What You Should Know About The Future Of Online Learning

May 7, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Education

Expanding your online pedagogy toolkit (InsideHigherEd, 22 April 2014) – Next-generation online learning differs from last generation e-learning in six distinct ways. First , it is scalable. New instructional support models-including coaches and peer mentors- allow online courses that are not MOOCs to effectively reach many more students in the past. Second , it is personalized. It offers multiple learning pathways tailored to student learning styles, needs, and interests. Just-in-time remediation and enrichment are embedded and content reflects students’ learning goals. Third , it is outcomes-oriented. Mastery of explicit learning objectives, including content and skills, represents its aim. Fourth , it is data-driven. Learning analytics provide students, instructors, coaches, and advisers with dashboards that signal student progress and problems in real time. Fifth , it is social and interactive. Building on the notion of learning as a social process, next-generation online courses encourage student involvement in communities of practice and in personal learning networks, where they have opportunities to collaborate, test ideas, and motivate and assist one another. Six[th] , and perhaps most importantly, it is activity oriented. Next-generation online learning involves challenges, inquiry, and problem solving. Students, individually and in small groups, have opportunities to learn by doing. Depending on the nature of the course, they might engage in hypothesis formulation and testing, data analysis, or constructing and applying rubrics. Simulations, in particular, give students opportunities to mimic professional practice and exercise real-world skills. Here are a series of techniques that you might use to build essential student skills, promote social interaction, and encourage active learning in an online environment * * *

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.

When Can You Tweet A Celebrity Photo?

May 5, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Social Media

When can you tweet a celebrity photo? (GigaOM, 10 April 2014) – Katherine Heigl, a former star on Grey’s Anatomy , is not happy that New York drugstore chain Duane Reade tweeted a picture of her leaving its store. Now, she is suing the company for $6 million in damages, which Heigl says she will donate to a charity named for her late brother. The conflict, which raises interesting questions about endorsements in the age of social media, began after gossip site JustJared posted pictures of Heigl leaving a store with her mother, carrying shopping bags. Soon after, Duane Reade tweeted the photo along with a gleeful caption. Normally, celebrities can’t do much about people taking their picture in public place – it’s just part and parcel of the whole rich and famous thing. And, indeed, Heigl’s lawsuit, embedded below, suggests that JustJared had a right to post the photos since they were “news” (it’s not clear why anyone going to the drugstore is ever “news” – but that’s another story.) According to Heigl, Duane Reade crossed the line by adding the captions. In her view, this was an unauthorized endorsement in violation of federal trademark rules and the personality rights laws of New York state. She appears to have a case in that celebrities have a right to control the way their images are used for endorsement. You can’t, for instance, take a photo of Heigl walking by your donut shop and then use the snap to plaster billboards around the city that suggest she likes your donuts. The Duane Reade case is a little more nuanced, however, in that it involves Twitter which, by its nature, is often associated with fleeting news events. If JustJared had tweeted the original photo and Duane Reade has retweeted it with its own caption, the company would be in a stronger position to say it a fair use right to share the photo. Instead, Duane Reade’s behavior looks more like a calculated decision to use an authorized endorsement rather than any form of news reporting – a claim Heigl’s lawyers make repeatedly in the complaint. (It’s also not clear if the drugstore bought the rights for the photo from JustJared – if not, it could be facing a copyright case too).

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/kanate.

Growing Hacker Creativity

May 2, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Security

Hackers lurking in vents and soda machines (NYT, 7 April 2014) – Unable to breach the computer network at a big oil company, hackers infected with malware the online menu of a Chinese restaurant that was popular with employees. When the workers browsed the menu, they inadvertently downloaded code that gave the attackers a foothold in the business’s vast computer network. Security experts summoned to fix the problem were not allowed to disclose the details of the breach, but the lesson from the incident was clear: Companies scrambling to seal up their systems from hackers and government snoops are having to look in the unlikeliest of places for vulnerabilities. Hackers in the recent Target payment card breach gained access to the retailer’s records through its heating and cooling system. In other cases, hackers have used printers , thermostats and videoconferencing equipment. Companies have always needed to be diligent in keeping ahead of hackers – email and leaky employee devices are an old problem – but the situation has grown increasingly complex and urgent as countless third parties are granted remote access to corporate systems. This access comes through software controlling all kinds of services a company needs: heating, ventilation and air-conditioning; billing, expense and human-resources management systems; graphics and data analytics functions; health insurance providers; and even vending machines. Break into one system, and you have a chance to break into them all. Data on the percentage of cyberattacks that can be tied to a leaky third party is difficult to come by, in large part because victims’ lawyers will find any reason not to disclose a breach. But a survey of more than 3,500 global I.T. and cybersecurity practitioners conducted by a security research firm, the Ponemon Institute, last year found that roughly a quarter – 23 percent – of breaches were attributable to third-party negligence. Security experts say that figure is low. Arabella Hallawell, vice president of strategy at Arbor Networks, a network security firm in Burlington, Mass., estimated that third-party suppliers were involved in some 70 percent of breaches her company reviewed.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Salvatore Vuono.

Cyber-Risk: How Do You And Your Firm Score?

April 30, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Legal News

KKR adds cyber-risk score to its assessment of companies (Bloomberg, 11 April 2014) – How important is cybersecurity to investors? The private equity firm KKR (KKR) just provided its own answer to that, adding a cyber-risk score to its assessment of the companies in its portfolio. About a year ago, KKR officials decided they needed to find a way to understand the current state of security at the companies they were invested in, as Chief Information Office Ed Brandman tells it. That goal might sound simple, but how to get there wasn’t obvious for a diverse set of 90 companies across a range of industries and regions. KKR worked with BitSight Technologies to come up with what amounts to a credit score for cyber risk. BitSight, based in Cambridge, Mass., collects Internet traffic flowing to and from tens of thousands of companies. Its staff members analyze risky behavior, such as communications with spam networks or servers known to be controlled by hackers and cybercriminals, to come up with a score for cyber risk on a scale from 250 (worst) to 900 (best). Subscribers to the service use it to help assess the security at third parties with whom they may share sensitive data and to benchmark their own performance, says Stephen Boyer, chief technology officer at BitSight. Bitsight did the same for 70 of KKR’s private equity holdings-excluding some in the portfolio that KKR was about to sell or had just bought.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.

Anonymization Examined

April 28, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment News

Article 29 WP Opinion on anonymization (Opinion 05/2140, 10 April 2014) – (from Executive Summary): In this Opinion, the WP analyses the effectiveness and limits of existing anonymisation techniques against the EU legal background of data protection and provides recommendations to handle these techniques by taking account of the residual risk of identification inherent in each of them. The WP acknowledges the potential value of anonymisation in particular as a strategy to reap the benefits of ‘open data’ for individuals and society at large whilst mitigating the risks for the individuals concerned. However, case studies and research publications have shown how difficult it is to create a truly anonymous dataset whilst retaining as much of the underlying information as required for the task. In the light of Directive 95/46/EC and other relevant EU legal instruments, anonymisation results from processing personal data in order to irreversibly prevent identification. In doing so, several elements should be taken into account by data controllers, having regard to all the means “likely reasonably” to be used for identification (either by the controller or by any third party). * * *

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Idea go.

Fake Cell Towers Remain A Mystery

April 25, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Security

Cities reluctant to reveal whether they’re using fake cell tower devices (ArsTechnica, 25 March 2014) – For some time now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been on a quest to better understand the use and legality of “stingrays.” These devices, which are also known as international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, or fake cell towers, can be used to track phones or, in some cases, intercept calls and text messages. The “Stingray” itself is a trademarked product manufactured by a Florida-based company, the Harris Corporation. (It has since come to be used as a generic term, like Xerox or Kleenex.) Harris is notoriously secretive about the capabilities of its devices and generally won’t talk to the press about their capabilities or deployments. Earlier in March, the ACLU filed a motion for public access request , requesting documents and information related to stingray use by nearly 30 Florida police and sheriff’s departments. Among the responses published for the first time on Tuesday was the curious reply from the city of Sunrise, Florida, a town of about 88,000 people, just northwest of Miami. Through its lawyers, Sunrise officially denied the request , noting that the city would neither confirm nor deny “whether any records responsive to the Request exist and, if any responsive records do exist, cannot and will not public disclose those records.” (In a footnote, the lawyers also cited this Ars story from September 2013 detailing stingrays and other related surveillance devices.) The ACLU published its response to the city’s denial on Tuesday. As the ACLU points out in a Tuesday blog post , the city of Sunrise has already published an invoice from Harris on its own website dated March 13, 2013, showing that the city paid over $65,000 for a stingray. That document clearly states, in all-caps on each page, that “disclosure of this document and the information it contains are strictly prohibited by Federal Law.”

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/photoexplorer.