The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

• BBC News: Visualising the Internet
• BBC News: Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on Youtube – Boing Boing
• The Economics of Perfect Software: Sigpwned
• Google gets little US corporate support in Internet fight with China – New York Times

Related posts:

1. Link roundup: September

My school has a site license (~100 computers) for Adobe CS3. In that, we get Acrobat, After Effects, Bridge, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Encore, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere & Soundbooth. Great. Except we’re missing Captivate and Presenter – possibly the two Adobe products best suited to education (screencasting & quiz presentation), and of the ones we have, we only use Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator & Photoshop in any significant way.

When a school is going to spend thousands of pounds on software, why should we have to fit with the standard packages released for personal & business use? What would make more sense is for Adobe to release an education Master Collection, including the most commonly-used Adobe products for education. Hell, what would be better would be a mix & match approach – it’s 2009, after all, why shouldn’t schools get to choose the products they want rather than simply what’s on offer?

Maybe it’s too much to hope that the “freemium” business model would spill over into education (okay, bad example – I don’t want adverts in my classroom), but I’d have hoped things would be more flexible than they appear to be right now.

Adobe Presenter is a nifty plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint that allows presentations to be exported as a Flash movie (iSpring does this for free – thanks to @twowhizzy for the link), but the big plus is that it allows for the creation of interactive quizzes, the answers to which can be exported into a spreadsheet for analysis & review. I know I could use it in my teaching to good effect.

Yet in January at the excellent BETT show at the London Olympia, we were wowed by a comprehensive, well-prepared, well-targeted presentation that showed off the features of this handy little app, then when we asked “how much?”, the otherwise very helpful Adobe staff were struck dumb. Nobody knew. After about 45 minutes of hanging around, we were told we could get it as a bundle with Acrobat 9 Pro Extended for £125 per computer (including education & bulk discount)- remember I said we have 100, earlier on… remember also that we have Acrobat 8 Pro.

Seriously, Adobe, get with it. I’d love to use this, and I’m the kind of person who would spread the word about it, but if I went to the bursar with a request for £12,500 for a really nifty little program, I’d get laughed out of the room. In fact, knowing The One Who Holds The Purse Strings as I do, I’d probably have a shoe thrown at me.

It’s time for a rethink of education licensing… in getting your software into schools you’re preparing a workforce to use them. I don’t particularly care whether I’m pumping yet more money into the hands of big corporations, I want my kids to be prepared to use industry-standard software. I want to know that I’m using the best possible tool for the job, and you want that tool to be yours – so stop making it so bloody difficult to get your software into the classroom.

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