Year 2005

Classifications

Get comfortable. This is going to be along one. I have been thinking about this subject for a while, but suddenly in the last 24 hours I have changed my position. I was fully behind Will when he posted Blogging vs Journaling again as he argued: Xanga is not a blog site. It’s an online journal site. There is nothing inherently wrong with journaling online (provided it’s done with the proper precautions.) But there is something wrong with calling that blogging. And that’s what’s happening more and more. And the problem comes when parents and principals equate Xanga and other such sites with blogging, which in turn predisposes them negatively toward efforts to use blogs the way we know they can be used. Not so anymore. After reading The Horseless Carriage by Tom Coates I have changed my stance on the subject.

Acid Test Results

Just for fun I ran Firefox (1.0.3) and IE 6 (XP SP2 etc.) through The Second Acid Test after hearing the Safari passed the test. I was slightly disappointed to find that Firefox had problems with: shrink-to-fit on floating elements,…

Good Fit

I rarely just link to things like this, but I have been very excited to discover Mathemagenic where Lilia is interested in exactly what I have begun to pursue in my PhD studies. The difference is that she is way…

Well Said

Will hit the nail right on the head with his post: Curriculum is for Kids. Every quote and every thought was exactly right clear down to his conclusion – blogging is exploration. We can ask ourselves why the education system has become a series of canned curriculum objectives – which are often not met anyway despite the best efforts of many good teachers – when we recognize as adults that learning comes from personal exploration. Anyone who has watched their children closely will easily see that children learn in exactly the same way. The only difference is that they do not always understand what they are doing or how to go about the process of discovery in meaningful ways. I hope we can get that little flaw fixed.

No god but God

I have been trying to learn more about Islam in an effort to sort out the truth from the fiction that is reported in conjunction with the war on terror and other similar realities of our day. As a part…

Blogging Mentality

I want to thank Tom Hoffman for his comments on James Farmer’s post: Blogging works best… in relation to my previous post. You should already be structuring work so that it is relevant to a student’s life, whether or not…

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.

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…

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…

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.