Twitter: no privacy, choked with spam

Largely because I've come across a number of links suggesting how Twitter could be used in education (see below), I've been having another play with it -- and frankly I'm not impressed.

Unless I've missed something, there seems to be a major privacy issue. Either spammers are forcing me to "follow" them or else Twitter itself has decided that I've got to follow a certain number of people, whether I'm interested in what they're twittering about or not. Within 24 hours, I found myself "following" (that is, receiving updates from) 24 people, only 3 of whom I'd actually chosen to follow, all of them with over 500,000 "followers".

The result? That when I log in, I am first forced to read the equivalent of junk email, and worse, have to choose to stop following each of the spammers individually, before I start to see the updates from people like Lance Armstrong (1.6m followers) that I am interested in.

>> Twitter in education:

• 25 ways to teach with Twitter (TechLearning.com)
• Nik Peachy on Twitter
  
• Twitter for Academia
  
• Twitter education groups ("twibes")
  

>> Previous Twitter posts:

• Twittering in ELT
• Twitter
  

Facebook makes you stupid?

An unnamed US study reckons 68% of school pupils using Facebook got "significantly lower" exam marks than those who didn't, according to The Week, the study referred to probably being that of Ohio State, according to TIME.

What it doesn't say -- though I haven't personally read the actual report -- is whether or not the exams themselves were actually testing what the learners know, or were relevant to their learning styles or actual real-world needs, and I suspect that quite possibly they weren't.

I might just be tempted to use Facebook rather than e-mail as a means of communication with learners as -- says my daughter (13) -- no-one ever uses e-mail now, at least not young learners.

What would put me off would be the privacy issues. While creating a new Facebook profile recently, I got asked did I want to be friends with these 25 people -- all of whom looked suspiciously young, and none of whom I recognised...

Hold on, I did recognise them: they were all 13, all girls, and all my daughter's friends. If you're going to use technology with young learners, you want a network that is a whole lot more secure than that...

Eyes: an idea for a class blog

Mystery eyes: someone in our class

Here's an idea that might be fun if you have a class blog: every week, we publish a photo of the eyes of someone in the class, and we then attempt to guess who our "mystery eyes" belong to.

By a "class blog", I mean one on which your learners author and publish the content and, besides class projects [example], and what you might publish as being of interest to your students [example], having a different pair responsible for the blog each week will get the students interested and involved. You could have such things as a "YouTube video of the week" or "Album of the week", which the students would be responsible for picking -- and "Mystery eyes of the week" would also be fun.

You want the students to take the photos and edit them and want to ensure that other students do comment on the blog, something they could be doing before class, during class, or at home...

An important issue is privacy, so do make sure you have appropriate school/parental permission before you start publishing photos, especially if you are doing this with young learners!

MySpace or Our Space?

The Electric Shoes: Great band, great example of what you can do with MySpace

In the US in particular, My Space is hugely popular, though there have been doubts raised in US High Schools about security problems (do you want it to be that easy for all those crazy people out there in cyberspace to contact your young learners?).

Here's a great example (not ELT-related) of what you can do with MySpace.

MySpace is very easy to use, and I can see why your teenagers might love it...

Our space, not my space
Personally, however, I've got two things against it, one the security issue (check how many of the MySpace FAQs refer to security: there must be a problem with it!).

The other is that I hate the name "my space".

One of the technologies I do like a lot for language learning is blogging, particularly if what you've got is a collaborative, team blog, to which all your learners contribute.

Then you're talking our space, not my space...

Official: Google IS evil!

A post on Jack Schofield's excellent Guardian technology blog drew my attention to this Observer report on something that's been obvious for a long time: Google is Evil.

Not just evil, note, but the most evil, according to the original Privacy International analysis The Observer is quoting, which ranked Google last on privacy among some of the leading Internet companies.

You've been warned!

Is your Yahoo (etc) account safe?

Someone asked me the questions yesterday: (a) is it possible to obtain someone's Yahoo (or Hotmail, etc) password -- and thus read their mail -- and (b) how do you do it?

The answers: (a), yes, 12-year-olds at my son's school can do it, and then impersonate others on Messenger; and (b) I don't know -- I said -- but go to Google-is-Evil and you can be sure you can find out.

The key to successful search is often knowing the operative keywords. If you want to know the answer to (b), your operative keywords are "hack" and/or "crack"... I got over 2 million results, and I'll leave it at that.

Fortunately, apart from the Evil, there's lots of good stuff on the Web. If you have a Yahoo account, Yahoo have a good security section, and specific suggestions on how to create a safe password.

A safe password is long, contains numbers and symbols and is not your birthday, among other things...

If you're using Hotmail (or whatever), check their recommendations out too.

If you're using MySpace, just don't...!

More on online security...

Is a blog open to anyone?

The muddiest points [ explanation ] from our special session on blogs and blogging, in which -- among other things -- we set up our own blogs...

Is a blog open to anyone? Can anyone post on a blog?
Well, that depends on what "settings" you choose for it.... Is your blog a private diary, perhaps one in which you reflect on your teaching? Is it intended for other people? Do you want those other people to be limited to your friends and family -- or is it for absolutely anyone out there in cyberspace...?

Likewise, if it is a blog you are using with a class, you might want to consider whether or not you want to protect their privacy or not (especially if they are youngish children).

If you have set your blog up at blogger.com (as we did today), you've got the "Basic" tab under "Settings" (shown above). Answering "No" to the question "Add your blog to our listings" gives you a certain amount of privacy. Someone would then need to know the address of your blog (you could give it to them), in order to be able to access it.

One of the other settings you might want to change is who can write comments on your blog. The "Comments" tab under "Settings" allows you three choices there (as shown above), and if you "enable comment moderation" (shown below), all comments will come to you first for approval, before they get published.

You might want to enable comment moderation, by the way, as otherwise -- especially on a public blog -- you will end up with "spam" (junk) comments.

Note that "only registered users" means anyone with a Blogger.com account. Personally, I choose "Anyone" for "Who can comment?" but then enable moderation.

More "muddiest points" from today's session...

• What's a permalink?
• Editing the links on a blog
• The difference between a blog and a discussion board

The answers to these three questions are in separate posts, below...