Globaled has had a make over. Initially, Emma and I organized globaled for a small workshop for a dozen teachers and educators at Branksome Hall in August of 2005. Our intent was to demonstrate how internet communication technologies are transforming education. We also believed that for educators involved in global education, ICT is bringing new methods for reaching students, creating learning experiences and enabling learners to network with other learners across the globe. The global education workshop at Branksome Hall has given us a better idea how to organize our globaled blog and we will continue to re-organize globaled as our experience and understanding of ICT and global education grows. 

We hope that globaled will serve as a gathering and networking point for educators, students and youth interested in global education. By reviewing & posting resources, articles, blogs and sites from the web and organizing them on globaled we and contributors from around the world can contribute to global education.

We are inviting reader/writers to recommend any global education resources, links or articles that they are familiar with on the Resource Portal page. The sub categories are broken down into the primary, junior and senior and all ages levels. 

For those not familiar with blogging, using globaled may give readers/writers an immediate feel for applying a blog and possibly other internet communication technologies in your global education curriculuum. 

I'm in the CHI papers session on Security.

The first paper is 'Why phishing works.'  Interesting point: both security designers and phishers use user interface techniques to accomplish their goals. Three basic categories of reasons why phishing works:

• lack of knowledge ( e.g. about URLs, security indicators)
• visual deception (e.g. 'vv' istead of 'w', overlaying windows,embedding fake address and status bar in page )
• bounded atention (i.e. inattention to secuirty indicators) 

In their study of whether people can correctly identify real and phishing sites, participant knowledge and use of security indicators was the best indicator of success in correctly identifying the sites. Though in walking through the examples, the reasons why people made mistakes were all over the place.

Interesting suggestion: that product teams 'spoof' their own design in the testing of their web sites, to see how easy it is to convincingly phish your site.

Another interesting design point: address bar prints the URL in small type that's hard to read; can you re-size the text to make it bigger and more readable?

Second paper: Secrecy, Flagging and Paranoia: Adoption Criteria in encrypted E-mail. There is an argument that people should encrypt all of their email. Conventional wisdom is that people don't encrypt email because it's too hard. Their user study showed that in fact people often don't encrypt email because there is a social meaning (in fact, a negative stigma) associated with encryption that they don't want to convey. People will use it for financial information, and for protecting secret planning information. But recipients think that if it's encrypted it must be important -- so encrypting all email would send the wrong message (no pun intended). This was a pretty limited study and it's unclear how much it can be generalized, but it's an interesting thought.

Third paper:  Do Security Toolbars Actually Prevent Phishing Attacks? There are many browser toolbars that try to help identify phishing sites. The categories of toolbars:

• neutral info: domain name, date registered, country registered
• System-decision: propose whether the site is OK or potentially fraudulent
• SSL-verification: presents a logo if it's a verified site.

Recurring point: security is almost never the user's primary task and we don't want to make it the primary task, but we do want the user to be motivated and engaged to make good decisions. Their results are that secuirty toolbars are not as effective as one would hope in preventing phishing attacks. The study reinforces the notion that users don't understnad or know how to parse URL's. Interestingly, anecdotal comments suggest that false-positives in spam filters cause people to expect anti-phishing spoolbars to be wrong some percentage of the time. In other words: often the phishing web site looks more credible than the toolbar. Also, since security is a separate, secondary task, people's desire and focus on getting the primary task done overrides the focus on the secondary task. This is a bizarre dilemma: we don't want to make security the primary task, but then users will often override security in favor of the primary task and open themselves up to phishing attacks.

In the summer of 2001, commercial air travel was incredibly painful. Lots of delays, passengers were treated like cattle, every plane was packed, schedules sucked -- it was just plain a rotten way to spend any significant amount of time at all. Then 9/11 happened and lots of people stopped flying.

Well, we're back to the way things were pre- 9/11. Air travel is just miserable. All the old complaints are once again true, with new additions.

1. Food, or lack thereof. A bag of peanuts is a luxury. Airlines want you to bring your own food on board, or to pay them extraordinary amounts for things disguising themselves as food.

2. Code-shares. You no longer know what airline you're flying when you buy a ticket, or whether you're getting the best price. Code-sharing is a huge scam, and the customers are the suckers. How this officially works is that one airline buys a set of seats on another airline then re-sells them under their own brand at whatever price they want. Go do a search on Expedia, and more likely than not you'll see the exact smae flight offered by two different airlines are radically different prices. What's worse, in most cases when you get to the airport the airlines won't have anything to do with each other -- you get a rude awakening when they send you down to another ticket counter to chek in. Here's what happened to me Friday:  I was originally booked on an Alaska Airlines flight to Chicago, connecting to an Alaska code-share flight to Montreal that was really run by American Airlines. But between the time that I booked the flight and Friday, my connecting flight was removed from the schedule and replaced by another one that was NOT a code-share flight. So my reservation went into airline purgatory and my travel agent wasn't notified. Neither Alaska nor American took responsibility for re-booking me on another flight, and when I tried to check in Alaska no longer had a record of a connecting flight for me. In fact, it's worse: the Alaska agent checked me in for the Chicago flight and told me I needed to go to the American ticket counter to check in for the connecting flight in Chicago, but neglected to tell me that she had only checked my bag through to Chicago. I caught this as I walked away fromt he counter and my bag was disappearing into the back on the converyor belt. I grabbed the attention of the supervisor, who was very nice and called down to the baggage handlers to grab my bag off the belt while she called over to American Airlines to sort out my conencting flight. Fifteen minutes later, I had a reservation on a connecting American flight and a promise that the Alaska baggage handlers would re-tag my bag to get it to Montreal. The good news is that my bag did in fact show up in Montreal, but I had to spend all day wondering if that particular miracle would happen.

3. Airline staff who care, or lack thereof. The supervisor at the Alaska counter was the rare exception. My best guess is that airline personnel are so worried about their company going bankrupt and being out of a job, or the courts invalidating their union contract, that their thoughts are just elsewhere. I'm sure they're well-meaning, and that they have their own struggles with the state of air travel today, but they sure do seem checked out.

4. Security checkpoints. As if everything else wasn't enough of a pain in the butt, you literally have to run the gauntlet. Jacket off. Zip-up sweatshirt off. Shoes off. Belt off. Watch off. Cell phone, keys, change out of pockets. Laptop out of carry-on bag. Fight other harried passengers for enough grey buckets to put all this stuff in. Remember to keep boarding pass with you. Hope you don't get randomly spot-checked. Then on the other side, as carryons and buckets accumulate and run into each other, struggle to put your shoes back on, sweater and jacket, belt, watch, put the laptop back in the carryon, make sure you didn't forget your boarding pass (which you had to set down to re-dress and pack up everything again). Then get out of the way fast. On days I'm travelling, I find myself dressing for the sole purpose of speeding my trip through the security line.

Whil in general I'm not living my life to accumulate large quantities of money, I find myself increasingly wanting to get rich just so I can afford to buy a private plane and get a pilot's license, and/or fly executive jets, just to avoid commercial air travel whenever possible. It would be money well spent.

The next day I received an email from Peter Freer, a banker from the UK who decided to raise funds for the Jaden Foundation as part of a jungle adventure challenge that was held in Belize recently . Together with his team 'the Belize Bankers' he came in 3rd place. They apparently had to kayak, run and survive in the jungle with nothing more than the shirts on their backs for several days. Thank you so much Peter for doing this for the Jaden Foundation. I think you're crazy, but there you go. You all seemed to have survived the ordeal.

There was one problem with this whole story, though. The Jaden Foundation is not registered as an official charity. I didn't do this as it would have cost me $8000 to do so. And that money I would rather spend on the Belizean kids (100% of the Jaden Foundation donations go to school fees, books, uniforms, transport and whatever else the kids need).

Peter told me that he could only donate to a registered charity, which is fair enough. So I decided that this was a sign to push through a dream that I have had for years now: to try and get as many local kids as possible accepted into a private school. The Belize Christian Academy is the closest school to us and by far the best school in this part of the country. It is linked to a registered charity in the US, so Peter and his team mates could make the donation directly to the school to pay for school fees.

It is already amazing that all the children in our community go to school these days, but if they could be going to BCA that would make an ever bigger impact on their lives. Many of the kids are currently 'falling through the cracks'. They are being passed along the grades, but should really be kept back as they still struggle so much with the English language. Right now they are crammed into classrooms with over 30 kids and don't get the attention they would need to excel. At the BCA they would be in classes of only half the size and they would not be getting so confused by the mix of Creole and English (which is another problem at the state schools)

Anyway, I am not sure what it would take to get all the children from our community accepted into that school. It may be too expensive. In that case, I will focus on getting the youngest kids in that school and let the older ones continue in the school that they are at now.

It's going to be quite a challenge, as the school fees for the private school are $250 BZ ($125 US) a month per child. I will try to get a special deal or assistance from the school & hopefully that way I will be able to send all.

Anyway, Jay and Jasper have just made a wonderful donation to the Jaden Foundation. They have given us $400 US! John and Rich' parents donate a further 20 Pounds per month & have done so for last year! Thank you, thank you, thank you, you guys. And now it looks like Peter Freer and his team mates have raised roughly $3500 US (to be donated at the end of then month). So we are getting there. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help. This is all so exciting!

If any of you blog readers out there would like to sponsor one of the kids, please contact me. You could even donate directly to the school, so the donations are tax deductible (rather give it to these kids than the tax man, right?)

Thank you,
Simone

P.S. I'll let you know what happens in the coming weeks....

If you are reading this post on my blog's home page, you should have noticed a new addition to the blog - a list of headlines from previous Warnie Award winners. This is all part of my mission to become a more influential blogger by driving you away from my own blog to the sites that I love! These people have much better stuff to say than I do - so go read their material, but keep coming back here to find it. The list of articles will always be bang up-to-date, so it's a great reason to visit my page several times during the day so you can see what many of the other Christian bloggers have been writing about.
The Warnies began as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek concept, but at the height of the award's fame, Christian bloggers would literally fight, bribe, and cajole their way to obtain membership in the highly-honoured club of Warnie Award winners. Now that the winners' headlines appear here, I fear that an all-out blog war may break out!

Today I have also awarded another two blogs the coveted Warnie Award – Resurgence and Together for the Gospel. Actually, I have decided to include headlines from the individual blogs of each of the writers of Together for the Gospel as well, since they are so fabulous. Resurgence and T4GB are two of the finest blogs on the planet, in my opinion, and should need no introduction to you!

I have gone through and updated the list of previous winners. (I don’t think that list left anyone out - please let me know if it did!) As a measure of the resilience of Warnie winners, only one has apparently bowed out of the blogging arena. Christweb was untraceable - any reports on the whereabouts of the Mac gratefully received!

John Mark Reynolds and Phil Johnson have both deserted singleton blogging, however, and joined group blogs. After careful deliberation the judges - ok me - have decided to officially appoint their successor blogs, Middlebrow and Team Pyro, as Warnie Winners.

All Warnie Winners remain eligible to place the coveted Warnie Award stamp on their blogs, but I ask that the link be changed to this home page, where you will be able to read the last ten headlines from Warnie blogs at all times. The Warnie winners are available in an RSS feed or to read in Google Reader.

I just am not sure about the placement of the headlines. If anyone from Google is reading this blog, a way to resize the box would be fantastic – then I could put it in the sidebar. Otherwise, it might move at some point to the bottom of the middle panel (where it sits on individual post pages). Anyway, here it is . . . and I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think, and go congratulate the new winners!

If you want to include the list of Warnie winners in your site simply copy and paste the following code:

<script language='javascript' type='text/javascript' src='http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=82b9e2ba8203c458cd4d3087f22cb86b'> </script>

If you want to include Warnie headlines on your own site, just drop me an email and I will send you the code, or nick it from looking at my source code!

For previous winners who want to include evidence of their award in their sidebar (this is entirely optional) simply copy and paste the following code into your template - this will give you the stamp at the top of this post:

<a href='http://www.adrian.warnock.info'><img src='http://www.adrian.warnock.info/uploaded_images/warnie-714212.gif'></a>

Alternatively, Phil has updated the stamp with a new look, which you can use if you prefer.

The code for this new picture is as follows -
<a href='http://www.adrian.warnock.info'><img src='http://www.adrian.warnock.info/warnie4.gif' /></a>

UPDATE
Phil was first out of the blogs to welcome the re-launch of the Warnie Awards which look like they are here to stay now! In his own inimitable style he thanks me for the first Warnie I sent his way:

'Last year, just three days after the launch of my original blog, PyroManiac, Brit-blogger Adrian Warnock catapulted me to worldwide fame by bestowing on me the most coveted award in the entire Christian blogosphere: the Warnie!'

In the comments section, Phil has also proposed a new version of the 'Warnie Stamp of Approval,' and since he no doubt still has the file from when he designed the first version for me, hopefully it didn't take him too long as I don't see people queuing up to add the Smeagol edition of the warnie stamp to their sidebars!

Incidentally, one of the things that prompted me to revive the list was the evident longing some have for a Warnie - perhaps that graphic should be reworded 'Warnie Award Awaited.'