September 2009

Web 2.0 tools hold great promise for education, but they also pose a number of challenges for educators. To help teachers and administrators navigate these challenges, while also becoming "disruptive leaders" in their schools, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) has released two new whitepapers as part of its recent focus on Web 2.0 and education. "Social Networking: Personalized Content, Conversations & Communities" is the latest publication in CoSN's EdTechNext series on emerging technologies for education. "How 2 B a Disruptive Technology Leader" recaps CoSN's Leadership Forum on this topic at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference earlier this year. Both reports are available only to CoSN members.

Americans are traveling despite the economy, but only about half are using the Internet to research and make travel arrangements. About 117 million Americans -- or about 52% of U.S. adults -- have taken at least a two-day trip in the last two years. But only 47% of them used to Internet to research travel services. And 39% of recent travelers say online media actually influenced their choice of travel services, with hotel/bed and breakfast Web sites having the most influence. The data is per Westerville, Ohio-based Ad-ology Research's study on media influence on consumer choice in travel services. The firm says online content also influenced 34% to visit local attractions and events, like amusement parks, zoos, and concerts. Traditional media influenced 27% of travelers and 32.7% of those visiting local attractions. Cost and value are the most important considerations, per the study, which suggests that the most-researched topics are airfares and hotel/motel rates. Thirty-four percent used the Internet to search for flights; 31% to search for hotels.

On Tuesday, the group within the United Nations that focuses on economic development (the Development Policy and Analysis Division) released its annual World Economic and Social Survey. The 2009 version of this report is entitled "Promoting Development, Saving the Planet," and focuses on how climate change issues will impact the developing world. It's a sprawling document, but the basic thesis is simple, and one that's widely recognized: we cannot afford to have the developing world follow an unsustainable path to modernization. From the perspective of international development, this creates multiple challenges, but there's an entire chapter of the report dedicated to technology and intellectual property issues. Because of its massive advantage in research, most sustainable technology will be produced by the developed world. This alone runs the risk of perpetuating the current inequality. But the issues run far deeper, as things like renewable energy sources have to be serviced and maintained locally, while sustainable practices will involve software and practices that have to operate within the developing economy. Even if we accept a perpetuation of the situation where the developed world sells things like solar panels to their developing partners, that's not enough to set those partners on a sustainable path. What will ultimately be needed, it's argued, is technology transfer on a massive scale, and money to make sure the technology gets put to good use.

With social media on the rise, traditional Internet portals such as Yahoo and AOL, once the front doors to the online world, are being spurned in favor of social sites, where users are discovering a new, more personal filter to the infinite world of the Internet. This behavioral change has forced content providers to adapt quickly. Rather than assuming that users will seek out their content, media organizations - from the big international newspaper groups, down to the small local publications - are now actively promoting their content on social networks, and encouraging readers to distribute links to their friends. It is de rigueur for news websites to be embedded with devices that automatically publish articles to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and to content sharing websites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.