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…
David
David is the father of 8 children. When he's not busy with that full time occupation he works as a technology professional. He enjoys discussing big issues with informed people, cooking, gardening, vexillology (flag design), and tinkering.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…