With developers rushing like wild dogs to build and launch applications to make your Twitterexperience more productive, how can you choose which is the best tool to use if you’re running queries on your company name and competitor’s product line, or references on small-town bakeries or Red Sox pitchers?

Thankfully, there is no shortage of search applications. But how different are their interfaces, how similar are their results, and what options do they offer? Let’s see.

From the fabulous Mashable site, here's the run down on the current, (April 2009), state of play with using Twitter as your search tool.

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.

I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.

Aha.

This article is a stunning vision of how the evolution of digital books such as the Kindle and the like may have on the very fabric of information compilation including how texts are written and structured, end-user processing including purchase, storage and reading and the mode of dissemination. Love the Diigo annotations from Will Richardson and others, join the conversation.

The CNN article, “Parents, police monitoring kids’ cell phones” references several commercial services being utilized by parents in an attempt to monitor and control their children’s activities and interactions via cell phones. Referenced services include “My Mobile Watchdog” and “Mobile Spy.” The marketing teaser for “Mobile Spy” is:

Need to silently record SMS (text message) and call information of your child or employee? Learn the TRUTH with Mobile Spy, a completely stealth program! Mobile Spy records every SMS and logs every call including phone numbers with durations. View real time results in your private online account.

When parents, employers, and authorities suspect criminal behavior is taking place, there may be just cause for extreme measures to be taken to monitor and document behavior. I cringe to think parents may be resorting to commercial services like this, however, when their teen most likely needs more opportunities to communicate and develop a supportive, functional relationship with their parent(s) instead of a monitoring/stealth spying service.

Once again Wes Fryer cuts through the marketing myths perpetuated by sales folk related to "Internet Safety" and the misrepresentation of stats in the interest of sales.

(Parenting) -- I was scrolling through family photos on my computer, admiring my two beautiful babies, when I spotted a disturbing trend: My laptop was open in almost all of the pictures. There's my daughter, at 8 months, playing at my feet while I typed away on the couch. There's me and my son, a year later, with the laptop at my side as I held him in my arms.

I'd heard about Internet addiction before, but always assumed it was something limited to socially challenged guys who played too much World of Warcraft. Now it seemed my Internet "habit" was slowly but surely crossing the line. Sometimes I found myself up into the wee hours of the morning, surfing the Web while my family slept. I read the news, kept up with friends, and looked up answers to endless questions. I wrote my personal blog and read dozens of others, just for something to do.

It turns out I'm not the only mama who plugs in and zones out. Coleen Moore, coordinator of resource development at the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery in Peoria, says that she's seeing more and more women coming in for Internet addiction. They're young, they're often new mothers, and they're addicted to blogs, message boards, and Second Life, she says.

These moms are contributing to a growing global addiction. There's a movement among psychiatrists to recognize Internet addiction as an official mental disorder (just like alcohol dependency). And a recent Stanford University national survey found that 14 percent of Internet users find it hard to stay away from it for several days at a time; 9 percent try to hide their "nonessential Internet use" from their loved ones; 8 percent admit they use the Web as a way to escape problems.

“Collaboration” seems to be one of the buzzwords in education today.  Even the esteemed N.C.T.E. identifies one of its “21^st Century Literacies” as the ability to “build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally.”  Couple this with the explosion of Web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, podcasting, social networking and all the other “cool tools,” and you have a formula ripe for collaboration.  But to call collaboration “new” is forgetting our roots. There is no topic more researched in the history of education than the value of “working together.” Leaders such as the Johnsons of the University of Minnesota, and Spencer Kagan, have researched and developed programs that have fine-tuned Cooperative Learning to a science. The problem, however, is that oftentimes, the connection between Cooperative Learning and technology is overlooked.  Unfortunately, some teachers get so caught up in the excitement of the tool, that they may lose sight of the learning.  Also, turning students loose on a wiki does not guarantee that any “learning” occurs. The philosophy of “If you build it, they will come,” should be changed to “If you build it, they will come…but they may not do anything.”

Well worth a read if only to provide a framework for considering how to better transition students from traditional practice to online collaboration.

IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience

Posted February 18, 2009

In recent years, IDEO has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about education. The firm’s work with Ormondale Elementary School, in Portola Valley, California, helped pioneer a special “investigative-learning” curriculum that inspires students to be seekers of knowledge. We spoke to Sandy Speicher, who heads the Design for Learning efforts at IDEO. Her insights provide powerful lessons for architects and designers creating the schools of tomorrow:

These 10 tips make for really interesting reading.
Pull, don't push, Create from relevance, Stop calling skills "soft skills, Allow for variation, No more sage on stage, Teachers as designers, Building learning communities, Being an anthropoligist, Incubating the future and Changing the discourse.

IT begins innocently enough: that overdue history essay is momentarily flicked to one side, so you can check your Facebook messages.

Rob Barnum, left, with friend Jeremy Grose at Manly in Sydney. Picture: James Croucher

Two hours later you're scrolling through baby photos of someone you sat next to in grade four. The essay remains untouched.

Most university students with Facebook accounts have similar tales of online procrastination. They know all too well how easy it is to lose hours of precious study time to the allure of social networking sites.

Now academic research has validated the nagging suspicions of many such students that Facebook is having a detrimental effect on their university results.

Twitter is not such a young phenomenon as commonly thought, with the average age of the 10 million people who use the chatting site being over 35. Online research by web monitoring company comScore also found that those aged 45 to 54 are 36 per cent more likely than average to visit the site. Only 10.6 per cent of American Twitter users are aged 18 to 24, Sarah Radwanick from comScore discovered. Furthermore, middle aged 'Tweeters' spend much longer on the site than their offspring: 35 to 44-year-olds spend nearly 20 minutes on the site, in which people post short messages of up to 140 characters; while 18 to 24-year-olds spend a mere 5.3 minutes on average. Radwanick said: "It is the 25 to 54 year old crowd that is actually driving the [Twitter] trend.

A national online survey on district use of Web 2.0 and Internet technologies conducted by an independent research firm suggests that teachers are the most important group driving adoption of these technologies in K-12 education. The survey was the first phase of the "Safe Schools in a Web 2.0 World" initiative, an ongoing effort by Lightspeed Systems and Thinkronize, developer of netTrekker, to help schools implement Web 2.0 technologies safely and effectively to address individual learning needs, engage students, and provide 21st century learning opportunities.

When Franklin County students break the rules online, Jimmy Pack can block the Web sites they're using, lock their computers or review screenshots of the violation " all from behind his desk.

Pack and Frankfort Independent's Tim Smith, both chief information officers for their school districts, have worked for months to implement Impero, a program that lets them monitor Internet use on school computers from their central office work stations.

For about $3 per computer, Impero works alongside Franklin County's proxy filter and other site-blocking software to report instantly when students try to jump over virtual barriers.

"Mostly it's the older kids trying to get around the rules," Pack said Monday, as he looked through a list of more than 300 alerts, streaming in real-time onto his computer screen.

How Franklin County schools seek to control rather than educate their students online behaviour. What was that you say about Big Brother?