Amidst the dispersion of local Occupy sites, an open session on civic education, a local community group electronic posting, and some online disappearances conspire for a recovery and renewal.

"The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World," an open public affairs panel/seminar event sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on December 5, was notable for the minimal time it spent on things technological and its preoccupation with active, in-the-world learning in contrast to the more traditionally academic approaches to civic education.

Last year's first Digital Excellence Conference and Technology Fair, Dexcon2010, went by little noticed by those outside of Chicago. Yet from the preconference outreach and publicity as well as from the conference itself, it was a notable gathering for what it brought together and the local/national model that it represented, a good bookend that reaches into the new year, up to the 5th National Conference for Media Reform, set to take place in Boston in April.

For the past month or so, Open Media Boston has had the chance to play with a unique breed of netbook streamlined for web content consumption produced by Boston-based company, litl. The eponymous computer eschews many elements of traditional operating environments (including the caps lock key), presenting to users only those tools essential to browsing the web, using cloud applications, and networking easily with other litl users. The user experience is so simple that anyone's grandmother can get online with the litl, but that same simplicity will likely keep more advanced users away. Read on for our full review.

The Journal of New Organizing, "an online publication devoted to reporting and analyzing organizing practices, leadership development, and campaign innovation in the progressive community," has recently announced publication of its first issue. Found at www.neworganizing.com/jno, it's a product of the New Organizing Institute (NOI). Both the journal and the institute reflect the distance that community organizing has come in integrating new technology and media tools into a field that for so long remained bound to its traditional forms and approaches.

This week saw significant updates to two of Open Media Boston's favorite applications—Firefox and the Transmission bittorrent client—and continued development on the recently reviewed BetterTouchTool Mac multitouch utility. Read on for highlights of the most important updates.

Apple released the multitouch capable Magic Mouse back in October, but as we wrote at the time, the software that ships with the mouse barely taps its hardware's potential. It was only a matter of time before OS X software developers picked up the slack and released tools to expand on Apple's limited preferences. Here are our first impressions of two such free utilities: MagicPrefs and BetterTouchTool.

The recent short trail starts with "Technology for Social Change" — The Grassroots Use of Technology Conference X, October 16 and 17 at Northeastern University in Boston. It ends seven weeks later, on Saturday, December 5 with "Organizing 2.0 — Online Organizing in the Era of Hope" at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education in midtown Manhattan.

Following a months-long spat of constant attacks against 4chan that included spam, malicious links and disgusting child pornography, 4chan founder "Moot" unofficially called for a response against file sharing host Sharecash. 4chan users, infamous for their DDoS attacks against other prominent and powerful targets, took up the call by bringing down Sharecash's server for several hours.

With ChromeOS, Google is betting the sever farm on a new model of computing that leaves applications on web servers and trades power for ease of use and reliability. Optimized for web work and little else, ChromeOS devices will be zippy browsers. But without the ability to run native applications, ChromeOS devices may not have the necessary power and flexibility users need to produce web content. If this is the model Google sees for the Internet's future, the web will be a quiet place.

Google is on the defensive in recent months, facing threats of antitrust action from the Obama administration, a concerted public smear campaign by Microsoft, and growing concern from its users over its panoptic and ubiquitous services. In an attempt to allay these concerns and convince Washington it isn't evil, Google has created Dashboard, a tool that brings many of a user's privacy settings and content from Google products onto one page. But while Google markets it as a powerful tool to manage one's privacy, the seemingly extensive Dashboard actually presents users with a limited set of the total personal data Google collects.