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Media literacy is a critical skill that aims to increase the understanding of how mass media produce meaning and construct reality. In a world where knowledge is increasingly distributed and technological developments are shaping new educational paradigms, the ability to filter relevant information is not to take for granted.

Photo credit: Stephen Downes

Inside this Media literacy digest:

• Complexity In Government - Periods of change present a duality that conspires to derail even the best organizations.
• Transparency Is The New Objectivity - When information is transparent, we can better understand and evaluate what is added to data after it has been gathered / created.
• Creating a City That Thinks Like The Web - …practical examples of how cities can be structured to enable greater citizen involvement in simple things like fixing streets and drawing attention to non-emergency situations.
• Universities and Financial Crisis - When society’s institutions fail - health care, education - all of society suffers.
• Beware The Cloud - …freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software.
• Interrogating Media - When seeking to understand media, gurus / experts like to use questions as guides.
• Huxley and Orwell - …a comparison between the world views of Huxley and Orwell.

Educational technologies expert George Siemens shares with you every week a selection of useful resources to help you make sense of the key technological changes and trends affecting society at large.

Here all the details:

Jewish people outside Jerusalem wishing to post a prayer on the Western Wall now have a new way of doing so - using the social networking service Twitter.

VICTORIA Police today unveiled their latest recruit in the war on dangerous drivers - Twitter.

Judaism’s holiest prayer site has entered the Twitter age. The Western Wall now has its own address on the social networking service, allowing believers around the globe to have their prayers placed between its 2,000 year-old-stones without even leaving their armchairs.

Eds: APNewsNow. ADDS comment from ex-wife’s attorney, trims. PROVIDENCE, R.I. A civil rights watchdog group wants a Rhode Island judge to reverse a gag order banning a woman from commenting on a child custody case on Facebook.

London, July 22 : A couple who share their name are all set to share their lives too-they are tying the knot after first meeting on Facebook.

Ideal for individuals who want to stay connected when they are out and about, the Nokia 6760 slide offers fast and easy access to favourite social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter as well as email accounts from Ovi Mail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and thousands of other email providers.

Caption: Anna Paquin ‘True Blood’ Season 2 Premiere Screening at the Paramount Theater - Arrivals Los Angeles, California …. PAQUIN BLASTS ONLINE IMPOSTORS ANNA PAQUIN is warning fans not to befriend hackers posing as the actress online - because her real accounts have all been listed under a fake name.

Topic: Home Entertainment Toshiba introduced Wireless photo frames today. The three models include two 8-inch frames available in black or white with an acrylic front finish and reflective trim and a black 10-inch frames .

Actor Sacha Baron Cohen poses after a press conference ahead of the Australian premiere of Bruno: The Movie.

Online meeting and appointment schedulers are automated tools and web services that help you and your contacts find the best matching date / time to organize a physical or virtual meeting. Instead of making many phone calls, or going back and forth with emails, these collaborative tools can help you find the perfect matching time for a meeting while doing all of the hard work.

Photo credit: homestudio

As you have likely found out already, to set up a meeting (both online or face-to-face) the main problem everyone has is finding a compatible time slot available that fits all of the participants schedule. As a matter of fact, often you spend more time “finding the time” than actually having your appointment scheduled.

Online meeting and appointment schedulers allow you to simplify the process while making it more effective and reliable. You simply declare your available time slots through a calendar-like interface just like everyone else invited to participate. It is then the automatic meeting scheduler that tries to match available date and times from the different participants to find a common available date.

Not only. Appointment schedulers generally also allow you to import your email contacts list, set your own reference time zone, and get immediate email notifications when other invitees have input their ideal meeting time.

For those already use a calendaring system like Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar, it is possible to integrate their popular and familiar scheduling facility with one of these meeting and appointment schedulers to manage all appointments from a unique dashboard while keeping all your meeting info up-to-date.

In this MasterNewMedia comparative guide you can find a full list of all the online meeting and appointment schedulers available out there, accompanied by a full comparison table showcasing their key strengths and features based on the following review criteria:

• Meeting Invitations: Automatic email updates to all invitees
• Time zones: Support for appointment scheduling over different time zones
• Email import: Importing of email contact lists
• Website integration: Embeddable widget integrated / published on your website.
• Pro Features: Basic Pro price and matching features.

If you are into simplifying and speeding up the time needed to organize group meetings, you will find this family of automatic meeting schedulers highly useful. Here all the details:

Share + Jul 19, 2009 11:04 pm US/Eastern CORAL SPRINGS An engaged Florida couple have more in common than their love for each other.

Most vinophiles can swirl and sip. The Murphy-Goode winery wants one who can sip and click.

A judge continues to examine whether a juror compromised the fairness of a trial over a fatal fire in the Bronx that killed a Rockland father of four by sending gushing e-mails to a firefighter who had testified in the case.

As new and old media pervade so many aspects of our lives, it is very important that everyone learns to decode and interpret messages and images and to ask critical questions about who is creating them and for what purpose.

Photo credit: Nancy White

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Addressing Problems of Faculty Resistance - James Morrison tackles the topic encouraging faculty to expand their range of instructional strategies and increase utilization of technology in the process.
• Social Media Guidelines - Organizations have to tell their employees how to use social media.
• Tools and Our Brain - Norman Doidge, in his text The Brain that Changes Itself, provides many compelling examples of how technology, tools, and experiences can substantially rewire the human brain in a short period of time.
• Social Media and Social Divisions - Does the internet - social media in particular - act as a unifier? Apparently not, according to several researchers.
• That Brain of Ours - Researchers are in the early stages of understanding the dynamics of the human brain.
• Consumer Voices - Trends can build and develop for long periods of time without significantly impacting status quo.
• Five Ways To Run a Deadly Online Seminar - Alan Levine reflects on his experience attending an online seminar:

New media technologies are the new means to explore, study, research, experiment and discover. Understanding and making sense of how these new communication tools work, allows everyone to communicate more effectively and to develop the new job skills required in our information economy.

Here all the details: