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Before the Wake

James is right about these two quick ways to kill off blogging in education. This is partially because of the ubiquitous but unnatural dissection of our education system into years, semesters and courses rather than dividing our education by students, topics and lives.

Blogging works best when it is a part of a persons life, meaning that it is a way that they work rather than a course requirement. It works best when it is owned by the individual student rather than being an element of a class they are taking. It works best when it is not forced. In short it cannot belong to the institution and it can rarely work as a requirement.

If we already know exactly how to kill blogging in education let us ask how we can avoid these easy deaths.

Categories
culture technology

Unsign Me Up

This Slashdot article asks “Would you be violating a social contract hitting the 30sec skip button on Tivo? Or putting a strip of paper across the bottom of our TV screen to block out those super annoying scrolling banners?”

My question is, if viewing ads and pop-ups is part of my social contract, how can I cancel the contract?

Categories
politics technology

Time for a Poll

In our country, which is run by polls anyway, I think that it is time to take a poll to find out Is Cheap Broadband Un-American? According to the article “cities . . . recognized broadband access as a basic public utility—no different from water, gas or electricity—that they could provide.” So the question is, what defines a public utility. Telephone and cable have been considered quasi-utilities and they have been regulated accordingly. We should take a poll to see if internet access has penetrated the population more deeply than telephone or cable access. I think it’s pretty close. Not only that, but cities can provide internet access much more easily than they could provide other communications options.

I have written about this topic multiple times so my position should be clear that internet access and broadband should either be regulated or provided by the government because the industry refuses to play nice with customers.

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Uncategorized

Exciting Development

Great news from Nate There is now a place to start when looking for conversations. I like what I have seen so far I can’t wait to see how things shake out when it comes to maintaining an accurate list of relevant feeds and deciding on the thresholds for inclusion.

Categories
life

Life After Death

I have noticed an interesting trend/pattern within myself ever since my grandma died. I am more sensitive to death. When I hear about a death – even some fictionalized ones, I have a different kind of reaction than I used to have. Before Grandma died I reacted to death with an intellectual type of sadness. Some thing like “Oh, that’s too bad for the family.” Now I have a personal understanding of the emptiness that death leaves in its wake and my reaction is more of an emotional “I know something of what that feels like.”

I understand that each death we face strikes us differently. I am sure that losing my wife or losing one of my children would be a much different experience than losing my grandma, but I have now experienced that vacuum that death universally leaves and I can see that it has changed me. I gives me more ability to understand the loss of others. Leave it to God to make something positive out of something that we all see as not positive.

Categories
culture technology

750000 reasons to spam

I just read on Wired News about a spammer who was just convicted for “pumping out at least 10 million e-mails a day.” Why would a person do that for a living? Later in the article the answer came to me loud and clear as I learned that “prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month.” That’s a very compelling argument – especially to someone who recently viewed $12,000 per year as a raise.

As a bonus he never had to worry about his internet access since he used 16 high-speed lines for sending out all that email.

Categories
Education

Social Presence

I like what Moon has to say about Social Presence and the disconnect between student appreciation for social presence – high classroom satisfaction – and student performance with social presence – no significant improvement in student performance.

It seems intuitive that better social presence would lead to higher classroom satisfaction and that higher classroom satisfaction should translate into higher student performance. I do not doubt the research on student performance being unconnected to social presence, but as I think about it and how it really is counter-intuitive I am beginning to wonder if that might indicate that we are not measuring the right things as we track student performance.

Categories
life

Teacher

On the way home tonight Savannah told me she wanted to play baseball. When we got home it turned out that she meant golf. I got the clubs out for her and some wiffle balls and she started playing. Within 5 minutes Alyssa wants to play too. Savannah took it upon herself to instruct Alyssa in all the fine points of the game.

“Put the ball down there. Now hit it. . . Like that.”

Categories
politics

More Daylight

What difference will more daylight savings make to those of us outside of Arizona? Not much that I can see.

If the politicians want to pass this I don’t mind it. I would love to use more sunlight, but let’s not fool ourselves that this will make a big difference in our oil consumption. If we save 10,000 barrels per day for an extra five weeks out of the year it would take us 57 years to save one day’s worth of oil at 20 million barrels per day (our current usage level) so it will not make us noticably less dependent on the Arabian peninsula.

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Uncategorized

Are we there yet?

I like to see that Nate has done somehting with the idea of collecting threads, but I have one question about his solution – how is it more accessible to the non-bloggers? Those of us who subscribe by RSS can get updates and even make changes to the wiki but what about others who are still more comfortable with subscribing to an email list?

Nate is probably right that the overhead would be a major burden to – and yes, it might possibly even kill – my journal idea, but just because we have an option does not mean that we have addressed all the concerns. That is what needs to happen at some point if we are to find the right balance in this type of communication between groups within our group (AECT).

I found another idea over at Weblogg-Ed that looks promising. There is a link there to a conversation tracker at blogpulse by Inteliseek. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work. I am thinking that they only track a subset of blogs, but if the tool could be used for AECT related blogs or Education related blogs it would be a very interesting start.

On another note, I am starting to wonder if I should take a sabbatical (as a student) to work on this stuff for a while without having to worry about classes. Any ideas? 🙂