My Brain Hurts

Lucky me! The Fedex Courier Company has been “waiting for you since to contact FedEx” because British Insurance has deposited US$900 000 in West Africa for me. I just have to send a $162 Security Keeping Fee to a very official sounding person with a hotmail address. Hmmmm

Wow! Lucky me again for today I have won US$1 500 000 in an Italian lottery and I didn’t even have to buy a ticket?? I just have to send some nice person my bank account and pin number so they can deposit the funds in my account. Hmmm

How does anyone fall for these scamms – they are so obviously fraudulent I can’t believe anyone is taken in by them – but people are. With the ability to bulk email the entire Internet it only takes one gullible fool and the sender starts to rake in the cash.

Some scams however are very well crafted and very believable, so follow some general rules:

1. If something sounds too good to be true then it probably isn’t

2. You never win anything without entering

3. Official warnings of great catastrophe and impending doom are not sent via email.

4. NEVER giver out banking/credit card details – stranger danger for big kids.

5. Official organisations do not use hotmail, gmail addresses.

Before you play good samaritan and send your hard earned money to Africa to save the poor child who’s been chained to an elephant’s butt for the last 12 years check out the Urban Legends reference site www.snopes.com – you may be surprised what is and is not real.

Why not use Snopes to verify the water bridge in Germany for instance . . .

A very descriptive new term, well at least it’s new to me.

“Technacy is the ability to understand, skillfully apply and communicate creative and ‘balanced’ technological solutions that are based on understanding the contextual factors involved. The Australian meaning of technacy is as a theoretical ‘model’ of technological activity. It implies a deep (critical) knowledge of the nature of technologies as systems, or phenomena or simply as a comprehensive prowess in specific technologies, especially if understood in the context of their application.” – Wikipedia article

The descriptive article explains how the term technacy evolved.

Will this spawn new terms such as technative, technation or technability?

Along similar lines is my own  ICTonomy created along the lines of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Where do we set the balance between protecting students from the evils of the Internet and the disruption blocked websites can cause to a lesson? As we know most blocking system overblocks and even if a teacher checks prior to a lesson there can still be issues. One high school I know of has removed all blocking from their system citing the time wasted constantly unblocking sites and the educational time lost through trying to access a blocked site as more important than the so called benefits of protective blocking.

My school is undergoing a period of IT renewal so as part of that process we distributed a survey to staff and students to gauge their opinions on what we now do and what they would like to do. The number one complaint from both groups was blocked websites. As one student put it to me “I am a responsible student, I don’t want to visit time wasting sites, I want to use the Internet to assist my education so why are sites I need to get to blocked?”

Three months into the trial the school I mentioned above is relishing in their new found educational freedom. Perhaps a lead that more should follow.

Education rather than regulation, deal with the transgressors rather than pronounce everyone guilty from the start.