21st Century Learning and Teaching

Internet security has changed the bureau’s priorities on national security

INFOSEC: CYBER CRIME is fast becoming a threat to surpass terrorism, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Wednesday,

===> announcing that it has changed its priorities to focus on cyber security as "a national security threat". <===

Thirty years later, we’re still “a nation at risk.”

THE changes needed to professionalize American education won’t be easy. They will require money, political will and the audacity to imagine that teaching could be a profession on a par with fields like law and medicine. But failure to change will be more costly — we could look up in another 30 years and find ourselves, once again, no better off than we are today. Several of today’s top performers, like South Korea, Finland and Singapore, moved to the top of the charts in one generation.

Real change in America is possible, but only if we stop tinkering at the margins.

Jal Mehta, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is theauthor of the forthcoming book “The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling.”

Speaking to the “do not track issue” regarding the data of social network profiles, Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said she wasn’t sure that a “do not track” browser setting accurately reflected a user’s wish to not to be tracked online, particularly in cases where companies such as Facebook tracked users to enable the very feature that customizes the user experience on the popular social network. Egan added, “For Facebook, we have social plugins. We don’t use that data for an advertising purpose — we use it to personalize the data on those pages.

===> ” Egan maintains that until the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets an official standard, “it’s really hard for companies like us.” More browser platforms may push ahead with a standard of their own, implementing settings that will enable expanded user control to block cookies, such as Internet Explorer’s default do not track setting. <===

This summer, citizens in cities across the Nation will join together to improve their communities and governments as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans.  

While civic hacking communities have long worked to improve our country and the world, this summer will mark the first time local developers from across the Nation unite around the shared mission of addressing and solving challenges relevant to OUR blocks, OUR neighborhoods, OUR cities, OUR states, and OUR country. 

National Day of Civic Hacking will provide citizens an opportunity to do what is most quintessentially American: roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to improve our society.

Even if you've never downloaded copyrighted content in your life, the new policy may put a damper on your Web surfing at the local cafe.

A new bill calls on Congress to fund $500 million in grants to states and districts for educational technology, and supporters say it could replace the old Enhancing Education Through Technology (E2T2) program, which died in 2011.