Assignment: text, tweet, blog …

Digital media are bringing change to all aspect of the modern-western people’s lives. Immune is not even the academic sphere. Digital media is influencing education and teaching processes by the day. While incorporation of digital media into educational methods and processes brings many positive changes and improvements, it also causes difficulties and problems.  Below are listed few of the pros and cons of the use of social media in classroom that I find are worth considering.

PROS

• visibility of the work

Everything students publish online is visible, searchable and stored. This most often encourages students to really fully engage in the work and develop deeper understanding of the topic they are dealing with. Awareness of the fact that your work is seen to everyone, even your potential employers, works, as David Silver argues in his article, as a good motivation for students and their studying.

• collaboration

Engagement of digital media in the classroom not only enables collaboration among the students and professors in the class but also collaboration among broader and more diverse range of people (students and professors  from abroad, different cultures, backgrounds). Cross-institutional collaboration is not invention of digital media and its use in the classroom but, as David Silver concludes in his article, it surely is made much easier with tools offered in digital media.

• overcoming time and space barriers 

Digital media are making distance learning much more easy. Anne Nelson in her article gives different attempts, more or less successful, of adoption of digital media for distance learning. Engagement of digital media can make distant learning more effective and easily conducted. Beside making the mere act of conducting the lessons much easier, digital media also enable better, easier and quicker access to literature, scholarly article, etc. to students in less developed countries.

CONS

• diversion of attention 

Students using digital media in class (e.g. computers, mobile phones, etc.) usually don’t fully pay attention to what is going on in the class and what professor is saying. There are so many distractions on social media that student’s’ attention quickly gets diverse. Use of social media hereby doesn’t aid to the learning process but instead disables it.

• technical limitations

Before digital media can really be successfully incorporated to the learning process several technical requirements need to be met. But this is often difficult and expensive to assure. Adoption of digital media thus often doesn’t get fully realized.

• failing to make use of digital media really relevant

Digital media in classroom are often misused or their use isn’t really thought through and therefore inadequate and ineffective. Before social media with different related applications are used in classroom, relevant, effective and useful applications should be developed and tested to really add value to the learning process.

Wikileaks – the aftermath

One of the events that really shook the world in the beginning of this year was the Wikileaks affair. Although it has been in every news and basically everyone at least once heard of it, not much space or time in news is dedicated to this issue nowadays. First shock, surprise and dismay – whether the reason be the act itself or the content of the published documents – faded out and other issues took the prominent place in the news. And what was the aftermath of this whole affair?

Probably the worst consequences is facing Private Bradley Manning, who is suspected to be the source of some of the information disclosed on Wikileaks. After initial charges the prosecution added additional and the soldier is facing life sentence. After being held in insolation, reports were released that he has been cleared to leave insolation and stay with other inmates.

Also Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is still facing charges; not on leaking confidential information but on sexual assault.  After being released from detention in British prison, he will have extradition appeal hearing in July.

Despite Wikileaks are not the first issue addressed in the news and world media the initiative is still alive. Several different documents are released on more or less regular basis. Among the latest were the documents on Guantanamo. Wikileaks also inspired others to start similar initiatives. One such initiative was created by Wall Street Journal. They created so-called SafeHouse. The site that works similarly as Wikileaks site – it enables whistleblowers to confidentially upload documents to the site – was created to enable secure sharing of the information with Wall Street Journal. The site was launched last Thursday and is already facing criticism from web security and privacy experts. The site is not even close to being as secure as is promoted and experts are even warning that it could even compromise the security of the whistleblowers.

Although we don’t hear as much about Wikileaks as when the affair was at its peak, the initiative is still very alive and even encouraged other similar attempts.

The largest Internet theft – Sony PlayStation Network hack

Two weeks ago happened possibly the largest theft on the Internet ever recorded – over 77 million customer accounts of Sony PlayStation Network have been hacked and their information stolen. Since the information about the security breach came out, many discussions, polemics, questions, etc. have been opening and taking place in different online information sources.

The security breach had opened sharp discussions addressing different issues. Some are dealing with the fact (e.g. What’s so special about Sony’s massive data breach?) that Sony even decided to officially disclose the information about the breach. After Sony realized that the breach is more severe than it seemed at first glance, they released official statement and FAQ list where they explained what happened and tried to answer most frequent questions their customers were seeking answers to. The surprising thing here is, for some commentators, that Sony even decided to release official statement on the matter. Many different attacks happened online and many are kept a secret. Beside that, many services attacked are not even aware of the attacks. Sony probably decided to officially release the fact that they were attacked because the attack was so wide and severe. The number of possible victims of the information theft is so huge that they probably couldn’t afford to keep this security breach a secret. I guess they followed some kind of a crisis communication plan and decided it’s better that you tell what’s going on and you tell it in your way than waiting if someone will ever find out and fear what kind of interpretation of the event will be communicated.

On the other hand, some other commentators didn’t welcome Sony’s official release on the issue with much sympathy (PlayStation Network hack: why it took Sony seven days to tell the world, Sony’s PlayStation Network Hack: When Did They Know?). The problem some commentators have with the official release is that it came seven days after Sony found out it has been hacked. There are already different theories why they decided to wait so long before they released the information. What all of them have in common is that commentators believe Sony waited too long to release the information on the hack – they should release the information immediately and not after a week into the attack and only after they realized how many accounts have been hacked and what kinds of personal information exposed and stolen.

The event of hacking into the Sony PlayStation Network and stealing of so many different personal information again opened up the question about security on Internet. Among the heavily criticised is also Sony’s way of storing the data they collect from their users. Most of the data is stored in unencrypted form and therefore even more vulnerable to different hacking attempts. Another problem, particularly on the side of the customers, is that people often use the same password for several different online accounts and therefore make it easier for the hackers to access additional personal data once they acquire our name and one password.

Some other commentators and authors of articles took different approach and haven’t focused on criticising Sony or elaborating on the problem of the hack and security issues; they focused on the customers. One of this kind is the article Sony PlayStation Network Hacked: 8 Things You Need To Do To Protect Yourself, in which author lists 8 things that potential victims of the Sony hack should do to protect themselves for experiencing even more damage. And the points listed in this article (and probably some additional) should take into account every Internet user. Because the best protection from information theft, identity theft, credit card theft, etc. is conscious use of the Internet and online services offered.