Hard-wired for Collaboration

According to this article on The World Cafe, we humans may be more inclined to collaborate rather than compete:

Swedish scientists have done extensive research on this and they found we first lived in small groups of 20 to 100 people who in any given week averaged 2.5 days for gathering and hunting and 4.5 days on talking. The conclusion they came to from this data was that the brain, the neurological system, and our hormonal systems have had 90,000 years of programming us for talk and collaboration, and only 10,000 years for competition and fighting.

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Moodle experiment continues, with kids!

So I decided to be brave yesterday. Here’s the backstory first…

A few days ago I decided that it was high time to get kids involved. Nothing finds a loophole in software, or an undesired feature better than a kid with some free time. I have spent weeks pouring over this software trying to figure it out, learn it, master it. Now it was time to unleash the students!

Getting their usernames and passwords uploaded turned into a nightmare. Because the username is a system of numbers that begins with 0’s, Excel kept erasing the 0’s as it would for a number. For example, if the user number is 001234, Excel made it 1234, naturally. Perfectly legitimate, but a dealbreaker for me. So between OpenOffice Calc and Excel I was finally able to upload the usernames and passwords via csv.

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Setting Up a Blogging Classroom

So this looks pretty interesting…

Jenn has 60 students spread across 3 classes at Saint Rose college in Albany, New York. Jenn is going to have all of the students blog for class, it is a writing class, and I will leave the explanation at that. Jenn can say more about this and her goals for the class. What I am going to do is help Jen figure out how to get all the students set up, with minimal technical difficulties, and to help Jen figure out how to track all of the students postings.

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