Eathompson314's List: Digital Literacy Vocabulary

• The ability to use digital technology, communication tools or networks to locate, evaluate, use and create information. 1
   The ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers. 2
   A person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment… Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments. 3
• Digital Literacy includes learning how to use technology’s tools. The list of digital tools is never ending. New releases make something that was new yesterday old today. Educators as well as students must thoughtfully determine which tools are essential to their digital literacy tool kit. Tool kit’s vary from one educator to another as they do from one student to another. Once you have mastered a particular tool, move on to another so you can increase your digital power.

• Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet. As a Cornell student, activities including writing papers, creating multimedia presentations, and posting information about yourself or others online are all a part of your day-to-day life, and all of these activities require varying degrees of digital literacy. Is simply knowing how to do these things enough? No—there’s more to it than that.  

     

    Consider how easy it is to cut, paste, share, rip, burn, and post media—at home and in the classroom. These activities seem as though they must be legal and appropriate, because they’re so easy to perform. Unfortunately, the assumption that what can be done, may be done, is often wrong.
• Digital literacy is an important topic because technology is changing faster than society is. The same advances that enhance leisure and make our work easier—those that make it possible for us to search online databases, text friends, and stream media—also present urgent challenges to the social norms, market models, and legal frameworks that structure our society. The rules of appropriate behavior in these digital contexts may be unknown or unknowable. Well-established concepts such as copyright, academic integrity, and privacy are now difficult to define, as their meanings are in flux.

• Today’s students have come of age in an era of digital media. However, proficiency with YouTube and Facebook does not necessarily mean that your child is digitally literate—that he has the technological skills to meet the digital demands required to succeed in school and beyond.
• Wikipedia defines digital literacy as “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology. It involves a working knowledge of current high-technology, and an understanding of how it can be used.”
• The demand for digital know-how at the high school and college levels has increased dramatically in recent years. For example, students today may be asked to e-mail coursework, including slideshows, documents, and other digital media to their instructors and/or classmates. They’re expected to access syllabi and assignments online, either directly through the school’s website or through specific software applications. They may have to engage in class discussions in chat rooms and forums, or blog about their experiences. And those are just a handful of examples of how things have changed in a few short years.
• To succeed in this digital environment, students must be able to retrieve information rapidly and accurately and consolidate learning into long-term memory quickly and proficiently. Doing that places an increased load on working memory for in-the-moment problem-solving and requires greater reliance on print. It also demands that students comprehend complex language and abstract concepts.
• Students with learning disabilities may have weak working memory as well as difficulties with rapid processing of information, including weaknesses in oral and text language. It is, therefore, critically important to develop not only their traditional literacy skills, but also their digital literacy skills.
• The moment a student is diagnosed with a reading and/or writing disability, remediation should begin, and that remediation should be paired with instruction through accessible digital media. That media can be pictures, videos, and especially electronic reading.

  • Look into a school grant for computer aided learning at home. memory enhancement, speed enhancement, note taking, writing tips
• Electronic reading provides students with access to digital tools that are not available in traditional reading. Such tools include: highlighted, text-to-speech reading of text, embedded electronic dictionary and thesaurus, picture dictionary, study tools, writing tools such as word prediction and speech recognition, semantic mapping, electronic fact gathering and organization, automatic formatting of sources, and much more. Most important for students with LD, digital text and electronic reading programs provide critical access to textual materials that these students might otherwise not be able to access and understand.

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• The idea of digital literacy often stops at “my students don’t have access.”  This really bothers me for two main reasons.  In reality your students do have some access (
• if we stop the conversation at access we miss the much larger challenge we will have to tackle – developing instructional models.  Simply putting a computer/iPad/netbook in the hands of a child will not meet the digital literacy goals of the Common Core Standards.  I have observed technology being used as a powerful component of meaningful instruction and then walked into the room next door and coached the teacher into putting the computers back into the cart.  Technology alone is not the answer.  To meet the needs of the Common Core Standards, we will have to focus our attention on powerful instructional practices that make strategic use of technology.

• Reading through this portrait, hopefully you noticed three main parts:

   
   
  • Students need to conduct effective online research;
   
  • Students need to integrate both online and offline research into what they are learning;
   
  • Students need to be familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select those best suited to their communication goals.
• These three components are fairly broad, but from my experience working in classrooms, I would say that most students are receiving some instruction that might meet the first two bullets.  We still have quite a bit of work to do in this area, but we have at least begun the journey. However, the third bullet is where we really need to pay attention as educators.  Can your students make strategic decisions about when it would be most appropriate to use a blog post, video, or podcast to convey their ideas?  Do they have knowledge of any of these tools?  Do your teachers?  Do your teachers and students have access to these types of digital texts in the form of hardware, software, and networking policies?
•  As a class, the teacher and students develop a collective definition for the genre and throughout the writing process refer back to mentor texts for strategies and ideas on creating their own pieces.  This model easily works whether students are producing persuasive essays, research reports, 30-second public service announcements, or podcasts.
•  One pair caught my attention when one student said to her partner, “I don’t think that’s how you use a quotation mark…let’s check our mentor text.”

• As a class, this group of students has created fourteen ebooks while building research, writing, and technological skills.  Through this project they are modeling many of the digital literacy skills and practices called out by the Common Core Standards.  All by itself, a technology-rich Writing Workshop may not solve every digital literacy need, but it is an instructional approach we should consider and adapt across content areas.  It is important to note that access is still quite important.  This particular class has about ten iPads.  That means students have to regularly work in triads and do not all have equal access to the technology.  However, this class demonstrates that we can all begin our digital literacy journey with the resources we currently have in place while simultaneously developing plans to increase the level of technology to support every student.

   

  Joe

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• What does it mean to be a good digital citizen?

   

  Digital citizenship requires ethical behavior. Just like there are expectations of honest, thoughtful, and respectful behavior at home, in school, and in your community, there are expectations of honest, thoughtful, and respectful behavior online.
• Digital Citizenship: A safe, responsible, and ethical approach to functioning in the digital world
• Think about the ethical standards of behavior you follow in real-life, and apply those same standards to your behavior online.
• Entering the digital world is in some ways like encountering a new culture. You may make some mistakes. In most cases, you won't be able to see the other people with whom you're communicating. Facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice that are important in face-to-face communication to convey meaning are absent in Internet communication. You might write an email or post a message that offends people without meaning to. Be confident in what you write, but try not to hurt other's feelings.
• • Be positive when you exchange ideas and information through the Internet. If you feel that you need to criticize someone, try to balance constructive criticism with complimentary feedback. Be pleasant and polite, and avoid using offensive language.  No bullying, hate speech, or abuse of any kind should be tolerated and violations should be reported.  
   
  • Emails, posting to social media pages, text messages (any information shared through mobile phones and the internet) are all public and can move very quickly across the digital world. Information that you may think is private can be shared and read by people whom you don't even know! Be careful and avoid sharing confidential information (anything that you wouldn't want to see published in your local newspaper).
   
  • Avoid using  all capital letters (CAPS) when you write email or post messages. Messages in CAPS can often be interpreted as anger, or yelling.
• • Think carefully about how you present yourself online. 
     
    •  <!--[endif]-->Spelling and grammar matter when you're communicating online. Sloppy writing can be interpreted as being disrespectful. Remember, people are making assessments of you without the benefit of interacting with you face-to-face. People will understand mistakes if you're not writing in your first language, but try your best.
     
    • Think about all your different internet communication options and what they convey about you as a person. Perhaps you've completed a profile where you've provided information about yourself (e.g., where you go to school, or your favorite color or movie) or post regular messages to a social media site (like Twitter) or have even uploaded a photo or other image (avatar) of yourself. Consider the image of yourself that you are sharing with the digital world.
     
     
   
  • Respect other people's work. If you do want to incorporate someone 's ideas into your work, it's ok to do this in your own words and acknowledge them as your source. Don't simply copy and re-send  or post information from the internet and pretend it's your own work.

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• Each day the world is becoming increasingly digital/ Your students begin to use more and more technology devices at home and in the classroom. But, are they prepared to be good digital citizens? Just as you teach your students the rules of society, it is imperative that you teach them the rules of the digital world, and how to be safe and responsible with technology. Mike Ribble shows you how in, Digital Citizenship in Schools, Second Edition.
• DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP IN SCHOOLS15Copyright 2011, ISTE ® (International Society for Technology in Education), Digital Citizenship in Schools, Second edition, Mike Ribble. 1.800.336.5191 or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org. All rights reserved. Distribution and copying of this excerpt is allowed for educational purposes and use with full attribution to ISTE.The nine elements of digital citizenship were identified after evaluating hundreds of articles, books, and news broadcasts related to technology use, misuse, and abuse. These nine elements focus on today’s issues, though they have the flexibility to accommodate technology changes in the foreseeable future.

• New technology and social media has done amazing things for the average person, providing the opportunity for anyone to voice their opinion, to connect to similar-minded people and to communicate with others across the digital space. Social media also has its negatives, such as the trend of people being dishonest when online and, conversely, of revealing private and intimate information when online.
• There's a growing awareness of the potential negative impact from 'oversharenting': how a parent's sharing of private details about their children could be harmful to the child's healthy social and psychological development. I
• Parents can experience more social isolation than non-parents and social media provides an opportunity to connect with others.
• Consider this social media profile: the mother's profile picture is an image of her child, there is very little mention of the father or other friends or family, and the majority of the status updates and images posted relate to activities or commentary about the child. Here's another example: a parent who after the birth of their child creates an email address and social media account, and then begins posting on behalf of that newborn child. You could be forgiven for wondering why an individual's online activity appears to be more about someone else than it is about their self. Obviously the purpose of the profile is important here -- a blog about motherhood which is located within a community of other parents is totally appropriate if that was the intention in creating that account.
• But isn't it strange that this rule of courtesy doesn't extend to children, who are unable to give informed consent to having their information shared publicly? Is it because of an assumption that children aren't likely to read or understand the information, and therefore won't be affected by it? This belief is unfortunately short-sighted because it fails to consider that online information could be permanently recorded and that one day the child will be interested and capable of looking at this information.
• Aside from the privacy issues, this type of behavior reveals an identity issue and loss of boundaries between parent and child. A profile picture is what we choose to show of ourselves to the outside world; there's already been considerable research and discussion about how profile photos are carefully chosen to show us at our best and how they also reveal information about our identity or our values. By choosing to show a profile image of their child the person reveals that they over-identify with their 'parent' role, and the focus on writing about the child shows they've prioritized the child as the most important aspect of them self, rather than discussing their self as a distinct individual with separate interests and hobbies.
• According to Jacques Lacan, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, a crucial phase of child development is the 'mirror stage' which he believed occurred between the ages of six months to eighteen-months-old. It is during this stage that the formation of the ego occurs; this develops from awareness within the child of the differentiation between itself and the external world.
• It is through the attention of the parents, commonly the mother, that the child gains an opportunity to see itself as a separate being by reflection from the other person. One of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis is the belief that problems in this stage of development will continue to occur in the social relationships of this individual throughout their lifespan. So, how does a child properly develop this sense of "otherness" when the parent has over-identified with their role, and the child is an extension of the parent's identity? The result is that the child will constantly look to others for reassurance or confirmation of who they are, their existence is dependent on their relationship to another person.
• Parents have a responsibility to do their best to assist their children with developing into healthy balanced individuals. Part of this responsibility is acknowledging the child's right to privacy and their right to be respected as an individual, balanced with also monitoring and supervising them. It is also important for children to grow up to make their own choices about who they are and how they want to represent themselves, without having their identities formed for them by pre-existing information on social media -- a reflection of stories, images and opinions of which they are not the author. Access to online activities should be introduced at age-appropriate developmental stages. Assisting a child to set up an account or profile is an opportunity to discuss with them responsible and respectful online activity and empowers the child to assume ownership of their digital identity.

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• Then I thought with so many students now involved in social media such as facebook, instagram, pinterest and twitter, how much information are they leaving by not checking their privacy settings but leaving things on default?
• Watch this video to see how easy it is to find out information about you. Jenny Luca, director of ICT and eLearning at a college in Australia used this with her grade 7-12 students. Read her post to find out their reactions. Jenny then directed me to another tweet from Doug Peterson in Canada linking to this post from lifehacker.
• You also leave a footprint when you sign up to join websites such as Moshi Monsters, Voki, Animoto and photopeach.  Do you ever check the terms of service or privacy settings? Have you joined a site that says you must be over 13 years old yet you are only 10?
• Activity 2. After watching the two videos, write a post about your digital footprint. Is it positive or negative? Would you be proud to have your grandparents or your future grandchildren look at everything you have included in your digital footprint? Why or why not? Maybe Google your name to see what is online about you, that you might not have put there. Remember to Google your nickname used in online games etc as information might be included there.

• Activity 3. Imagine you are debating this topic: It is better to have a negative digital footprint than no footprint at all. Give three reasons to support each side of the debate.

   

  Activity 4. Watch the third video. Why is it important to check out the settings whenever you buy a new device? Default settings often allow the manufacturer to gain information about you without you realising it.

   

  Activity 5. Should all teachers,principals and parents have a digital footprint in this time of technology? Google your teacher or principal (with their permission first) or even your parents. What have they got online? Do they have some information you think should not be there? Discuss it with them. Write a post about the discussion you had without giving away personal information to your readers.
• ctivity 8. Mainly middle and high school students – There are 9 elements to being a good digital citizen.

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• Self-expression, creativity, social change, and one’s identity are all facets of a brand. Almost all Millennials are on Social Media, and have created various accounts to connect with their friends, family, classmates, and even their bosses or professors. Upon the creation of a Facebook or About.Me account, a student is inadvertently creating a brand for them self, whether they intend to or not. All someone has to do is type their name in a search engine, and all of the profiles or accounts a student has created (assuming they use their real name) will appear
• This is the creation of one’s digital identity – The personal brand, persona, or representation of one’s self via social media.
• A digital identity is, in my opinion, what this NY Times question is alluding to… When on social media platforms, students can express themselves in creative ways, in order to make a statement; align themselves with a group or belief; share information or their whereabouts; or to explain their mood, feelings, thoughts, reflections, or frustrations. This creative expression most certainly creates an online persona that is representative of the individual. This persona, brand, or digital identity, whether accurately or poorly portrayed, can have real life consequences or effects on that individuals life, so it is important for the Millennial generation to understand this, and seek to represent themselves in positive ways.
• The repercussions for presenting a negative digital identity can be serious… The loss of a job is one harsh example that is a real life consequence of a negative online persona. Complaining, posting inappropriate pictures, using dirty language, and having a negative disposition can all have lasting effects on one’s reputation. I am unsure if most college students are aware of the implications their digital identity can have on their college and professional careers…
• YES! No matter how much privacy we THINK exists, employers and colleges are constantly looking up applicants to see how they rank amongst the competition, therefore, you are ALWAYS selling yourself and your brand!
• In a 2007 study done by UMass, it was found that 25% of Colleges and Universities look students up online before making a decision of whether to review their applications or not. As well, about 75% of employers did that same with their new applicants…

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• Digital Identy matters7Our relationship with the Internet is changing. Mobile devices, wireless connectivity, and our increasing virtual presence across multiple social media services have all but collapsed the bound-ary between being online or offline.
• How does our online visibility affect who we think we are and our ability to act with purpose and intent? How should we ethically respond to concerns about the impact of one person’s online behaviour upon the lives of others. These are two of the questions that are explored here
• Together the virtual and the real form the seamless space in which many of us live out our daily lives. We fashion the self through social interaction, com-munity and network affiliations, and here come to construct our identities as well as interpret the identity of others
• Our ability to engage so readily with digital me-dia and online networks is empowering but our resultant actions also make us vulnerable. We suffer the pressures of information overload, time management and, as we argue in this publication, the need to curate our increasingly visible digital lives.
• In the Rhizome project we have been exploring the impact of social media on the construction, interpretation and management of online identi-ties
• Whether we call it ‘digital identity’, ‘online per-sona’ or ‘virtual self’ we are talking about ac-cumulated electronic data that references us as an individual
• the things that we say about our-selves, the things that others say about us, and/or the products of our electronic transactions that are driven by human-machine or machine-machine interactions.
• The practi-cal steps we take to manage our online presence when we are faced with multiple possibilities and often-contradictory advice.
• Digital Identy matters9It is impossible to decouple identity from our sense of self. Similarity and difference play a strong role in identification, and in the dialecti-cal process of knowing who we are and therefore where we can act. The digital spaces we inhabit are performative extensions to our real world activities and similarly our digital identity is not separate from what we understand as “identity”.

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• I've been writing about "digital rights management" (DRM) for years in this column, but here I am, about to write about it again. That's because DRM – sometimes called "copy protection software" or "digital restrictions management" – is one of the most salient, and least understood, facts about technology in the contemporary world.
• In the real world, "bare" DRM doesn't really do much. Before governments enacted laws making compromising DRM illegal (even if no copyright infringement took place), DRM didn't survive contact with the market for long. That's because technologically, DRM doesn't make any sense. For DRM to work, you have to send a scrambled message (say, a movie) to your customer, then give your customer a program to unscramble it. Anyone who wants to can become your customer simply by downloading your player or buying your device – "anyone" in this case includes the most skilled technical people in the world. From there, your adversary's job is to figure out where in the player you've hidden the key that is used to unscramble the message (the movie, the ebook, song, etc). Once she does that, she can make her own player that unscrambles your files. And unless it's illegal to do this, she can sell her app or device, which will be better than yours, because it will do a bunch of things you don't want it to do: allow your customers to use the media they buy on whatever devices they own, allow them to share the media with friends, to play it in other countries, to sell it on as a used good, and so on.
• Back in 1995, Bill Clinton's copyright tsar Bruce Lehman – a copyright lawyer, late of Microsoft – wrote a white paper proposing a new regulatory framework for the internet. It was bonkers. Under Lehman's plan, every copy of every work would have to be explicitly permitted and a license fee collected. That means that your computer would have to check for permission and pay a tiny royalty when it copied a file from the modem's buffer into memory, and from memory into the graphics card.
• Lehman's next stop was Geneva, where he convinced the UN's World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to enact key measures from his plan in international treaties (the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty). Then he got the US Congress to pass a law to comply with the treaty – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – that snuck much of the stuff that Gore had rejected into US law
• The DMCA is a long and complex instrument, but what I'm talking about here is section 1201: the notorious "anti-circumvention" provisions. They make it illegal to circumvent an "effective means of access control" that restricts a copyrighted work. The companies that make DRM and the courts have interpreted this very broadly, enjoining people from publishing information about vulnerabilities in DRM, from publishing the secret keys hidden in the DRM, from publishing instructions for getting around the DRM – basically, anything that could conceivably give aid and comfort to someone who wanted to do something that the manufacturer or the copyright holder forbade.
• Here, the Reimerdes case set another bad precedent: it moved computer code from the realm of protected expression into a kind of grey-zone where it may or may not be protected.
• Ever since Reimerdes, it's been clear that DRM isn't the right to prevent piracy: it's the right to make up your own copyright laws. The right to invent things that people aren't allowed to do – even though the law permits it -- and to embed these prohibitions in code that is illegal to violate. Reimerdes also showed us that DRM is the right to suppress speech: the right to stop people from uttering code or keys or other expressions if there is some chance that these utterances will interfere with your made-up copyright laws.
• The entertainment industry calls DRM "security" software, because it makes them secure from their customers. Security is not a matter of abstract absolutes, it requires a context. You can't be "secure," generally -- you can only be secure from some risk. For example, having food makes you secure from hunger, but puts you at risk from obesity-related illness.
• DRM assumes that the computer's owner is its adversary. For DRM to work, there has to be no obvious way to remove, interrupt or fool it. For DRM to work, it has to reside in a computer whose operating system is designed to obfuscate some of its files and processes: to deliberately hoodwink the computer's owner about what the computer is doing. If you ask your computer to list all the running programs, it has to hide the DRM program from you. If you ask it to show you the files, it has to hide the DRM files from you. Anything less and you, as the computer's owner, would kill the program and delete its associated files at the first sign of trouble.

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• With the prevalence of Internet accessibil-ity and worldwide connectivity ingrained within all aspects of American life, cyber attacks have now become an imposing security threat to the Federal Government, U.S.-based businesses, and to all American citizens.According to the University of Maryland – University College (2013), cyber security focuses on protecting computers, networks, programs and data from unin-tended or unauthorized access, change or destruction. During a Senate hearing in March 2013, the nation’s top intelligence officials warned that cyber attacks and digital spying are the top threats to national secu-rity, eclipsing terrorism. Sadly, cyber attacks are hap-pening every day to the federal government and have become a serious “all government” issue.
• drills and exercises, and personnel. To gain a greater understanding of cyber security related to the federal government, you need to understand the state of cy-ber security legislation, recognize cyber information resources, and learn how to stay in the know.
• The Cybersecurity Act of 2012, introduced by Sena-tors Joseph Lieberman [I-CT] and Susan Collins [R-ME] to the Senate in February 2012, called for the establishment of a National Cybersecurity Council to focus on cyber risk assessments, identification of criti-cal infrastructure, cybersecurity practices and proce-dures, and technical guidance. The bill was passed by the House of Representative previously, but stalled in the Senate. It was reintroduced in July 2012, but did not receive the required votes to pass. In February 2013 as an effort to fill the gap in legislation, President Obama released an Executive Order on Cybersecurityand the Presidential Policy Directive on Critical Infra-structure Security and Resilience (see the Resources section below for more information). With the Execu-tive Order and Presidential Directive in place, the gov-ernment can remain focused on cyber attacks and security practices, share cyber security-related infor-mation, and continue to rewrite the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 so that it can be passed into legislation (ASIS, 2013).
• Establishing national cyber security capabilities will provide the foundation on which to build operational functions in cyber re-sponse and recovery, and enhanced coordination of activities though all levels of the federal government. As such, funds from each of the Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) components – State Home-land Security Program, Urban Areas Security Initiative, Metropolitan Medical Response System, and Citizen Corps Program – can be used to invest in functions that support and enhance State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) cyber security programs.
• A better understanding of cyber threats and security measures will ultimately help strengthen your grant applications and improve your ability to secure the funding. Some areas where cyber security will surface include equipment investments, planning, training

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• • Avoid watchful eyes: 
     
    • Avoid working with your back to a window
     
    • When you are travelling on a plane or train, attach a privacy filter to your screen. A privacy filter is a clear film which restricts side-on viewing when applied to your screen. Only the person sitting in front of it (you) can see the screen.
     
     
   
  • When travelling, try to keep your equipment with you as much as possible. This prevents anyone from being able to obtain files from your computer or being able to introduce a Trojan horse.
   
  • All operating systems (Windows, Mac OS and Linux) let you protect your session with a password. Make sure you use this feature.
   
   

  

• Delete your tracks on a public computer

   

  If you work in an Internet café or on a computer which is not your own, make sure that you do not leave any traces once you've finished your work:

   
   
  1. If you have checked your email, Facebook or Twitter account, always make sure you log out.
   
  2. Delete your browsing history. This contains various information and an expert could also access some of your online accounts
   
  3. Never store your passwords in the browser on a public computer. If you do this by accident, delete them from the browser's memory when you've finished your work.
   
  4. Clear form entry fields
   
  5. Delete cookies

• Control access to your information

   

  Most online services (Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, Skype, etc.) let you recover a lost password by sending a password to your inbox. You must therefore protect your inbox as much as possible. If it is compromised, all your digital information could be too.

   

  Google's mail service, Gmail, offers an additional layer of security: ”two-step verification”. This service lets you protect your mail account with:

   
   
  1. a username
   
  2. a password
   
  3. a code that you receive on your mobile each time you connect to your mailbox.
   
   

  Therefore, without your mobile, you cannot access your mail.

   

  When you log into your Gmail mailbox, remember to click on the “Details” link at the bottom of the page. This opens a window which displays the recent connections to your inbox. This way, you can detect any suspicious activity.

• Use passphrases

   

  Password length is the key factor in creating a strong password which can resist a brute-force crack. Combining numbers, special characters and lower- and upper-case letters often creates weak passwords which are difficult to remember. If you use a “passphrase”, rather than a “password”, you can create a string of characters which is easy to remember and is much longer than your old passwords.

   
   
  • Th$jHTo%46: short and difficult to remember
   
  • I hear the sound of bells on the green pastures: easy to remember and, for an attacker, very difficult to guess

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• Increasingly, national stakeholders express concern that U.S. college graduates cannot adequately solve problems and think critically. As a set of cognitive abilities, critical thinking skills provide students with tangible academic, personal, and professional benefits that may ultimately address these concerns. As an instructional method, writing has long been perceived as a way to improve critical thinking. In the current study, the researchers compared critical thinking performance of students who experienced a laboratory writing treatment with those who experienced traditional quiz-based laboratory in a general education biology course. The effects of writing were determined within the context of multiple covariables. Results indicated that the writing group significantly improved critical thinking skills whereas the nonwriting group did not. Specifically, analysis and inference skills increased significantly in the writing group but not the nonwriting group. Writing students also showed greater gains in evaluation skills; however, these were not significant. In addition to writing, prior critical thinking skill and instructor significantly affected critical thinking performance, whereas other covariables such as gender, ethnicity, and age were not significant. With improved critical thinking skill, general education biology students will be better prepared to solve problems as engaged and productive citizens.
• In the past several years, an increasing number of national reports indicate a growing concern over the effectiveness of higher education teaching practices and the decreased science (and math) performance of U.S. students relative to other industrialized countries (Project Kaleidoscope, 2006 ).
• Specifically, business leaders are calling for graduates who possess advanced analysis and communication skills, for instructional methods that improve lifelong learning, and ultimately for an educational system that builds a nation of innovative and effective thinkers (Business-Higher Education Forum and American Council on Education, 2003 )
• any college faculty consider critical thinking to be one of the most important indicators of student learning quality. In its 2005 national report, the AACU indicated that 93% of higher education faculty perceived analytical and critical thinking to be an essential learning outcome (AACU, 2005) whereas 87% of undergraduate students indicated that college experiences contributed to their ability to think analytically and creatively. This same AACU report showed that only 6% of undergraduate seniors demonstrated critical thinking proficiency based on Educational Testing Services standardized assessments from 2003 to 2004. During the same time frame, data from the ACT Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency test showed a similar trend, with undergraduates improving their critical thinking less than 1 SD from freshman to senior year. Thus, it appears a discrepancy exists between faculty expectations of critical thinking and students' ability to perceive and demonstrate critical thinking proficiency using standardized assessments (AACU, 2005).
• Although they are not always transparent to many college students, the academic and personal benefits of critical thinking are well established; students who can think critically tend to get better grades, are often better able to use reasoning in daily decisions (
• Descriptive statistics of total critical thinking performance in the writing and nonwriting groups were also calculated (see Table 3). The writing group showed an average CCTST raw score change of 1.18 compared with the nonwriting group, which showed an average raw score change of −0.51. These critical thinking raw scores equated to gains in national percentile rank of 7.47 (45th to 53rd percentile) for the writing group and −2.09 (42nd to 40th percentile) for the nonwriting group. Critical thinking improvement in the writing group was approximately nine times greater than the nonwriting group
• The ANCOVA test of total critical thinking skill indicated that gender, ethnicity, age, class standing, and academic term did not significantly affect critical thinking performance (see

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• CRITICAL   THINKING is the active and systematic process of

   
   
  • Communication
     
  • Analysis
   
  • Synthesis
   
  • Problem-solving
   
  • Evaluation
   
  • Reflection
   
   

  both individually and in community to

   
   
  • Foster understanding
   
  • Support sound decision-making and
   
  • Guide action
• Whether delving into assigned readings or confronting realistic problems, it   helps to systematically review the different elements of critical   thinking. SPC's faculty champions have developed criteria of what   good critical thinking looks like as part of the Assessment Rubric for   Critical Thinking (ARC). Take your students through a similar example in   your own course.
• While thinking critically in online   classes involves all of the elements of of the critical thinking   definition, there are a couple of areas for which critical thinking   becomes especially important:

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• These realities mean that we must empower students to become creative thinkers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers—people who are continually learning and who can apply their new knowledge to complex, novel, open-ended challenges; people who will proceed confidently and competently into the new horizons of life and work.
• n education, we routinely teach students how to use various sets of cognitive tools to make academic work easier, more efficient, or more productive: for example, research methods, note-taking strategies, or ways to remember and organize information. In teaching thinking, we need to give students cognitive tools and teach them to use these tools systematically to solve real-life problems and to manage change. These tools apply to two essential categories: creative thinking and critical thinking.
• What is creative thinking? What is critical thinking? We often view these terms as opposites that are poles apart and incompatible. We stereotype the creative thinker as wild and zany, thriving on off-the-wall, impractical ideas; in contrast, we envision the critical thinker as serious, deep, analytical, and impersonal. Consider instead a different view—that these two ways of thinking are complementary and equally important. They need to work together in harmony to address perceived dilemmas, paradoxes, opportunities, challenges, or concerns (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006).
• Critical thinking, on the other hand, involves examining possibilities carefully, fairly, and constructively—focusing your thoughts and actions by organizing and analyzing possibilities, refining and developing the most promising possibilities, ranking or prioritizing options, and choosing certain options.
• Generating many possibilities is not enough by itself to help you solve a problem. Similarly, if you rely on focusing alone, you may have too few possibilities from which to choose. Effective problem solvers must think both creatively and critically, generating options and focusing their thinking.

• Individuals or groups use generating tools to produce many, varied, or unusual possibilities; to develop new and interesting combinations of possibilities; or to add detail to new possibilities. When using these tools, it is important to follow four broad guidelines, or ground rules (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006): 

   
  • Defer judgment. When generating options, productive thinkers separate generating from judging. They direct their effort and energy to producing possibilities that can be judged later.
   
  • Seek quantity. The more options a person or group generates, the greater the likelihood that at least some of those possibilities will be intriguing and potentially useful.
   
  • Encourage all possibilities. Even possibilities that seem wild or silly might serve as a springboard for someone to make an original and powerful new connection.
   
  • Look for combinations. It is often possible to increase the quantity and quality of options by building on the thinking of others or by seeing new combinations that may be stronger than any of their parts.

• Focusing tools help individuals or groups analyze, organize, refine, develop, prioritize, evaluate, or select options from the set of possibilities they have at hand. When using these tools, problem solvers should again follow four broad guidelines or ground rules (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006): 

   
  • Use affirmative judgment. When focusing their thinking, productive thinkers examine options carefully but constructively, placing more emphasis on screening, supporting, or selecting options than on criticizing them.
   
  • Be deliberate. Effective focusing takes into consideration the purpose of focusing. Is it to select a single solution, to rank order or prioritize several options, to examine ideas carefully with very detailed criteria, to refine or strengthen options, or to create a sequence of steps or actions? Each of these purposes might be best served by a specific focusing tool.
   
  • Consider novelty. If the stated goal is to find a novel or original solution or response, then it is important to focus deliberately on that dimension when evaluating possible solutions, and not simply to fall back on the easiest or most familiar options within a list.
   
  • Stay on course. When focusing, it is important to keep the goals and purposes of the task clearly in sight and to ensure that you evaluate the options in relation to their relevance and importance for the goal.

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• • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
  • to use (another's production) without crediting the source
  • to commit literary theft
  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
• In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward
• According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file).
• • turning in someone else's work as your own
  • copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
  • failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
  • giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
  • changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
  • copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on "fair use" rules)

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• If you use an author's specific word or words, you must place those words within quotation   marks and you must credit the source.
• Even if you use your own words, if you obtained the information or ideas you are presenting from a source, you must document the source.

• Information: If a piece of information isn't common knowledge (see below), you need to provide a source.

   

  Ideas: An author's ideas may include not only points made and conclusions drawn, but, for instance, a specific method or theory, the arrangement of material, or a list of steps in a process or characteristics of a medical condition. If a source provided any of these, you need to acknowledge the source.

• You do not need to cite a source for material considered common knowledge:

    

  General common knowledge is factual information considered to be in the public domain, such as birth and death dates of well-known figures, and generally accepted dates of military, political, literary, and other historical events. In general, factual information contained in multiple standard reference works can usually be considered to be in the public domain.

    

  Field-specific common knowledge is "common" only within a particular field or specialty. It may include facts, theories, or methods that are familiar to readers within that discipline. For instance, you may not need to cite a reference to Piaget's developmental stages in a paper for an education class or give a source for your description of a commonly used method in a biology report—but you must be sure that this information is so widely known within that field that it will be shared by your readers.

    

  If in doubt, be cautious and cite the source. And in the case of both general and field-specific common knowledge, if you use the exact words of the reference source, you must use quotation marks and credit the source.

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