The new school year in Serbia is about to start, and local newspapers are filled with techno anti-utopian articles on the bad effects of the Internet and social networks. A survey on the use of Facebook by the youth in Serbia has been published recently, too, however, and its results suggest that things aren’t really that bad.

More about the usage of Facebook among Serbian youth in my Global Voices article.  Those who’ve asked me about the photo I’ve contributed in the featured text:  it was taken in the downtown of Belgrade, in the Internet cafe, and I use it for my slides, for conference talks.

Feel free to comment.

In my latest article for Global Voices I wrote about Digital School, a state-funded project that would allow to set up digital classrooms in Serbia’s primary schools. I’ve discussed some of the challenges that need to be addressed for the project to succeed. More about it in the Global Voices column. Feel free to leave the comment.

Those of you who are not being able to join this year conference - Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, below you can find some important information.

Schedule of the sessions, panels, workshops, events, and their description is on this wiki page, with the program at a glance.

All sessions are broadcasted via iStream and you can watch livestreamings of the sessions here, grouped in four halls for each session during the day. This also refers to concerts, after presentations events, and tonight is the screening of the movie “Truth in Numbers” followed by a panel discussion.

If you are tweeting, using Identica or other microblogging service, use hashtags #wikimania2010, #wikimania. The irc channel is #wikimania-gdansk on freenode#wikimania2010.

Tomorrow, Sunday 11 July,  I’m chairing the morning sessions, two panels: Academic Researchers and Wikipedia, in Concert Hall, so tune in.

For those who are in Oxford these days for parallel conferences that are happening around (TransferSummit/UK, BarCamp), I want to let you know that I’m giving a talk at the interdisciplinary conference  on ‘Problems of Adolescence”.

Oxford University Centre for the History of Childhood is organising one day event, this Saturday, 26 June 2010, at Magdalen college.  The speakers (the program)come from different backgrounds: anthropology, clinical psychology, history of education, science and medicine, childhood studies, and social sciences and Web (moi).

I will talk about Adolescents and the Web: in particular social network sites (SNS), and communication, social, dynamics and practices on Facebook. This will be very interesting event, and I’m thankful to, both, UK and overseas peers, OII colleagues, and friends who’ve shared some data (British stats and references), as I’ve been analysing teen profiles and came to interesting observations that I’ll share later on with you either through an article (text of talk or proceedings) or slides.

If you are around this Saturday, come and say Hi.

Wikimania is an annual international conference dedicated to Wikimedia projects around the globe (including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikimedia Commons, and MediaWiki).

This year’s conference will be held July 9-11, 2010 in Gdansk, Poland at Polish Baltic Philharmonic. For more information, visit the official Wikimania 2010 site: http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/

The event is a community gathering, giving the editors, users and developers of Wikimedia projects an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, report on research and projects, and collaborate on the future of the projects. The conference is open to the public, and is a chance for educators, researchers, programmers and free culture activists who are interested in the Wikimedia projects to learn more, present and share ideas.

Wikimania 2010 will be a mix of submitted talks, open space meetings, birds of a feather groups, and lightning talks. Submissions will be discussed and selected in an informal process on the wiki.

As being said in the Call for Participation, this year Wikimania will offer three tracks for submissions for members of wiki communities and interested observers to share their own experiences and thoughts and to present new ideas: people and community, knowledge and collaboration and infrastructure track.

Deadline for submitting workshop, tutorial, panel, and presentation proposals is May 20th. Submit yours, no less than 300 words, and see you in July in Poland.

Tomorrow morning I’m giving an hour session for scientists who want to get familiar with collaborative social media tools for the next three days of the conference ScienceOnline. You know that I was here [Research Triangle Park, NC] last year and that we talked about open access in developed countries, now with the accelerating emerge of participative media and their implementation in everyday life, including any professional area, there are some normative literacy’s to embrace in order to communicate and contribute.

As you know I do not make presentations in a classic way, with too much (or none) words, since this is workshop I will be demonstrating and practice interaction with people who are attending and will report, network and micro blog in the next few days on ScienceOnline2010.

Slide are uploaded on SlideShare, they are fluid in a way that I will add/talk/address/demo other issues on social media, social networks and science.