I guess this is an argument for the .kids domain: Fox News reports: The owner of a grade-school educational website says he fears he’ll be run out of business by a medical marijuana website with an identical name. Peter Vavak, the owner of Newsbowl.com, says he’s concerned that grade school students will log on mistakenly [...]
Paul E. Peterson– Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University Director, Program on Education Policy and Governance and Editor-in-Chief of Education Next–has a new book out: Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. (Which I haven’t read yet.) Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes at City Journal: Across [...]
How to protect kids from wandering into bad neighborhoods on the internet without resorting to censorship? That’s the question tackled by Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schulz at The National Review. They propose a new domain name, .kids. Here is one proposal. Right now, there are many “top-level domains” — .com, .org, .biz, .gov, .edu., etc. [...]
There’s much ado about Stanford University’s announcement about its new bookless library. Laura Sydell at National Public Radio (NPR) reports: The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete [...]
The Slatest Edition reports on GodBlock, software designed to shield kids from religious content online. According to the GodBlock website: GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, [...]
Pampers has a new app for the iPad called Hello Baby that lets you track your baby’s growth in the womb– and share it on Facebook. Here’s the ad for it. This makes the little plastic models I used to use to teach fifth-graders about this stuff seem like something from another century. Matter of [...]
The experts are lining up on both sides of this one. The discussion is prompted by the publication of Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Here’s my contribution to a workout for what Hercule Poirot refers to as your “little gray cells.” Here’s Carr making his case [...]
Teaching Now reports on a new social networking site for the 10-and-under crowd. It’s called Togetherville. I confess that my initial reaction was: Gee whiz! No! Shouldn’t kids under ten be doing something else? It’s getting great reviews, though, from the WSJ, NYT and Wired, who all like Togetherville’s safe environment and family participation. Geek [...]