Wayne Barry's Public Library

In Denmark, the government has taken the bold step of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school year exams.

A total of 14 colleges in Denmark are piloting the new system of exams and all schools in the country have been invited to join the scheme by 2011.

Greve High School, south of Copenhagen, is one of the pilot schools.

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Human suspicion of realistic robots and avatars may have earlier origins than previously thought.

The phenomenon, called the uncanny valley, describes the disquiet caused by synthetic people which almost, but not quite, match human expressiveness.

Experiments with macaque monkeys show they too are suspicious of replicas that fall short of the real thing.

The research suggests a deep-seated evolutionary origin for the reactions such artificial entities evoke.

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Trailer for "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, published by Princeton University Press 2009.

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I did it. I committed social suicide. It was weeks before anyone noticed. A total of two people contacted me to ask if it was true. Which just goes to show that Facebook really is all about passively stalking and mostly ignoring everyone in your friends list.

In the end, I enjoyed Facebookless life for about a month. I came back to the fold because I missed the light-touch contact that Facebook affords me with far-distant family and friends. Like it or hate it (and boy, do I hate it) – Facebook is here to stay. I’d already had permissions in place when I left. The plan now is to lock it all down completely and start sharing from scratch.

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Do you remember your first time – the trepidation, the expectation, the rite of passage? Mine was in 1997 – "things can only get better" – opening up the heavy black Mac Powerbook I'd just unwrapped, going through the unintelligible process of account creation with a patient BT support desk, plugging in various fat cables and listening as the dial-up connection went through its slow motions: the little digital jingle of the phone number and then the long expectant screech and babble of static as your machine attempted to connect, an electric chatter in which I could imagine – that first time – I heard all the world's voices talking to one another, the ultimate party line. It was, I guess, the closest most of my generation came to tuning in and turning on. This was seven years before Facebook, eight before YouTube. Amazon was still a river in south America, Google was an unlikely algorithm in the minds of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, which they were then thinking of calling "BackRub".

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When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community

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Desire to protect status and student contact fuels resistance to e-learning. Rebecca Attwood writes

Academics are resistant to e-learning because they feel it threatens their identity as tutors and because they want to protect face-to-face teaching relationships, a study has found.

Janet Hanson, head of education enhancement at Bournemouth University, conducted a group interview with nine academics and in-depth individual interviews with a further five at a university in the south of England.

She found that when academics saw that their students' technological expertise exceeded their own, their identities as "expert knowledge providers" was undermined.

In such cases, academics perceive a shift in the balance of power between themselves and their students, Dr Hanson writes, losing their role as the "gatekeepers" of knowledge.

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A recent study by industry group the Participatory Marketing Network has unearthed some surprising data on Gen Y behavior. Apparently, the members of this young demographic (ages 18-24) would rather give up their social networking accounts before they would abandon their email. Given that this generation is typically viewed as "plugged in" digital natives who don't have any use for email, the study raises many questions. Have the previous reports about Generation Y's disdain for email simply been wrong? Or has Gen Y grown up a bit now and has learned the necessity of the medium?

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Last year, I spent a lot of time exploring the many new social networks for scientists that hit the market. At the time, my conclusions were that most, if not all, failed to offer anything that the scientists I work with were interested in doing; that the networks demanded a significant time commitment; and that scientists (at least biologists) were ignoring them in droves. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time with these networks since then, as there hasn’t been anything particularly new or exciting offered, and participation still seems to be lagging.

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A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they "couldn't live" without the internet.

The report, published by online charity YouthNet, also found that four out of five young people used the web to look for advice.

About one third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online.

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The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, admitted that the // in a web address were "unnecessary".

He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes.

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New things are exciting. For example social networking. It’s a whole new way to interact with others, a reason why society is moving online isn’t it? But how to make it useful? What can we do with this new digital tool that goes beyond chit-chat? It should be possible to use facebook and Twitter for something of value for education but which one is better? Which one is more popular? Maybe there is something new just around the corner? …What could we do with Google Wave?…

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Jay Shepherd’s commonsense approach to corporate policy for use of social media. Includes 140-character policy for Twitter:
“I generally advocate a simpler approach that involves treating employees as grown-ups who have judgment. See, for example, “A two-word corporate blogging policy” and “The world’s shortest employee handbook.”

With that said, here is my take at a corporate Twitter policy that has the extra added benefit of being itself twitterable:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit ‘update.’ ”

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I wonder if Twitter’s main strength is the way it enables what I’m going to call “ambient collegiality”.

This idea is partially based on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of “ambient intimacy”

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social media higher education social networking twitter collegiality

Having data is one thing – but being able to present it in interesting ways is often just as important. Maps are, of course, the perfect example of data visualisation; but the Department of Communities and Local Government has now launched a portal that aims to show all of government how best to display data to bring out the stories hidden beneath the numbers.

A newly-launched site, Dataviz carries the tagline "Improving data visualisation for the public sector", and carries a number of examples and case studies of representations of data from government.

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public sector data visualisation

The premiere of ABC’s FlashForward last night was positively Lost-ish, with the pilot episode promising at least one solid season of strong character drama and compelling mystery (not to mention the incongruous appearance of an exotic mammal). It also hinted strongly at being one of the first major network dramas to really understand the potential of social media.

In the pilot, the entire world’s population falls unconscious for two minutes and 17 seconds, at which point they each have a vision of what they’ll be doing on April 29, 2010 — and thus everyone on Earth has a unique experience that, when shared with others, might help decode the mystery behind the Global Black Out. Thus a plucky young FBI agent suggests that they build a web site to compile said “flashes.”

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TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.

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It was a throwaway statistic in an article about the heavy metal band Slayer that got Jonathan Pieslak thinking. During the Gulf war, he read, some 40% of the band's fan mail came from soldiers stationed in the Middle East.

Professor Pieslak is a music theorist at the City College of New York. Over the past few years he has interviewed US soldiers about the music they listen to and - more importantly - what they listen to it for.

You wouldn't expect much Chris de Burgh or Barry White to come floating over the barbed wire fences around military camps in Iraq or Afghanistan, and Pieslak's research confirms the hunch. The playlists are dominated by Slayer, Metallica, Eminem and others.

What's interesting about the work is not so much which bands soldiers are drawn to, but the extraordinary terms they use to describe the power the music has over them. Some talk about tracks turning them into monsters, making them inhuman so they can do inhuman acts.

The subjects of Pieslak's interviews are among the first generation to take MP3 players to war. Some, only half joking, say iPods should be standard issue for soldiers. The psychological effect the music has, and highly stressful situations, make for a powerful mix.

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Electric Dreams explores how the technological revolution of the 1970s, 80s and 90s has transformed Britain’s homes and all our lives.

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PsychNology Journal (ISSN 1720-7525) is a quadrimestral, international, peer-reviewed journal on the relationship between humans and technology. The name 'PsychNology' emphasizes its multidisciplinary interest in all issues related to the human adoption and development of technologies. Its broad scope allows to host in a sole venue advances and ideas that would otherwise remain confined within separate communities or disciplines. PNJ is an independent, electronic publication that leaves the copyright to authors, and provides wide accessibility to their papers through the Internet and several indexing and abstracting services including PsycInfo and EBSCO.

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