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.

Google owns you

What happened? To 'google' is all of the certain a word that we use every day. Everyone knows what you are talking about when referring to this verb.
When I was a kid 'to google' was not something one did on www.google.com, but on fx www.yahoo.com or similar Danish wepages like fx www.jubii.dk or www.sol.dk. But nowadays this action is on google.com, and nowhere else.

This blogpost is not going to be about how we 'google' things, or on how google.com has succeeded in making the perfect search engine. Instead this blogpost will reflect on how this brand of google is developing new things all the time - and slowly taking over the world in many ways.

I surrendered recently and got a gmail.com after 10 years of having an yahoo-account. I am a frequent user of the google maps - especially their street view version is nice when you miss home, or when you need to go somewhere for the first time, and you are not sure of what it will look like. Also I use google translate many times throughout the day to understand slovene bills and webpages... or to look up English words I do not know. Google is simply genious. And it is hard for me to imagine life without these tools. Life just becomes easier. Google chrome is also worth mentioning. I really did not realise that there could be such a difference in internet browsers.. but there is! Al of the sudden the internet is faster, the browser translates everything for me, I can google in the same space as I write the address.. all so easy!

What is the future for Google? What will they come up with next? What will be the next thing that will make my life easier, the next thing that I simply cannot live without?

On the 1st of April this year Google posted this on their webpage, as the new 'thing':



http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html


A programme where one can control its Gmail by body movements -and language - instead of using the mouse.
Off course when you click the link you realise that this is maybe not really possible yet - but it really makes you think!!

In the same area (that of the human body) Google also made the programme googlebody .



A programme that lets you 'peel' of different layers of a human body... Perfect for school use fx.
Google is everywhere - now also inside the human body!!!! Developing a programme like this is really not in the original sphere of google products... but why not have a programme that reveals the deeper insides of the human being. In this way making man and computer technologies into one.

Google is really getting into every sphere. Spheres that you didnt even know existed. Spheres you didnt know related to the 'google'-empire.

I realise that this blog entry is grasping a lot of different subjects...
But really what Im trying to make my reader aware of, is that 'google' is everywhere. Google owns you.
Not only because more and more people use Google products, but also because we get addicted to it. We get addicted to googleing in the googlechrome browser... and we use programmes in ways we never thought of. Google knows you. Google has been inside your body - they realise what the human being needs in the future.

Creating a better world...

I would like to use this blog entry to make a commercial for the social network site of Couchsurfing. This is probably the webpage I adore the most on the internet, and one of the most important pages for me - a world without this page would for me simply mean another personal history and a poor world.

For the people who do not know this webpage I will briefly explain. Couchsurfing is an internet community for people who like to travel and meet new people - it connects the traveller with the local communities, as they write on their webpage. The thought is that everyone always have a spare couch/bed in their house/flat - and therefore can offer this to travellers visiting their local community. In this way the traveller lives for free and both the host and 'the surfer' of the couch meet new people and get a real cultural experience that can not be found in a hostel or a hotel. Furthermore Couchsurfing offers social groups where people can arrange meeting for a beer, going on trips together, arranging parties, ask about sightseeing, bond over common interests etc.

I have been a member of this webpage since 2008 and have travelled many places using this community... so far only with good experience. The page is different than a social network page like facebook. On couchsurfing it is about meeting new people - not keeping in contact with 'old' friends.



The slogan for this community is that couchsuring is creating a better world one couch at the time - and I really think that this is the case. My travels have never been the same after joining couchsurfing. I always feel like I get to know the culture much better, and I get friends all over the world, which is not a bad thing either (the map on the right shows the couchsurfers of this world). At the same time I get to reflect on my own identity and nationality quite a lot since Im being confronted with this all the time when meeting people from other countries or showing them my city or my country.

I am very happy that I live in a time where it is possible to travel in this manner - and Im not sure what I would do without this webpage. Being a foreigner in Slovenia this page is also quite helpfull for getting friends and keeping updated on what is going on in the city and the country.


Off course this community also has it flaws. First of all the webpage is not that user friendly, the design is ugly, and it takes some time to figure out how to navigate around it - also it often 'crashes'.


Second of all some people do not get the idea of couchsurfing - and therefore write 'dating-requests' to you... which you can off course just choose to ignore. It ruins the idea.
Finally I think that the architecture of the page also affects the behaviour of people using the webpage. It is quite specified what you can write about yourself and on top of this you also have to think a lot about what photos to post on your profile. Photos you put on facebook is different because people know you and will link your pictures to your actual identity... while people that do not know you will 'judge' you on your picture (or on what you write about yourself). Therefore there are a lot of thoughts about creating your profile and the 'identity' you think people would like to surf with or host.

What is left to say is - try it! Make the world a greater place by opening up your house and experiencing a new culture !

Thoughts on whether there was a 'facebook/twitter' revolution in the Middle East

What picture can capture the 2011-revolts in the Middle East and North Africa in the best fashion? Is there some picture that can clearest capture what is going on/what has been going on in Egypt, Tunesia, Bahrain and Lybia?

Peter Beaumont writes in his article from The Gurdian that it has very much been a young man or woman with a smart phone taking pictures of the revolts, of inequipped hospitals, of people being shot in the streets...!

Is the revolutions going on in the Middle East right now a 'twitter revolutions'? Revolutions where people use 'new media' to not only get information, but to also use information to fight political forces through pictures and words?

Or is this all made up by the Western media that tend to over estimate the use of new media?

”The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns” Michael Gladwell wrote in october 2010 in the New Yorker about the socalled Twitter revolution in Iran in 2009. He thinks that what happened in Iran in 2009 cannot be called a wtitter revolution, however. There was a twitter revolution made up by people in the West, who read tweets about what was going on in Iran - but all were in English. Gladwell asks if these tweets would not have been in Farsi if the Iranians were in fact using Twitter as part of the revolution...!

I will agree with him on this point. But also highlight that I think that when using the discourse of a 'twitter revolution' it covers more than just the webpage of Twitter. It includes all the use of new media and information. Here I think of the meaning of pictures (as I started this blog post with), also facebook seems to become more and more important. In Tunesia fx most social network pages were closed down - but not facebook. Facebook then became the way for people to get real' information that was not controlled by a state (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya)



Off course one can question whether it is a revolution when not everyone have access to computers, can read, etc. But I believe that just the fact that some people can get access to 'real information' and can forward information to others is what it takes for us to talk about a 'facebook'/'twitter' revolution. Their might have been a slight exaggeration of the meaning of these medias, but small things can lead to bigger things. Fx Al Jazeera has this past month shown quite a lot of these facebook - and youtube videos that people have been filming - which has not only lead the revolution to other parts of the Middle East, but also informed us in the West.

Some blogging about blocking

The Danish telecommunication providers have by ruling by the Danish supreme court been imposed to shut down the Danes access to the webpage "Pirate Bay".



With this official blocking of Pirate Bay, Denmark joins the club of Kuwait and China which are the only other countries that has banned this page.

I will not reflect on here whether it is right or not to use a page like this... but instead reflect on the notion of state's control over the internet. Is it OK for states to block the internet so that its citizens cannot use certain web pages?


In the current world it is not a new event that countries (like North Korea, China and Iran) blocks or bans certain parts of the internet. Not long ago Egypt also joined the club. But can we tolerate that these things happen in Western, democratic and modern states?

The reason for the Danish judgment on Pirate Bay was that it was a copyright infringment. But if this is the case isn't a judgment like this a glide towards more blocking? What will be next? When does a webpage entail enough copyright infringment material to be shut down? 40 %? 60 %? When is it OK to limit people's and webpage's right to free speech and free press? And what about people's right to freedom of information?

In the USA not long ago it was published by Wikileaks that the USA, a country that claims to be the most 'free' in the world, has made sure that Silicon Valley companies make 'back doors' in their software, so that the government have the option to spionage in what people write, comment on or publish online.

Is this democratic????

Or do we have to redifine the way we look upon the internet to make sure that democracy can keep existing?

I personally think that IF states cannot keep up with the way that their citizens use the internet and their 'new way' of getting access to informations and sources where they can speak or publish things freely (fx discussions fora... but also pirate bay!) - THEN there is something wrong.

We need more discussions on this subject, more education, more transparency....
The fact that Danish telecommunication providers has shut down access to Pirate Bay does not mean anything in practise, though. According to the Danish group of internet pirates (piratgruppen.org) it takes only 30 seconds to get around this 'block' and then access the page and download music, movies etc. Also people who wish to use Pirate Bay have a 1000 other options of web pages that offers downloading or streaming of movies and music more or less illegally (fx Spotify, grooveshark, isohunt ... )



Right now it seems that the internet has unlimited possibilities - and that states, even though they try, cannot fully keep up with these developments. But maybe they can - and then we must ask ourselves if we ever learned anything from George Owell's 1984?

Ore is 'BIGBROTHER' the answer in order to keep the citizens on a 'straight path'?

the first blog entry

I am really quite excited about taking this course.

I must admit that when I first chose the class it was because there were few post graduate courses available at FDV (faculty of social science in Ljubljana). I had no expectations for this course at all. Actually I was a bit frightened as I am not used to doing classes in this field (that I would name "communication"). When I further found out that half of the course was in slovene I was quite ready to give up.

But after reading the syllabus for the course and looking through the different materials I have changed my mind:

• First of all because I use new media quite a lot. I already have a blog that I use for travel reports, and since I was ten years old I have used computers for communication; When I was ten for chatting with other Spice Girls fans - now for keeping in touch with friends on facebook, skype etc. Furthermore I always have my computer with me; in class, at work, at home... and I can not imagine life without it. I even google everything these days!
• Second of all because I study political science... and there is very little focus on communication and writing skills in the everyday classes. At the same time more and more employers actually look for employees with good writing -and communication skills. That's a mismatch that I hope the course can solve!
• Third of all because I am interested to learn more about what the internet can be used for and look into how it is in fact used by different actors. Last semester I wrote a paper on how the the Danish ANTIFA makes their identity through internet foras and news data bases. That was quite interesting and I wish I knew more.

Well that was a bit about my reasons and expectations for taking this course. But I also need to present myself:

My name is Annika Mogensen, I am Danish and I am 25 years old. I am a bachelor of political science from Copenhagen University and started studying my masters in political science this summer. I am not sure what my main interest in the field of politcal science is. But so far I have worked a bit with human rights and international relations... but I also wish to take some courses related to anthropology and sociology to broaden my perspective.

I hope that with this course I can combine these interests and my knowledge of politics with the use of new media. I think that I will do my seminar paper on identity exploration and construction or digital activism.