Pandemia: Welcome! Inside The Social Media Strategy That Made Batkid Go Viral On November 15th, a five year-old named Miles Scott barreled into public consciousness as Batkid, a crime-fighting San Francisco superhero who takes on tricky villains like the Riddler and the Penguin, all while cruising around in a Lamborghini. That day, Miles, a Make-a-Wish Foundation grantee who recently finished chemotherapy treatments for leukemia, received Twitter shout-outs from Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and millions of others. He also had a crowd of tens of thousands cheering him on in person. The event, while heartwarming, didn't randomly go viral all on its own (few things do), though it may have seemed like it to anyone watching as #SFBatKid showed up every five seconds in their Twitter stream. Pomponi came across the planned Batkid event, which involved Miles rescuing a damsel in distress from the train tracks, stopping the Penguin from kidnapping the San Francisco Giants seal mascot, and getting the key to the city from the mayor, on local blog SFist.
Save Publishing: Tweet Everything Why You Can't Talk About "Hair Bacon" (And Lots Of Other Things) On Chinese Social Media Hoobastank, the American rock band behind the cloying 2003 earworm “The Reason,” is not welcome on Sina Weibo, China’s premier microblogging site. The censors do not approve. At first, Jason Q. Instead, Ng ran another search. Behind China’s “Great Firewall” of censorship, Sina, a private company, employs an army of scrubs to keep posts in line with the state’s one-party agenda. Ng uses a unique and revealing method of tracking blocked terms. So far, he’s tested 700,000 keywords, 1,500 of which were blocked. Some of the terms are fairly obvious, like “one person blocking tanks” (self-explanatory). Over time, Ng has noticed that Weibo’s censorship approach has changed. “The government is forging more of these offline connections to try and bring in and collaborate with these Internet users. Going forward, Ng will continue to update his Blocked on Weibo Tumblr, but he has launched another project that will further analyze dissemination of ideas behind the Great Firewall.
Bookmarklets The Easy Way (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE9+, etc) If you're using a browser that supports it, you should be able to click and drag each of the three bookmarklets below to your bookmarks or favorites bar. Scrubs web pages of distractions and provides a clean, comfortable view. Handy for reading longer articles. Read Later Registered users enjoy their articles whenever and wherever they want. Send any article directly to your Kindle for reading later in the comfortable Readability view. The Not So Easy Way(s) While many browsers make installing bookmarklets easy, there are as many that make it somewhat to very difficult. • iOS: iPhone, iPad, Apple II, etc First, choose the bookmarklet you would like to install and copy the code from the textbox below. Do that for each and you should wind up with three bookmarks in mobile Safari: Read Now, Read Later, and Send to Kindle. If you have any questions, start with this Help page, which includes a link to contact us.
This Scientist Uses The New York Times Archive To Eerily, Accurately Predict The Future The New York Times might be a widely respected chronicler of past events, but can we use it to divine the future? Kira Radinsky, a 27-year-old Israeli computer prodigy dubbed the “web prophet” says yes. Radinsky, who appeared this year on MIT’s prestigious list of top 35 inventors under the age of 35 (previous winners include the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin), and who started university at the age of 15 and received her Ph.D. in computer science at 26, has developed a unique system which she claims has already predicted the first cholera epidemic in Cuba in many decades, many of the riots that started the Arab Spring, and other important world events. The complex computer algorithms she wrote collect immense volumes of electronic data--most notably several decades of New York Times archives but also anything from Twitter feeds to Wikipedia entries--and processes it to extract little-known cause and effect patterns that can be used to predict future events.
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The 10 Governments That Requested (And Got) The Most Facebook User Data Internet firms like Twitter and Google have started releasing transparency reports in the last few years, sharing with the public some information about requests they get from governments to hand over private details about specific users or accounts. Facebook joined in today, issuing the first of what it says will be regular transparency reports, this one covering the first six months of 2013. In total, 74 countries sought data from Facebook for about 38,000 total users--a pretty staggering number considering that it comprises 3% of the network’s total 1.15 billion users as of June [editor's note: Due to a, er, calculation error, this number was grossly inflated. It's .003%] (though governments were not successful at obtaining the information they sought all of these cases). In fact, as Forbes notes, Facebook was actually less likely to hand over user data than Google (79% of the time compared to 88% over similar periods), according to both companies’ self-reported statistics.
An Updated Digital Differentiation Model This is part of a Digital Differentiation model, my way i of weaving a web of flexible tools together for teaching and learning. To keep the model relevant, frequent updates are required, as new tools and trends emerge. To access the most current resources, please click on the tab at the top of this blog: Digital Differentiation - Current Updating Ten months ago I published a Digital Differentiation model on this blog. Technology is a tool that can be used to help teachers facilitate learning experiences that address the diverse learning needs of all students and help them develop 21st Century Skills, an idea supported by the Common Core. At it's most basic level, digital tools can be used to help students find, understand and use information. The goal is to design student-driven learning experiences that are fueled by standards-based Essential Questions and facilitated by digital tools to provide students with flexible learning paths. 3 Components: Essential Questions Flexible Learning Paths