathers information together in one place to help libraries.  Although she essentially targets public libraries, academic libraries can garner information here as well.  Here are a few examples, more on the website

Google News search for library - July 13, 12:36 PM

Download

• Download the Bridge Material Type Icon Set (1.0)

What is included in the package

There are three directories included in the package:

1. gifs – this contains .gif files ready to be placed on web pages. At this point it contains two directories: 40x40_beige_bg and 40x40_white_bg.
2. psd – this contains Photoshop (.psd) files used to generate additional .gif files with the background color of your choice. At this point it contains one directory: 40×40.
3. ai – this contains the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files that have the vector art needed to create icons at different sizes or to make alterations to the icons.

How to use the package

• If your needs are met with one of the two included sets of gif files, you can simply unzip this package, place it somewhere on your web server, and point your catalog or repository at the appropriate images.
• If you need to change the wording (for localization, for example) or if you need to provide a different background color for the icons, you can open up the .psd files and add new layers for your text or background colors, and then save for web into a new directory in the package. The naming convention for directories is this: [WIDTH]x[HEIGHT]_[BACKGROUNDCOLOR]_[TWOLETTERLANGUAGECODE] (e.g. 40x40_beige_en)
• If you need to change the size of the icons, create a new set of .psd files in the psd directory with the dimensions of the icons as the directory name (e.g. 40×40). Create new .psd files and bring the .ai files in at the new dimensions.
• If you want to create new icons for the set, you can either create them from scratch in your vector editing program, or work from elements in the icon set. It is important that you only use images that are available to creative commons licensing or that you have copyright on and can legally contribute to the project.

Providing Attribution

If you use this set, you must provide attribution on your site. An example of attribution is provided here:

• Material type icons by the Bridge Material Type Icons Project

Contributing back to the project

There is no legal requirement to contribute back to the Bridge Material Icon Set Project. There is, however, a legal requirement to make any derivative works available under the same license. The simplest way to do this is to contribute any alterations or additions to the icon set back to the project. This method will make your changes part of the standard distribution of the icon set. To contribute back to the project, submit your changes and/or new icons to Matt Ryan: mryan [at] carleton [dot] edu.

News and discussion regarding the project

To find out when the icon set is updated or to participate in discussion of future directions for this project, join the bridge-icons email list.

Credits

The core of the Bridge Material Type Icon Set was created by Matt Ryan during the winter of 2005-2006, with able assistance in testing and evaluating the icons from the members of the Bridge Consortium’s Public Access Working Group.

License

The Bridge Material Type Icon Set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License by the Bridge Consortium of Carleton College and St. Olaf College.

• A human-readable summary of this license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ and in the file license.txt that accompanies this package
• A legal representation of this license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode and in the file license.txt that accompanies this package

The Bridge Consortium of Carleton College and St. Olaf College may be contacted at: Bridge Public Access Working Group Gould Library Carleton College 1 N College St Northfield, MN 55057

Aaron Swartz is accused of downloading over four million articles from JSTOR.

By David Glenn Cambridge, Mass. This past April in Switzerland, Lawrence Lessig gave an impassioned lecture denouncing publishers’ paywalls, which charge fees to read scholarly research, thus blocking most people from access. It was a familiar theme for Mr. Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who is one of the world’s most outspoken critics of intellectual-property laws. But in this speech he gave special attention to JSTOR, a not-for-profit journal archive. He cited a tweet from a scholar who called JSTOR “morally offensive” for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly. The JSTOR archive is not usually cast as a leading villain by open-access advocates. But Mr. Lessig surely knew in April something that his Swiss audience did not: Aaron Swartz—a friend and former Harvard colleague of Mr. Lessig’s—was under investigation for misappropriating more than 4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR. On July 19, exactly three months after Mr. Lessig’s speech, federal prosecutors unsealed anindictment charging that Mr. Swartz had abused computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and disrupted JSTOR’s servers. If convicted on all counts, Mr. Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison. The arrest instantly became a new focal point in the long-running debate about how to restructure scholarly publishing. But some people in Cambridge are also asking questions about whether Harvard, which employed Mr. Swartz, and MIT, where his alleged misdeeds took place, should have done more to prevent the episode from spiraling into a major federal prosecution. Mr. Swartz’s case has become a cause célèbre among hundreds of programmers, scholars, and activists who have worked with him during the last decade. (Mr. Swartz came to prominence in 2000, when, at the age of 13, he helped write an early version of RSS, a hugely popular Web-syndication format that feeds content into services like Google Reader.) These activists say the 35-year sentence looming over Mr. Swartz is a prime example of the irrationality and cruelty of the existing copyright regime. If Mr. Swartz abused his guest privileges on MIT’s network, they say, the matter should have been settled as a civil dispute, not handed over to federal law enforcement. “MIT has a duty to get down on its knees and beg that this prosecution be dropped,” says Richard M. Stallman, a Boston-based programmer and prominent “free culture” advocate who attended graduate school at MIT in the 1970s. But others say Mr. Swartz appears to have acted recklessly in this episode, putting his liberty and his promising career at risk while achieving nothing on behalf of open access. “If the indictment is accurate, this behavior seems to have been illegal, immoral, and ineffective,” says Stuart M. Shieber, the director of Harvard’s Office of Scholarly Communication. Mr. Shieber believes the current structure of scholarly publishing is unsustainable and does not serve the public well, but he says he cannot imagine how Mr. Swartz’s exploit could have helped the situation.

Caught in a Closet

In Cambridge last week, friends and acquaintances of Mr. Swartz said they were horrified by the thought that he might spend three decades in prison. But they said they had no clear idea what he might have been up to at MIT. “I knew nothing about this until I read about the indictment,” says John H. Summers, a historian and former Harvard lecturer who was recently named editor of The Baffler, an independent journal of cultural criticism. Mr. Swartz volunteered to redesign the magazine’s Web site and has written an essay on “content farming” for the forthcoming issue. The two men had met several times over the last three months, but Mr. Summers said Mr. Swartz betrayed no sign that he was under the shadow of a federal grand jury. “He has a very cool temperament,” Mr. Summers says. But Mr. Swartz had known he was in trouble since January 6, when he was arrested after being spotted removing a laptop from a wiring closet in the basement of MIT’s Building 16, where he had allegedly tapped directly into the core of MIT’s network in order to avoid JSTOR’s security measures. That basement, which lies underneath the university’s anthropology department, is a chilly, cement service corridor that most MIT students probably never see. What exactly was Mr. Swartz doing here last fall? He and his lawyer did not reply to requests for interviews, and no one else has come forward with direct knowledge of his project. Likewise, officials at MIT declined multiple requests for comment about how Mr. Swartz’s downloading was detected and how the university handled the affair. Most discussions of the case now center on two documents: the federal indictment and a police report that was published last week byWired.The purported facts in those documents have not yet been contested in court. But if they are broadly accurate, the story seems to have gone like this: Last fall, Mr. Swartz began an appointment as a research fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which Mr. Lessig directs. (The two first crossed paths in 2002, when, at the age of 15, Mr. Swartz was hired as a programmer for Creative Commons, a project Mr. Lessig started to simplify copyright.) Mr. Swartz was brought to the Safra Center to study questions of open government, but he spent some of his free time on other matters. Beginning in late September, according to the indictment, Mr. Swartz used automated software to download huge quantities of papers from JSTOR, far exceeding the limits imposed by JSTOR’s terms of service. Though he had access to JSTOR at his Harvard office, Mr. Swartz carried on this activity two miles away at MIT, where he had no affiliation. He logged onto MIT’s guest network under the name “Gary Host,” which collapses to “ghost” as a username. Mr. Swartz’s downloading was detected by JSTOR within 48 hours, and the service began to block an increasing range of IP addresses at MIT. The university then tried to obstruct Mr. Swartz’s laptop specifically, by barring the Media Access Control address, or MAC address, that the network had assigned to his computer. But Mr. Swartz managed to evade all those measures. On October 9, when he was simultaneously using two computers to download JSTOR material, the “pace was so fast that it brought down some of JSTOR’s computer servers,” according to the indictment. For several days thereafter, JSTOR cut off access to MIT’s entire network. Heidi McGregor, a spokesperson for Ithaka, the nonprofit education-technology foundation that merged with JSTOR in 2009, says such events have been extremely rare in JSTOR’s history. Citing the continuing criminal case, she declined to clarify exactly how long MIT was suspended or why JSTOR eventually was willing to restore the university’s access. She also declined to explain whether the server failures on October 9 affected international access to JSTOR. Even after the October disruption to the university, Mr. Swartz persisted. At some point in November, the indictment charges, he plugged his laptop directly into the basement wiring closet at MIT. He allegedly used external hard drives to store his JSTOR downloads, periodically visiting the wiring closet to pick up his harvest. On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university’s technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam. The camera caught Mr. Swartz visiting the closet that afternoon, concealing his face with a bicycle helmet. Two days later, he was spotted again as he removed his laptop from the closet, and this time he was arrested as he rode his bicycle across campus. (On top of the federal charges that were unsealed on July 19, Mr. Swartz faces a state charge of felony breaking and entering. Not long after the January arrest, he left his fellowship at the Safra Center.) According to Ms. McGregor, JSTOR believes it has recovered all of the millions of files that Mr. Swartz downloaded. The two parties signed a settlement in which Mr. Swartz assured them that he had not posted the files online or made copies for anyone else. She adds that JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR’s.

Motivations for ‘Hacktivism’

Why did Mr. Swartz go to such lengths? He has a longstanding interest in making large-scale data sets available for public analysis. He has pursued that goal through a Web site known as theinfo.org, and in a well-publicized 2008 project, he downloaded an enormous amount of data from the federal courts’ PACER system. That episode earned him an FBI file, but he was not arrested. What was his goal at MIT? Had he been planning to use the huge cache of JSTOR data to analyze corporations’ financial support for scholarly research? That seems plausible, as he had helped a friend do a similar study of academic legal research in 2008. Had he planned to create a public database of information about the JSTOR papers, as he and his colleagues at the Open Library project have done with books? Or had he actually planned to feed the full text of the JSTOR library into file-sharing sites? A 2008 “Guerilla Open Access” manifesto written by Mr. Swartz proclaimed, “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. … We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.” Mr. Shieber, of Harvard, says the wholesale file-sharing scenario seems most plausible to him, assuming that the basic facts in the indictment are correct. If Mr. Swartz had wanted to look at corporate financial support, Mr. Shieber says, he probably would have examined a much smaller range of JSTOR data—say, economics papers published since 1975. Mr. Summers, who has spoken extensively with Mr. Swartz since the arrest, says he believes his intention was to analyze the structure of academic research, not to commit wholesale copyright violations. In any case, Mr. Summers says, it is absurd for the U.S. attorney to treat Mr. Swartz’s actions as analogous to stealing cars. “The idea that we should pay no attention to context and motive—that’s just a dereliction of intellectual duty,” Mr. Summers says. (The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.) At MIT, meanwhile, faculty members are debating whether the university was too quick to bring in federal authorities. “What Aaron Swartz did was a clear violation of the rules and protocols of the library and the community,” says Christopher Capozzola, an associate professor of history and acting associate dean of the school of humanities, arts, and social sciences. “But the penalties in this case, and the sources of those penalties, are really remarkable. These penalties really go against MIT’s culture of breaking down barriers.” Mr. Stallman, the programmer and MIT alumnus, says he is mystified by the police report’s suggestion that Secret Service agents were brought in just hours after the laptop was discovered. “At best—if they didn’t know what the laptop was doing—it was an overreaction,” he says. “Surely MIT people can examine a laptop without police help.” Over in Cambridge at Harvard, Mr. Lessig declined multiple requests for an interview. Ms. McGregor, of JSTOR, said her colleagues were dismayed by his April lecture in Switzerland. Mr. Lessig did not give enough credit to JSTOR’s efforts to provide low-cost access to universities in developing countries, she said. And the $20 price for the California Historical Society paper, she said, was not JSTOR’s choice. The approximately 800 publishers that participate in the JSTOR system decide individually how much they will charge for access for people who are not logging in from institutions with JSTOR subscriptions. One such person is Mr. Summers. He has taught at Harvard and at Boston College, but he presently has no academic affiliation with either institution. Two of his scholarly papers are available at JSTOR; if you’re logging in from outside an affiliated university, it will cost you $38 to buy them. “What Aaron’s case begs us to remember is that universities are supposed to be public, not-for-profit institutions,” Mr. Summers says. “They owe a standing moral debt to the public.” Michael F. McElroy, Zuma Press, Newscom

The Dangers of HTML5: WebSockets and Stable Standards

New HTML5 technologies like WebSockets offer some amazing new opportunities for Web developers. But they also show how implementing unstable standards may cause more harm to a site than the benefits of the technology. What is the role of browsers and how should developers plan for when developing with HTML5?

Internet Explorer 6: What Have We Learned?

IE6 shipped more than 10 years ago, but its non-standard implementation of the shifting standards of 2001 still haunts today’s developers. As the Web shifts to HTML5, and new versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome debut, have we learned the lessons of IE6?

Crank Up the Volume with HTML5 Music

With HTML5, music is making a comeback on the Web. Create amazing music site experiences where adding an audio file is as simple as inserting an image and users have more pause and play music outside a browser. The introduction of the <audio> tag eliminates the need for external music players, allowing for true integration of sound in your website.

Dojo.behavior: Write Modularized HTML Document Event Handling

The dojo.behavior module provides a simple and lightweight mechanism for listening to HTML document events. Find out what makes dojo.behavior one of the best event handling mechanisms around.

The Dojo Publish/Subscribe Event Mechanism

Learn how to use the Dojo Toolkit’s versatile ContentPane widget to load dynamic content into your Web pages.

Post a Message on a Facebook Wall with JavaScript

Allowing your visitors to easily post links to your website on Facebook can really boost traffic.

Loading Dynamic HTML Content Using the Dijit ContentPane

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Optimize Your Web Page with CSS Sprites

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Using with the jQuery Globalization Plugin in ASP.NET

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June 27, 2011 By Josh Keller San Francisco Many colleges have published iPhone apps in the last few years that allow people to get campus news, maps, and other information on Apple’s popular smartphones. Then some colleges found they also needed to develop a version for phones running Google’s competing Android system. And some built apps for BlackBerrys as well. But at least a few colleges are now reconsidering the wisdom and the expense of building all those mobile apps. As the mobile Internet continues to grow at an astounding pace, those colleges are shifting their attention from stand-alone applications that can be downloaded from an app store to mobile-optimized versions of their Web sites. Multiple types of smartphones have become very popular, making mobile Web sites that work on all phones more critical.   Think m.college.edu, not iCollege. The distinction between a mobile Web site and a mobile app might seem technical. But which one colleges prioritize—and some are pursuing both—will affect how much they spend on development, how effective their offerings will be, and how much they rely on vendors like Blackboard. The University of California at San Diego, one of the first public universities to offer a mobile application, will end its mobile-application contract with Blackboard next year, according to Brett Pollak, director of the campus Web office. Instead, the college will soon start directing all mobile users to a version of its Web site, m.ucsd.edu. Several new open-source software projects seek to help colleges create mobile Web sites, contrasting with a previous wave of software that helped them build mobile apps. One of those projects, from a team at the University of California at Los Angeles, has already been adopted at four University of California campuses, including UCLA. College officials who favor mobile Web sites say that developing apps is getting too expensive. It can require creating and updating multiple versions of a single program, one for iPhones and another for Android phones, for instance. By contrast, a single mobile Web site can work with all kinds of devices, potentially lowering development costs. Last month developers at the University of California estimated, using a rough calculation, that the system will save about $1-million in staff time each year by using UCLA’s mobile framework rather than trying to build downloadable applications. Bradley C. Wheeler, chief information officer at Indiana University, argues that offering mobile campus services solely through a stand-alone application is becoming unsustainable. “We can declare a lot of victory for the first chapter in mobile,” says Mr. Wheeler, who is helping to start another Web-focused framework, Kuali Mobility Enterprise.“But there’s a lot of what we learned in the first chapter that will not scale in the next chapter.”

A ‘Natural Trend’

Releasing a mobile application requires getting all departments involved to release their data and stick to the same schedule, which can be a challenge, says William Allison, director of campus technology services at the University of California at Berkeley. Mobile Web sites can be produced in a way that more closely mirrors the decentralized structure of most colleges’ technical staff, he says. “It’s actually a paradigm that works well in a university,” Mr. Allison says. “We’re not a top-down type of organization.” The conclusions of those colleges are far from universal, and most colleges are not exactly pouring resources into building mobile Web sites. Research by David Olsen at West Virginia University shows that roughly 15 percent of colleges have a top-level Web site designed for mobile devices, up from roughly 9 percent in February. Some observers, including Mr. Olsen, believe that colleges will actually need both mobile formats. “Guess what, you’re going to be doing everything, you’re going to be supporting everything, and that’s the nature of mobile,” Mr. Olsen says. Supporters of mobile applications point out that mobile Web sites have limitations of their own. Many look less polished than their native cousins, and they can’t typically coordinate with all of the features of a mobile device, such as a camera. They also cannot be promoted in popular online marketplaces like Apple’s App Store. Kayvon Beykpour, vice president of Blackboard Mobile, says the focus on mobile Web sites is an “obvious, natural trend” as more colleges recognize the importance of reaching people on mobile platforms. “It so happens that mobile Web is the most economical,” he says. “It’s clearly the easiest way to do it.” But Mr. Beykpour says mobile applications are worth it. Colleges without one will miss reaching a critical group of tech-savvy users who “10 times out of 10″ prefer downloading an application over using a mobile Web site, which serves the “everyone-else bracket,” he says. Mobile applications can also take advantage of the latest features of smartphones and tablets. “That’s where we think the excitement is, that’s where we think the innovation is,” he says. For instance, he says, Blackboard plans to release an augmented-reality application in the fall to help people discover interesting places on college campuses. When users point their phones’ cameras at a campus landmark, for instance, the application will display information about the landmark on their screens. “You can’t do that stuff on the Web,” Mr. Beykpour says. “You just can’t.”

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Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories

Technology nowadays is supposed to be disruptive—in a good way— so let it disrupt your summer vacation. Enrich it, we mean, with these provocative books. Last grades submitted? Last commencement handshake done? Take a little time to find out what’s in store next year and after that: Social media might rot students’ brains—or create a cognitive surplus that improves society; hackers’ pranks have definitely improved aspects of MIT; and Twitter may help repressive regimes more than it aids democracy activists. Also watch a video in which a professor outlines the future of smarter robots. Most of these are available in various e-book formats as well as print, so toss your tablet computer or smartphone into the beach bag along with the flip-flops. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (Basic Books). You’re not as good at multitasking as you think. That’s a key take-away from the latest book by Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who blends personal observations with case studies from her research on how children, teenagers, and elderly people interact with various gadgets. She’s not antitechnology—her once-gushing views on virtual identity landed her on the cover of Wired magazine in the 1990s, as outlined in a Chronicle profile this year. In her new book, she argues that we’re so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we’re neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it’s not too late to make some “corrections” to our high-tech habits. It’s time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.—Jeffrey R. Young Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators(Penguin). The technology enthusiast Clay Shirky argues for the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television. Critics have argued that this view fails to take into account yet more opportunities for passive entertainment, but Mr. Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program who was featured last year in The Chronicle, points to examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that “the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways.” —Ben Wieder The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Stanford University’s YouTube channel). The dream of creating general-purpose robot helpers is back! Since he was a kid, Andrew Ng has wanted to build smart robots. Soon after becoming a computer-science professor at Stanford University, though, he advised his grad students that making all-purpose thinking machines was just too hard. But now Mr. Ng has had a breakthrough that renewed his faith in his childhood dream. In a short talk he delivered last month at a Stanford conference on new ideas, he showed off an algorithm that can be applied to different kinds of problems, so that the same algorithm can do speech recognition and also help a robot make sense of images it sees through its camera eyes. C-3PO is looking more realistic by the minute. The talk is available on Stanford’s YouTube channel, proving that some of the newest academic ideas these days can be found in video form rather than text. —Jeffrey R. Young In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Simon & Schuster)and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press). The search to determine how Google came to be and how it has shaped society gets two new entries this year. For In the Plex, Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired, interviewed hundreds of Google employees past and present, including top management—and ate countless meals at the company’s Mountain View burrito joint—to document how Google grew from humble origins, in a garage belonging to friends of the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to its current ubiquity. The implications form the subject of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Googlization of Everything. Mr. Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and frequent contributor to The Chronicle Review, reminds readers that they aren’t consumers of Google’s offerings. Rather, their use of Google’s services is the product it sells to advertisers. Both books look at the continuing evolution of the Google Books settlement as a key test of how far the company’s reach could extend and a sign of how the perception of Google has changed from that of scrappy upstart with a clever motto, “Don’t be evil,” to global behemoth accused by some of being just that. —Ben Wieder The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf). Is the Internet on its way to getting monopolized? That question underlies Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. The eccentric Columbia Law School professor—he’s known to dress up as a blue bear at the annual Burning Man festival—recounts how ruthless companies consolidated their power over earlier information industries like the telephone, radio, and film. So which tech giant seems likely to grab control of the net? Let’s just say you probably won’t see Steve Jobs reading Mr. Wu’s book on the beach this summer. —Marc Parry Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity Press). To judge by the sometimes breathless news stories about publishing in the digital age, it feels like we’re perpetually on the verge of a tipping point, when e-books will overtake print books as a source of revenue for publishers. John B. Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, analyzes the inner workings of the contemporary trade-publishing industry. (He did the same for scholarly publishing in an earlier work, Books in the Digital Age.) Mr. Thompson examines the roles played by agents, editors, and authors as well as differences among small, medium, and large publishing operations, and he probes under the surface of the great digital shift. We’re too hung up on the form of the book, he argues: “A revolution has taken place in publishing, but it is a revolution in the process rather than a revolution in the product.“—Jennifer Howard

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs). Sure, the 2009 rebellion in Iran was on Twitter. The uprising in Lebanon and pro-democracy movements in Russia and China also made Facebook and even old-fashioned e-mail. But technology is actually doing far more to bolster authoritarian regimes than to overturn them, writes Evgeny Morozov in this sharp reality check on the media-fueled notion that information is making everybody free. Mr. Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, points out that the Iranian government posted “most wanted” pictures of protesters on the Web, leading to several arrests. The Muslim Brotherhood blogs actively in Egypt. And China pays people to make pro-authority statements on the Internet, paying a few cents for each endorsement. The Twitter revolution, in this book, is “overblown and completely unsubstantiated rhetoric.”—Josh Fischman Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (MIT Press). The word “hacking” is said to have originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sometimes referring to students’ ingenious pranks involving the university’s iconic buildings. The tradition of engineering-related pranks on the campus is celebrated in this well-illustrated coffee-table book by T.F. Peterson (described as “MIT historian” but actually a nom de plume hack), just released in an updated edition. One of the glossy photos shows a fire truck placed on campus’s Great Dome in 2006 to commemorate the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001. MIT even employs a team of security officials charged with removing hacks, though they agree to let the most clever and harmless stunts stay around for a few days. —Jeffrey R. Young The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton). Multimedia—dangerous! Online research—depthless! Classroom screens—dubious! If you want a contrarian take on technology, Nicholas Carr is your man. In The Shallows, just out in paperback, the Colorado-based author warns that the Internet is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think. And that has big consequences for teaching, he told The Chronicle last year: “The assumption that the more media, the more messaging, the more social networking you can bring in will lead to better educational outcomes is not only dubious but in many cases is probably just wrong.”—Marc Parry

Things Every Computer Geek Should Know.

The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject. A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. If you’re that type of person and are looking for a few extra skills to pick up, or if you’re a newbie aiming to get a handhold on the honor that is geekhood, read on to find out what skills you need to know.

How to become a real computer Geek?

Little known to most, there are many benefits to being a computer geek. In our high-tech society, being a computer guru can be one of the most high paying jobs available and they are highly in demand, especially if you want to become a network administrator. By tapping into your inner geek, you can develop a most useful skill that will be sure to pay off later in life. You may get the answer here: http://www.aagneyam.com/blog/?p=1059

The Meaning of Technical Acronyms

• USB – Universal Serial Bus
• GPU – Graphics Processing Unit
• CPU – Central Processing Unit
• ATA- AT Attachment (AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI)
• SATA – Serial ATA
• HTML – Hyper-text Markup Language
• HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• FTP – File Transfer Protocol
• P2P -  peer to peer

1. Default Password List

One of the best list of default passwords. http://www.searchlores.org/defpasslist1.htm 1A. Usability of passwordshttp://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability

2. A bit, about How to hack some common gadgets.

If you rolled your eyes here, that is a good thing. If not, you have many things to learn, young padawan. It’s amazing how few people know how to do this. If you’re unsure, hit up the link below to find out how: http://www.aagneyam.com/blog/?cat=708

3. Identify Keyloggers

Internet cafes are the most likely place you’ll find them, followed by library, perhaps, and maybe even you own house if you’ve some unscrupulous friends/family. Identity theft groups warn about keyloggers and advocate checking out the keyboard yourself before continuing. Can you identify a keylogger, however, if one is plugged into the back of the system? Here’s what one looks like: Hit up this link for excellent info on keyloggers on public computers and how to protect yourself: ,http://www.ghacks.net/2007/06/28/how-to-defeat-most-keyloggers-on-public-computers/

4. Surf the Web Anonymously

We won’t make any assumptions about why you may need this particular skill, but the fact remains that every geek should know how to traverse the Internet with the highest amount of security possible. Aside from the safest method–which is using a connection that is not yours–you will need the ultimate in proxies…Tor. Tor is an onion-routing system which makes it ‘impossible’ for someone to find out who you actually are.

5. Bypass a Computer Password on All Major Operating Systems

Obviously you shouldn’t use this to gain unlawful access to a computer. If you’re a geek, however, you’ll eventually end up in a situation where someone forgets their password, you acquire a machine with an operating system you cannot access, or similar situation. See this tutorial for info on how to bypass the password on the three major operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux.http://www.joetech.com/2009/01/29/how-to-crack-the-account-password-on-any-operating-system/

6. Find a Users IP Address on AIM

Knowing someones IP address is actually pretty useless in this case, but most people don’t realize that. If someone is harassing you via AIM and you can’t get them to stop, discovering their IP and sending it to them–with a nicely worded threat of law enforcement involvement should they not stop–is likely enough to send them scamping away with tail between legs.http://www.ehow.com/how_5529416_someones-ip-address-aim-chat.html

7. Hide a File Behind a JPEG

So you need a nice spot to hide your blackmail personal files. You could, of course, bury them deeply within a series of random, useless folders, but there’s always the chance of them being discovered. A password protected RAR is the best choice, but it’s a bit obvious despite the most boring title you could give it. A sneaky person would hide the important file behind a completely random and boring family reunion photo, where no person in their right mind would shift through. http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/hide-file-in-picture/

8. Crack a Wifi Password

This is one of those things you don’t need to do (hopefully), but that you still need to know just for the sake of knowledge. A strong WPA password is very secure, but most people don’t want to bother learning a convoluted series of letters, numbers, and symbols, instead opting for random everyday words. A good overall tutorial on wifi and cracking can be found here:http://www.aagneyam.com/blog/?p=623

9. Monitor Network Traffic

The Internet is a vast place with a bit of everything. Whether you’re curious about what your roommate is downloading, your kid is getting into, or any leeches living around you who’ve unscrupulously breached your wifi, knowing how to analyze network traffic is an invaluable skill. Here is a list of dozens of network analyzers, as well as some general info to get you started:http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html

10. Recover Master Boot Record

A virus or other problem can lead to an MBR error, which will make it impossible to access install. Many users would simply become frustrated and reinstall, but not you! Every geek should know how to recover the master book record. Here is an excellent guide to get started: http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

11. Retrieve Data off Hard Drive

There will come some point in your life when a hard drive craps out sans warning. It could be due to a number of reasons–physical damage, file corruption, etc. There are computer service centers that would be happy to extract the data for a (hefty) fee; a true geek would be the one working at center, not taking his or her drive there. To find out how to retrieve data off a damaged hard drive, read here: http://laptoplogic.com/resources/5-ways-to-retrieve-data-off-a-crashed-hard-drive

12. Load Rockbox onto an MP3 Player

The firmware that comes on your average mp3 player is intended for those who are scared of advanced features; often, the only audio settings available are a few prearranged EQs. If you’re an audiophile–or simply frustrated with the lack of control over your music settings–Rockbox is the firmware for you. Open source and free, it can be installed on several different types of players and enables full control over what you listen to. http://rockbox.org

13. Unbrick a Smartphone

No geek can resist the allure of flashing the newest beta firmware onto their shiny smartphone. The byproduct of that is sometimes a bricked phone, which would leave many sobbing into their pillow at night. To avoid rendering your $400 gadget into a door stopper, learn the fine art of unbricking and then flash away. As the method used to fix a phone will vary, this is the best place to start looking for answers: http://www.howardforums.com/

14. Replace a Laptop Keyboard

Keyboards get gummy after awhile. If you use yours a lot (aka: all day), then you probably eat over it at some point. Crumbs get into the keys and things are sticking, and before you know it, you need a new keyboard. http://www.refurbished-laptop-guide.com/how-to-remove-a-laptop-keyboard.html

15. Rip Streaming Videos

Streaming videos are officially in vogue. We’re not going to make any assumptions about what type of videos you are streaming and may want to keep, but no matter what it is, any geek could rip them while sipping a Red Bull and watching the latest episode of BSG. Here’s a hint to get you started: http://applian.com/download-videos/

16. Strip Windows DRM

DRM is incredibly annoying. With many online stores now offering DRM-free mp3 audio files, it would seem it’s not as big of an issue as it used to be. That is not not the case, however, with all videos bearing a DRM as well as music of a higher-quality than MP3. Stripping Windows DRM is not legal. If you’re a geek, your probably don’t care: http://undrm.info/remove-DRM-protection/FairUse4WM-freeware-DRM-removal-Windows-software-Strip-copy-protection-from-WMV-ASF-WMA-Windows-Media-Player.htm

17. Homebrew Hack Game Systems

Gaming consoles are notorious for having features you can’t use simply because the manufacturer decided to lock them down. As a geek, you can’t just be satisfied with the features they decided to give you. No, you have to crack that case open and take a peek inside. Every geek should know how to homebrew hack their system and unlock it’s full potential.

18. Find a Website IP Address Without Web/Command Prompt Access

Some school admins think they’re being sneaky when they lock down the command prompt and block all major IP search websites and block all the websites you actually want to visit. Of course, that is child’s play for any geek. First, to get a new command prompt, open Notepad and type: command.com. Then, save as “cmd.bat”. You now have a command prompt. Now, open the command prompt and type “ping http://www.website.com/” to find the IP address of that website. Enter the website into the browser and you will officially have impressed all your friends.

19. Bypass School or Work Website Blocks

What is a horrific situation for an average computer user is a simple irritation for an everyday geek. To bypass a website block/filter, simply enter that websites IP address in instead of the actual site address. ref. no 18 in this post.

20. Screw with Wifi Leeches

Nobody likes a wifi leech. At best, they’re simply using up your valuable bandwidth. At the worst–and far more likely, they’re stealing your identity and watching your activities. After watching your network and identifying the leech, use this trick to flip their browser upside down and let them know you don’t appreciate the intrusion. http://tech.nocr.at/hacking-security/baffle-wifi-leeches-with-an-upside-down-ternet-2/

21. Hexadecimal and Binary Number Systems

Everyone knows the normal, everyday digit system used. It takes a special–possibly psychotic person–to also know hexadecimal and binary number systems. Here is an excellent interactive tutorial on learning the two systems: http://www.wisc-online.com/objects/index_tj.asp?objID=DIG1102

22. How to Hot Wire a Car

If your family always turns to you any time their computer hiccups, their DVD player needs fixed, or their home security system doesn’t activate, it’s only a matter of time before someone asks you how to hot wire a car. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to answer them? To learn this unique skill, read here: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Hot_Wire_Your_Car

23. Increase Wifi Range

With so many small portable gadgets gaining more and more sophisticated web browsers, in addition to gaming systems like the PSP and DS, getting the most use out of your wifi is practically a geek necessity. Here is a good guide on extending your wifi’s range:http://www.mavromatic.com/archives/000451

24. Carrying a Computer Cleaning Arsenal on Your USB Drive

A good geek prepares for their friends stupidity. No matter how many times you tell them to stop downloading porn, they keep doing it until their machine is so infected it can’t drag itself into a grave. An arsenal of portable malware cleaners, a portable task manager, anti-virus, etc, will make those impromptu purging sessions all the easier.

25. Running an Operating System from a USB Thumb Drive

Most people don’t even understand what the magical operating system is. As a geek, you should transcend that basic knowledge and have a small operating system on your thumb drive handy for those times you need computer access but don’t know the password to a nearby computer. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

26. Understand What “There’s no Place Like 127.0.0.1″ Means

A lot of geeks wear this shirt as a short hand code for their computer finesse–or maybe just to screw with other people who stare but cannot figure out what it means. No matter the reason, if you’d like an answer, check out the link below. http://www.tech-faq.com/127.0.0.1.shtml

27. Read 1337 At Normal Speed

Sure, everyone knows about it and it’s no longer cool, but if you’re going to proclaim yourself as a geek, you should be able to read it full speed. Who wants to choke in front of the wannabe that learned to read it full speed and flaunts it in your face?http://www.wikihow.com/Read-and-Write-in-1337 28. At Least One Fictional LanguageAnd not only should you know a fictional language, but you should use it to say something about yourself. Do you choose Klingon or Quenya? Here’s a list of constructed languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages

29. How to Survive in a Linux Argument

Linux is gaining an all around higher standing in the geeksphere, and it’s bound to enter a conversation at some point (which will invariably end up turning into an argument). If you want to keep up, you’ll need to understand the basic points of Linux, as well as the general info of all basic things. Here’s a good place to read and gain a foothold: http://www.linux.com/articles/feature/

30. Identify Major Constellations

For those times you venture from the air-conditioned, computer filled basement of your parents house (or something like that), look up at the stars and have yourself a Galileo moment. The stars may just be dots to many people, but with the handy website below, you’ll be stopping man-belts and lions in no time. http://www.sky-watch.com/astronomy-guide/major-constellations.html

31. Use a Camera in Manual Mode

Sure, you could just use auto mode like everyone else too afraid to learn what some letters and numbers mean, but then you wouldn’t be much of a geek, would you? The oft-ignored dial on a camera is the key that unleashes the best quality photos possible, and every geek should be a whiz at using one. http://digital-photography-school.com/digital-camera-modes

32. Who Mulder and Scully Are

It seems that in the plethora of geek websites, there always appears a joke about Mulder and Scully, the two main characters from the X-Files. If you don’t know who they are, you’ll be left in the dark, alone, contemplating what exactly it was you were doing in the 90′s that you wouldn’t understand the joke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulder_and_Scully_(song)

33. Javascript

HTML is running the world (not really). Everyone knows some HTML and it makes them feel empowered. As a geek, you want to transcend that basic knowledge others share and know a little more. JavaScript is the answer–it is easy to learn if you’re not actually interested in web programming, but simply curious, and it looks scary to anyone who doesn’t know it.http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/javascript/basicjavascript.html

34. How to Unlock an iPhone

Sure, most geeks wouldn’t be caught dead with an iPhone, but what about your friends? You’re the smart techie, they’ll expect your to know how to unlock it. http://www.aagneyam.com/blog/?p=531

35. How to Install Mac OS X on a PC

Just because you don’t want Mac on your PC doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to do it. Knowledge is power, right? Go ahead, use this to stump your friends and family. http://dailyapps.net/2007/10/hack-attack-install-leopard-on-your-pc-in-3-easy-steps/

36. Build a PC

If you purchase a ready-made PC, you can be sure of one thing–you’re paying more than you should. Assembling your own PC isn’t too hard, and is the first thing you should be aiming to accomplish as a geek. Here is a massive article on assembling your own PC:http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/

37. Tethering a Smartphone

Nothing like a little wifi on the move, eh? Tethering a smartphone means using the Internet on your laptop/netbook via your cell phone. Of course, the method to do this depends on your phone, but here’s an article to get your started: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2276/smartphones_bb_treo_tether_modem_usa_carriers/

38. Wiring a Home Theater System

Home theater systems used to consist of a TV and a chair. Gone are those days of simplicity, however, and setting up a modern system can be pure mind-boggling horror. Where does the modulator go, why does the DVD player have no video and the cable box no sound? Here’s a tutorial, including excellent diagrams, to show you how: http://www.prillaman.net/ht_info_8-wiring.html

39. Replacing a Laptop LCD

Laptop LCDs are vulnerable to many different mishaps: accidental pressure spots, shadows, airsoft pellets…. No matter, there will come a point when you need to swap your LCD for a new one. Now, as a geek, you probably don’t have an extended warranty. If that’s the case, here are some excellent pages and pictures on replacing the display: http://www.fonerbooks.com/laptop_4.htm

40. Make a Laptop Cooling Pad

Can you believe these cost $50?! A geek will need one, because data crunching/DVD ripping/videos playing/rendering at the same times tends to cause excess heat. Instead of shelling out your hard earned dollars, make your own like so:http://www.instructables.com/id/Lazy-mans-laptop-cooler/

41. Unleash a Laser Pointer’s full potential

A normal person uses a laser pointer to drive their dog crazy. A geek uses it to melt butter for their grilled cheese sandwich. To unless a laser pointer’s full strength, crack open the case, fry the resistor with a hot soldering iron, then snap it back together and keep it away from flesh/eyes/airplanes. The pointer will burn out after a few hours, but what a fun few hours they will be. Note: this is dangerous. Don’t do anything stupid.

42. Keyboard Shortcuts

This will depend on your operating system and the apps you use, so there’s no tutorial available. However, that is irrelevant–you’re a geek, you can find them yourself. Shortcuts are the difference between a slow computer user and a geek. The geek will always will out in a speed contest, because they do practically everything from their keyboard.

43. Soldering Glasses Together

Nerds use tape on broken glasses; geeks use solder. ‘Nuff said.

44. How to Execute a Shell Script

If you’re a true geek, you’ll need to do this at some point. Below are instructions on how to do so. Remember: always be cautious when running a script, you don’t want your computer to turn into a door stop, now do ya?http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/unixhelp/scrpt/scrpt1.2.html

45. How to Hack a Pop Machine

Okay, so stealing isn’t cool. Still, hacking is simply a misunderstood art, right? So hacking a pop machine isn’t really stealing, because it’s not about the pop, it about the pleasure of getting your way. Or something like that. (Newsflash, it is illegal, don’t do it.) If you want to try your fingers at getting a free Coke, check out this link: http://skattertech.com/soda-machine-hack/

46. Turn a Laptop into a Digital Picture Frame

So you want to show off pictures of your dog and that girl you once met, but you want to do it in an uber geeky way. Any schmuck can go to Walmart and buy a digital picture frame for a grossly inflated price. But you…oh, you’re too smart for that. No, instead you’ll find an old laptop on eBay for $5 and turn it into a true work of art. http://repair4laptop.org/notebook_picture_frame.html

47. How to Mod a Flash Drive Case

All the geeks are doing it…. Whatever. The case your flash drive came in is probably weak and most certainly plain. Why not jazz it up with your own unique style? Here’s one such case mod, and dozens of related projects: http://www.instructables.com/id/Metal-USB—Flash-drive-case-mod/

48. Do Cool Things to Altoids Tins

People are obsessed with these things. Altoids tins are durable, small, and just begging to be filled with LEDs, mp3 players, audio amps, and maybe some snuff. A good geek will find millions of uses for these little metal wonders. If you need a mental boost, however, here’s some interesting links: http://www.squidoo.com/altoids-tins

49. Convert Cassette Tapes to Digital Audio Files

If your geekhood started in the 90′s, then you probably have a least a few (dozen) cassette tapes still sitting around. Why not breathe digital life into them before they fall ill to mortal fate? http://lifehacker.com/software/mp3/alpha-geek-how-to-digitize-cassette-tapes-222394.php

50. Lock Your Computer with a USB Drive

You don’t want anyone getting into your files while you’re gone. A normal password would be enough to keep most people out, but what if you got super-secret X files on your computer? You can lock your machine down with a USB drive via these instructions:http://lionjkt.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/how-to-lock-your-computer-with-usb-drive/

51. Run Your Own Ethernet Line

Wifi has taken the place of a wired connection in many homes, and with good reasons–you can go anywhere, no cables necessary. What about those…sensitive…activities that you’d rather the neighborhood script kiddie didn’t see on your wifi? An Ethernet cable is your solution. To wire your own Ethernet, hit up this link: http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/ethernetcables.html

52. Set Up a Streaming Media Server

With digital files becoming the ultimate medium, many people have hundreds of gigabytes worth of music, videos, and pictures. You could keep them on a portable hard drive, but then you’re have to take it everywhere, and only one person could use it at a time. The solution is a streaming media server, something no geek can live without. http://www.n00tz.net/2008/07/vlc-media-server-ubuntu-hardy/

53. Setting up a VPN

If you’re like most geeks, you can’t live without your computers. They store your life in some poetic fashion, holding files you feel a personal connection with…. Anyway, if you are at work and suddenly realize you left an important picture at home (or you need blackmail material pronto), having a VPN ready to go will save you big time.http://compnetworking.about.com/od/vpnsetup/VPN_Setup_How_to_Set_Up_a_VPN.htm

54. Turn Webcams into Security Cameras

Is someone stealing your Netflix DVDs? Do you suspect it is a fat hairy man in his boxers taking them each morning? If so, you can get your proof using a couple webcams and a bit of software. http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/09/27/how-to-use-your-pc-and-webcam-as-a-motion-detecting-and-recording-security-camera/

55. Control Your House Lights with a Computer

Controlling the lights in your house via computer is a great way to freak out the neighborhood kids ding-dong-ditching (assuming you wire up a Halloween scream motion sensor, also). If you reasons are less nefarious, you simply use it to turn on and off lights without having to life ye butt from thy seat, which is a good reason in itself. http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-lights-in-your-house-with-your-computer/

56. Play Retro Games without Retro Consoles

This applies to the geeks who enjoy gaming. Setting up an emulation PC on your TV is a great way to relive those games of old.

57. Put LEDs Inside a Lightbulb

The days of hot incandescent and mercury-laden fluorescent are gone, and in are the days of long lasting, low heat, low consumption LEDs. As any good geek, you want to be able to say “I was doing X long before it became mainstream.” Here’s your chance–the following link will show you how to put an LED inside a lightbulb, something sure to stump your friends the same way Grandpa’s ship-in-a-wine-bottle used to stump you. http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/06/make_a_led_bulb.html

58. Create Music with Keyboard

How awesome is KeyBored? This little app gives all of your QWERTY keys a piano note. When you type, it sounds like an infant monkey punching a keyboard. If you’ve got some musical chops, it won’t take you long to figure out the Star Wars theme or find a hidden musical message in Counter Strike control buttons. http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/

59. Make Your Office Ergonomic

Face it–you spend a lot of time at your desk. You might even have a few extra pounds and pallid skin to show for it. While those things are temporary, far to common and more serious is the carpal tunnel, eye strain, and back problems you’ll develop from having a poor workspace. Hit up this link to create a body-friendly workspace that will keep you limber and flexible:http://www.ergotron.com/tabid/305/language/en-US/default.aspx

60. Adding a Third Monitor

Studies show that dual monitor increase work productivity by 30%. As a geek, you’ll need a third monitor to equal the dual setup of a layman (if that makes sense). While any hack with a VGA port can add a second monitor, it takes a true geek to add a third (or more). This will vary based on graphics/OS, so hit up Google for a tutorial or two.http://stackoverflow.com/questions/76267/hardware-solutions-for-adding-a-third-monitor-to-a-laptop

61. How to Convert a DVD to x264 (or XviD or DivX)

It might seem like child’s play to you, but many individuals do not understand the fine art of converting a DVD into a digital file, let alone the careful skills it takes to achieve a happy balance between size and quality. Here is an excellent tutorial demonstrating how to rip a DVD with the multi-platform free software Handbrake: http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/

62. Flash System BIOS

Ya gotta do it some time, so stop putting it off and man up. Flashing the BIOS on your laptop might seem scary (as it should–fear keeps you on your toes and prevents mistakes), but it’s not (actually, it is, but if you even understand why you need to do this, you’ve gotta have at least a few chops by now). Warning–you can seriously bork your computer doing this!http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1605

63. How to Irrecoverably Protect Data

TrueCrypt, my friends. Learn to use TrueCrypt. If you have ask why, you don’t need it. http://www.truecrypt.org/

64. The Fastest way to Kill a Computer

It’s said that you have to get into a killers mind to understand their weaknesses, right? Same goes for the unfortunate boobs who always kill their laptops. Here’s a list of all the different ways you can accidentally kill a computer–arm your family and friends, and save yourself grief (because it’s surely you they will call when something goes horribly, horribly wrong).http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1720

65.GK for every drunken Geek

Describing the advantages and disadvantages in various alcoholic drinks http://www.aagneyam.com/blog/?p=797

66.Microsoft Network Monitor

67.Windows Sysinternals Suite

The Windows Sysinternals Suite is a set of advanced tools for troubleshooting issues with Windows-based computers. These tools were originally developed by Winternals Software LP, which Microsoft acquired in 2006.http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/SysinternalsSuite.zip

68.NTFS support for Mac OS.

Mac OS X v10.3 and later include read-only support for NTFS-formatted partitions. The GPL-licensed NTFS-3G also works on Mac OS X through FUSE and allows reading and writing to NTFS partitions. A performance enhanced commercial version, called Tuxera NTFS for Mac, is also available from the NTFS-3G developers. NTFS write support has been discovered in Mac OS X 10.6, but has not been activated as of version 10.6.1, although hacks do exist to enable the functionality. However, user reports indicate the functionality is unstable and tends to cause kernel panics, probably the reason why write support has not been enabled or advertised. Download Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.9-RC

69.15 Web Alternatives to Popular Desktop Software.

http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/15-web-alternatives-to-popular-desktop-software/

70.Top 6 Underground Search Engines You Never Knew About

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-7-underground-search-engines-knew/

71. Fake Name Generator

If you need a name, address, email, or even a UPS tracking code, use this handy tool to generate any one of the necessary fakes. http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ **Authors comment

Simple Methods to Clean Up Your Digital Life and Manage Information Overload

See the 5 tips below:

Adopting and Adapting New Technology

Writing Open Library Bots  (From the Open Library Wiki– see links)

First, create a Bot account, ending with “Bot”. Example bots include WorkBot, ImportBot and ToCb0t. Ending with “Bot” allows the bot edits to be filtered in Recent Changes. (Since bots tend to repeat the same small operation with high frequency, they would overwhelm the list if shown alongside edits by humans.) In order for your Bot to get write access to the OL API, your bot account must be a member of the API usergroup. Please write to us and tell us as much as you can about what your bot will do, and if everything looks good, we’ll go ahead and add you to the API usergroup. Your Bot will need to use the Open Library API to read from or write to an Open Library instance. There is documentation in the source available at GitHub: http://github.com/openlibrary/openlibrary/blob/master/openlibrary/api.py

ol = OpenLibrary('http://0.0.0.0:8080') # use dev instance ol.login(username, password) # or use ol.autologin() to load from ~/.olrc data = ol.get(key) ol.save(key, data, comment) 

You can save thing with key-value pairs and add comments for edits your Bot makes. A loop would look like find book, add identifier, save. Querying for things:

things = ol.query({'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}) 

Examples and source code:

• Daniel’s IdentifierBot
• Ben’s Goodreads bot
• AMillarBot
• oclcBot, by Bruce Washburn
• URL below: