“A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs”-NY Times

The front page of today’s New York Times features a story about the attempts of Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales to create a set of guidelines for “Web Civility” in the light of what happened with Kathy Sierra and others.
Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

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Technology Success Story

We are so proud!

Jonas Salk High-Tech Academy in the San Juan School District (Sacramento, California) is featured in the Sacramento Bee as a technology success story. Jonas Salk is a double-duty Generation YES school, using both the GenYES and TechYES progrms. We’ve watched the amazing work their GenYES students have been doing to support teacher use of technology and how their TechYES students have stepped up to mentoring their peers in tech literacy to receive TechYES certifications.

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Crossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age Presentation

I have pushed everything to the side and I am determined to spend some time on K12 Online 07 this week. What a joy! Many have taken off for the holidays and we have a little down time. The research is on hold until the beginning of December so I am surfacing for a bit.

I selected Karen Richardson’s presentation “Crossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age”. She starts off with a video giving a clear and concise overview of the contents of her wiki. The wiki includes a humorous yet very informative spoof of copyright by Eric Faden that includes a series of clips from Disney movies. Then she includes a copyright quiz by Hall Davidson that will let you know your own understanding of copyright laws. Then it moves into a great introduction to Creative Commons. You see a movie and this link will take you directly to a search engine to find Creative Commons licensed materials. The next part gives you a tour of places you can find copyright-friendly materials like Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive. Then she moves into open education resources commons like Yellowstone National Park, National Archives website, and the Library of Congress. I have been spending lots of time on all these sites this morning - it is a terrific resource. Go follow her links to see all the resources.

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Moodling Around

Tomorrow is the first full day training for our Tablet PC pilot and I’ve been hammering away on the Moodle site I’ve created for the course. This is my first attempt at Moodle and I have to say I am very, very impressed. Once you get the feel for it, it’s very intuitive, and it’s got a very rich feature set. The wiki tool alone was enough to sell me. (No blog, however…)

Anyway, just thought I’d share a link to the site and invite anyone who is interested to take a look around. Just click on the “New Classroom Model Pilot Course” link at the lower left, and then login as a guest. It’s read only. If there are any Moodle-ists out there with advice, I’m all ears.

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