Web 2.0 and digital identity

The 7th grade covered lots of ground this week in tech.

We opened up a raffle system so students can take the school’s OLPC laptops home and test them out – Ali is the first to spend the weekend with the little green machine.

Students tested the public beta of Twiddla.com, a new, free online collaboration tool. We talked about the idea of Web 2.0 and how Twiddla is a part of that trend.

Julia and Maya (paper online soon) presented their digital identity papers to the class and both led an interesting discussion about privacy and technology.

Finally, students read one of two “Tech in the News” articles related to digital identity and there was then a class dicussion. The articles were:

• ‘Swatter’ Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Hostage Hoaxes – This article is directly related to Tristan’s digital identity paper, and Tristan had raised this very issue as a way that caller ID spoofing could be abused.
• Virtual demos over net censorship – This article raised the question, “can someone be arrested in real life for demonstrating online?”