At EdLab's Development & Research team, we're trying to build out a couple of social applications for education and are running in to this issue of privacy head-on. It would be great to get a wider sense of what people think about privacy for their data in education-oriented sites. I'm specifically wondering how open people would be with some of the following:

- Which courses or course material you've taken in the past.
- Work (without assessment results) that you've posted for classes.
- Discussion board posts for classes and on social networks in general.
- Assessment related information (grades, etc.).
- Professional bios and resumes.

It's especially challenging b/c you almost want to open up some or all of the data somehow for learning (eg. to show off to potential employers), but at the same time you may not want to share all your data all the time. But, as an employer, I wonder if you trust some online portfolio of work that is presented to you if you know it is filtered by the user somehow (presumably for the better).

This article about Yale's decision and then postponement to adopt Google Apps brings up interesting questions about cloud-based services. I'm sure we'll have to deal with these as well with some of our apps, although having servers in all but 15 countries in the world may be a little far off :).

The US Department of Education has made several recommendations that I think would directly influence our work and strategy for the eduction sector. Not only do these affect the technologies that will be invested in, but the resources that may be made available for research in the future using such technologies. Among the highlights:
"
* Adequate broadband and wireless access inside and outside of school
* At least one Internet access device for every student and educator inside and outside of school
* R&D into the use of gaming, simulations, and virtual worlds for instruction and assessment
* Encouragement of cloud computing for school districts
* Use of Creative Commons and Open Education licenses
* Changes to FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act) to open access to student data
* Changes to CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) to open access to the Internet and rethink how filtering works in schools"

Several projects at the EdLab are trying to do some serious work with javascript, a language that is probably 'hacked' at the most (I'm guilty of that :)). Designing and planning your code with it is usually an afterthought and this can cause some problems when you get more complex javascript-driven UIs. I found this site as a good resource for javascript in case people are interested (especially those building front-facing applications):

I especially recommend the "Private Members in Javascript" section which talks about scoping issues.

Thought this piece was relevant since we are trying to tap into the Columbia students community (especially with engineers in EdLab's Development & Research team) to help us innovate while also giving opportunities for people to work on interesting projects. The fact that we are in such a vibrant student environment can have many advantages if we use it the right way.

I thought this article was interesting since we have a "Digitial Artists in Residence" program already and this is sort of a parallel idea:

Perhaps the team working on the EdLab business plan competition could entice participants with a prize like this. For example, winners get to utilize the intellectual and physical resources of the lab to some degree to make their new venture go for a semester.

Of course, we'll have to come up with a good list of perks to compete with the benefits EIRs enjoy at some of these places: "including its ample parking, woodsy surroundings and outdoor patio.".

I think others have mentioned this story around the lab in the past, but I'd like to point out the recent NYTimes article on Facebook privacy for another reason. I've been surprised to see this article among the top emailed for almost 2 weeks now. I haven't seen many articles with the same staying power and I think it hints at how much people are worried about their privacy as they put their whole lives online. Even with Facebook's new privacy features, I've seen huge holes in the way you can access other people's info. For example, if a friend of mine comments on a photo of mine, then a complete stranger who is friends with my friend can actually follow a link to seem my whole album ... kind of worrying.

In EdLab's Development & Research, we're thinking about ways to make privacy and data portability work together. With people posting things to Critter, taking courses on online learning environments, and connecting with colleagues through social networks, we think it is going to be important to be able to share all of the content people produce across applications while also giving them sensible and clear control over their data.

The New York Times is reporting on a boom in enrollments at Community Colleges, especially among non-traditional students who also work and must attend at very late/early hours. While there are a lot of lessons to take from this, one that I think is especially pertinent to our work is the huge potential for technology to serve non-traditional students (echoing what we saw at the PACyber seminar a few weeks ago).

The real challenge at this point is to come up with the right delivery systems (eg. Critter, Discussion Analyzer tool) and the right environments (Elgg, enhanced LMS's) that can complement or revolutionize face-to-face classes for the above population. Even without such advancements though, I've heard from many about online postsecondary programs that are attracting lots of demand despite very low quality.

What do people think about this trend? Is there other research out there on the potential of online education to serve non-traditional students?

I wish the map was a bit higher resolution, but it is really interesting nonetheless. You can find the map and different download sizes here.

There were lots of demos by marketing startups during the day. Below are most of the different ones with brief descriptions. They can all be googled for more information if you're interested.

Demo: Spencer at Vice Magazine / ViceLand / VBS TV

Demo: Stephan from Poken
Real world social media – allows you to share experiences and contacts with people in the real world.

Capture people and places by just touching your pokens – special way to keep in touch.

Demo: glider
Research tool that lets you collect and save travel information from across the web.

Demo: Josh from YCD Multimedia
Demographic targeting: figure out what type of person is standing in front of a digital screen and customize the digital content for them.
Point of sale integration: use digital media to deliver message to consumers while they are purchasing something.
Doing analytics on data about consumer behavior in real physical situations of sales.

Demo: WooMe - dating site now used for quick polling and discussions between people.