Twitting in the classroom

In this blog entry I will try to outline some of benefits and harms of including Twitter in education.

David Silver writes in the latest edition of "the cronicle of higher education" that twitter is a very good tool in the classroom. Both because it makes the students aware of what they post online, because they can follow and comment other student's work, because they feel like a community of 21st century citizens, and because the short message system of Twitter gives them an easy of of just giving the teacher a link to their works instead of physical papers.

It seems that people can not get enough of Twitter. In the UK teaching about Twitter is even part of the curriculum the Guardian writes. When making a quick view of articles on the use of twitter in education it seems there are endless amounts of praises for this instrument. One can fast and easy tell the students about next time's class, about cancelling of classes, share links, make role plays of famous historical persons etc etc (see fx this article by K Walsh where people praise Twitter as an instrument in the classroom). All of this makes sense and sounds great.

It becomes more interesting then to look at the 'harm' of using Twitter. One of the first things that comes to my mind is that I do not always wish to be online... and when I am online I prefer it to be for more private matters. I can have my own private Twitter account for keeping us with long lost friends and to follow news ... but if I also have to use this for my 'career' as a student... then I am not sure I will ever be 'off' duty. Furthermore the online world has so many possibilities... and also so many possibilites to procastinate, be distracted and not be so serious. Somehow tweeting is for me far away from the academic more serious world of the university. This is something that is also adressed in the "cronicle of higher education" that I linked to above. See fx the article by Levy et al.

I agree somewhat with the many ideas put forward when praising the use of Twitter in the classroom. But I think that maybe the teachers should use other tools than Twitter. Tools that are ment only for classroom activities. See fx this article.
It becomes difficult for me as a student if I all of the sudden have to use my Facebook or Twitter account for other things than my private life.

Be forever on the guard - SONY's Playstation Network has been online filtrated

Last week SONY's Playstation Network was infiltrated, which meant that 77 mio customers accounts with personal information were stolen - making it one of the biggest online data infiltrations ever.

Learning about this made me quite aware of how internet and personal data do not really go hand in hand.
The hackers can use the information they got from SONY (fx people's birthdays and adresses) to go 'spearphishing'. Spearphishing are "attacks" on often individuals that are customized to each individual target. Hackers draft emails that will maybe appear to come from someone the individual knows (fx a boss) or a trusted company, also it wil often contain enough personal information to persuade the victim to let down its defenses - which then can lead to people withdrawing money from their bank accounts or downloading malicious software.

People are getting less trusty of the internet, and do not just click whatever link drops into their mail inbox. BUT when hackers from SONY have a lot of information on people like fx birthdays and phonenumbers it becomes less transparent for the individual.

A test made by searchsecurity showed that a man pretending to be a 'colonal of West Point' could trick 80 % of 500 cadets into clicking link solely because they trusted this authority.

Many speculate that spear phishing will increase. Spam filters might get better, but the spammers ak the time adopt "sophisticated" spear phishing techniques in order to reach their victims. Also people are not so careful with their personal information in their increasing use of social networks. Another reason allspammedup.com writes, is that many companies do not come clean on their data breaches. A wealth of stolen information is floating around out there.
Reuters writes that reasons for companies not to report this can be that they either do not know that they have been hacked or that they want to avoid the public embarresment and the public scrutiny.

It seems then that we forever have to be careful of these 'spearphishers'. PC mag offers a list of things one can do to avoid being a victim of spearphishing. Click the link to see this list.

I guess we have to be forever on the watch, and never let our guards down. Even trusted companies like SONY can be hacked - and even though they will develop better technologies to secure their customer's informations, this seems to be no guarantee. We could avoid giving informations ti fx companies like SONY, but this is probably not the future.