Firefox the alternative browser of choice has reached the 500 million downloads milestone.
Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.
The BBC reports on how the number of Facebook users in the UK declined by 5% in January.
Social networking site Facebook has seen its first drop in UK users in January, new industry data indicates.
Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online.
To be honest this doesn’t surprise me, my use of Facebook has declined. I use Facebookin order to engage with other e-learning colleagues and friends. There are various groups to which I belong and like to discuss work related issues with people I have met at conferences, events or have known for some time.
However the explosion of zombies, vampires, pointless quizzes, doughnuts, etc… has really put me off the whole Facebook experience. I guess some people find that aspect fun and enjoy and fair play to them, but in terms of social networking and engaging with others it I don’t want that. I have fun elsewhere.
Having said that 8.5 million users is a huge user base. So I won’t delete my account (partly because that can be difficult if nigh on impossible) and will pop in now and again.
Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer.
Interesting article on how the mobile phone is becoming more like the mobile multimedia computer which can make phone calls.
The US National Academy of Engineering asked eighteen influential thinkers what they thought were the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.
Now while the press like the BBC have focussed on the nanobots and artificial intelligence papers, the one that (obviously) interested me was the challenge of personalised learning.
Some learners are highly self-motivated and self-driven, learning best by exploring a realm of knowledge on their own or at least with very little guidance. Other learners prefer some coaching and a more structured approach; they are typically self-motivated when the subject matter appeals to their interests. Still another type is more often motivated by external rewards and may learn best with step-by-step instruction. Some may resist learning altogether and have little motivation or interest in achieving goals established by others.
These general categorizations provide a base for developing personalized instruction, but truly personalized learning could be even more subtly individualized. Within the basic types of learners, some prefer to learn by example, others by finding answers to questions, and others by solving problems on their own. Under different conditions, people might even switch their preferences, preferring examples in some contexts but questions in others.
BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones blogs about the five big stories form the Mobile Phone Congress in Barcelona.
Looking back on the teeming madness that is the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig, there was no one headline-grabbing story, but plenty of pointers to the road ahead. I’ve picked five things that were big in Barcelona.
BBC’s Click has a nice article on the mobile internet.
It is estimated that just one in five people with phones that are able to connect to the net actually do. But the iPhone, however, is having a profound effect on the willingness of its users to go online.
According to a survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, 58% of sixth form teachers believe that “internet plagiarism is a serious problem”.
More than half of teachers believe internet plagiarism is a serious problem among sixth-form students, a teaching union survey suggests.
The 58% of 278 teachers who identified it as a problem said they thought 25% of work returned by pupils included material copied from internet sites.
If as reported by the BBC:
One teacher said a piece of work they saw still contained website adverts.
You have to ask who is at fault here?
Did the learner understand what was required of them?
Did they know they were plagiarising, or did the learner think that it was “okay”?
What internet research skills (if any) had the institution taught the students?
If an institution has a problem with internet plagiarism what policies and tools do they have and use in order to not just detect plagiarism, but also prevent it from happening in the first place.
It’s not as though you can use the excuse I don’t have the time, not when there are such excellent resources such as Intute’s Virtual Training Suite (VTS) available.
People talk of digial natives , but as was borne out in a recent JISC survey, though we may have learners who are digital natives, they may not have the research skills to use the internet effectively to support their learning.
Plagiarism is of course not a new thing, I was told about plagarism when I was at sixth form (and University) and that was a fair few years ago now.
I remember when I was teaching (in the pre-internet days) and a student submitted an assignment which in the main consisted of pages photocopied from a book.
Yes I know you might laugh, but the reality was that the student had no concept of how to research and analyse a topic – they had missed that study skills lesson.
The moral of this whole sorry story of plagarism from the internet, is that use tools such as the VTS to allow learners how to learn to use the internet effectively to support their learning and use tools such as Turnitin to detect plagiarism.
Most of the current crop of HD Blu-ray players are not able to be upgraded to access the new features that are coming on stream in the near future reports the BBC.
Owners of Blu-ray DVD players may find themselves frozen out of future developments in the technology because their machines are not upgradeable.
The Blu-ray camp has recently rolled out new features for players, which include picture in picture options.
But the majority of Blu-ray players sold to date do not have the necessary hardware to offer the features.
Here in the UK it is (still) illegal to rip a CD to your computer (so when using iTunes or Windows Media Player you are technically breaking the law if you import a CD).
However the BBC reports that this may soon change…
Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.
Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.
This is of course of those things that we do on a regular basis, but is in fact still illegal, I would suspect most people don’t even realise it is illegal.
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