Most teens don’t use Twitter because it doesn’t enable them to do anything they can’t already do elsewhere, which is the same reason most adults don’t use Twitter. It has nothing to do with any teen-specific concerns like texting plans or safety. It comes down to something more simple: delivering value beyond Facebook and MySpace — a competitive moat that Facebook is bridging one move at a time, from the Everyone button to the acquisition of FriendFeed to the centrality of the stream itself.

The question of “Why Don’t Teens Use Twitter?” is the question of “Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Twitter?” The answer, it would seem, is both obvious and heretical … maybe Twitter isn’t for everyone.

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Same old same old, but nicely done…

At the local church hall on a late autumn afternoon in Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, more than 100 wannabe-students are queueing to sign up to a new university. The atmosphere is chatty, tea is being brewed, and there's an air of excitement about embarking on a new stage of life. But this isn't a typical student body. There's barely a hoodie in sight and not a teenager to be seen: this is one of the country's newest branches of the University of the Third Age.

U3A – the older person's lifelong learning organisation – is experiencing a recession-fuelled surge in popularity. More than 20,000 new members joined this year

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The extent of Facebook's reach in Australia – it accounts for 29 per cent of all time spent online by Australians – has led to research group Nielsen defining the trend as "Facebook Time" and "Non Facebook Time".

"It's just phenomenal," said Nielsen Online's director of analytics, Mark Higginson. "Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone."

Source: here

Sir Stuart joined the attack on the British education system claiming that businesses are “not always getting what we need.”

The boss of country’s biggest clothes retailer added to the scathing criticism by Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, who recently said the standard of school leavers was “woefully low.”
[this typo is as it was in the article, depressingly enough!...]

He said of some school-leavers: “They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”He said of some school-leavers: “They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”

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Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to "the sum of all human knowledge," the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy.

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"When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second," Albert Einstein said, by way of explaining relativity. "When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour."

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Giving parents a choice over primary schools increases the social divide, a study reveals.

The majority of poor parents pick their child's primary school because it is close to their home, while nearly half of middle-class parents opt for a school for its academic record, researchers found…

They asked 11,533 parents why they preferred one school to another on application forms. While two-fifths of parents with no qualifications said a school's proximity to their home had been the most important reason for choosing it, this was the case for only 20% of parents with degrees.

Only one in eight parents with no qualifications said academic record had been the main factor in their choice, compared with two-fifths of parents with degrees.

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Teenagers will be allowed to switch to the qualifications, which were scrapped in the late 80s following the introduction of GCSEs, under Conservative plans to give schools greater freedom to choose between courses.

It comes as figures show 654,000 candidates took O-levels this year in countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Pakistan. It represents an increase of 22,000 in the last four years.

The tests are still offered by two British exam boards – Cambridge International Examinations and Edexcel – even though they are currently banned in English state schools.

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We want to broaden the choice available to parents in our part of London by offering a type of education that isn’t provided by other state schools in the area. A classical education forms the bedrock of Britain’s most successful independent schools and we don’t see why it shouldn’t be available in the state sector, too. It’s a powerful tool that should be accessible to children from all parts of the community, not just the most privileged. It is the ideal preparation for future career success — not in a narrow, vocational sense, but in a broad, intellectual sense. Latin, in particular, trains children how to think logically and intuitively, an essential requirement if they’re going to excel in later life.

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In August, journalist Toby Young announced in this newspaper that he wanted to found a new type of 'free' school where access to a good education is not based on income. Three months on, his biggest problem is battling bureaucracy and accusations of middle-class snobbery

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The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim said that "enchantment had its uses" for the developing child. The fairy tale was a symbolic world in which the child's struggle to understand what adulthood might mean – all those difficulties around power, passion and purpose that we have to eventually master – could be rehearsed in a reasonably safe internal space. I think we should seek to build virtual places with the same capacious and developmental purposes for our children. It's a grown-up job to consider all the subtleties of how these places might balance constraint and freedom, support and autonomy.

And we are adults, remember? There's one modern fairy story – involving angels and demons, maleficence and innocence, the prey and the predator – that we clearly shouldn't fall for. Cyberspace isn't the big bad wood. Cyberspace is what we consciously and wisely make it to be.

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Before Lotus Notes or SharePoint we had Happy Hour. Arthur Andersen/Accenture grabbed an early lead in knowledge sharing because it recognized the value of a liquor license long before there was even a technological environment capable of supporting the likes of Notes or SharePoint. Their efforts demonstrate why successful knowledge management is rooted in the social, not the technical. It’s a lesson we keep needing to learn.

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such are the limitations of our understanding of the brain, attempting to apply the findings of neuroscience to social policy would be premature, even if this were not wrong in principle. But it is wrong in principle. The fabric of the human world, of the public space that is the arena of our lives, is woven out of explicit shared attention that has been infinitely elaborated in a way that has little to do with what goes on in the darkness of the individual skull, though you require a brain in working order in order to be part of it. If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun. Bring on the neurosceptics.

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Evolution is already taught in secondary schools and many primary schools, but under the curriculum changes, it will become compulsory for primary pupils.

Professor Sir Martin Taylor, vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "We are delighted to see evolution explicitly included in the primary curriculum.

"One of the most remarkable achievements of science over the last two hundred years has been to show how humans and all other organisms on the earth arose through the process of evolution."

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A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright.

…

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

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Tips and tricks on how to create better stories for your next presentation.

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A fairly pointless but fun survey asks: If the British could follow any figure from history on Twitter, who would it be? The top answer, apparently, is ex-war time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, a man who was renown for making speeches that far exceeded 140 characters.

Jesus, who isn’t short of followers outside of the Twittersphere, came in at a surprising second.

The poll, which surveyed 2000+ people across the UK, was carried out by YouGov on behalf of Prospect Magazine.

Source: here

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.

When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

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Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs … The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

Source: here