Good vibes for the virtual global village

This morning’s New York Times has a review of the newly released movie “In the Shadow of the Moon.” The review titled “When the Moon Was a Matter of Pride,” includes these 2 dreary paragraphs:

If Mr. Collinss recollections make you swell with vicarious pride, they may also make you shudder. When was the last time the wonders of technology received such wholehearted endorsement? If todays world is even more strife-torn than the world of 1969, when the Vietnam War was raging, one reason may be that the same technology that produced Apollo 11 has since come under a cloud.

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This dinosaur may be smarter than the real ones were!

This morning’s Washington Post has a story here of the Demo conference where a new Pleo toy was launched. I went to the website of the manufacturer, Ugobe, to meet Pleo’s makers. The website is compelling. Their idea is to make robots that respond to humans and these robots learn. The implications for education are amazing. Why not “life form” bots as Ugobe calls Pleo and their products to follow, that would be tutors? The following is Ugobe’s description of Pleo:

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The Survey SAYS….

We just received a nebulous message from our principal about the upcoming surveys. I suppose what he wanted to say was, "Write only good things, please," but he was constrained by instructions not to say such things:

Guidelines on the Education Department Web site stress that principals should "avoid even the appearance" that they are trying to sway survey answers.

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Bloglines Blues

Here’s an admission…I’m an RSS fraud. Hypocrite, if you must. And I apologize.

Yesterday, in three straight presentations about the wonders and potential of RSS to rock our eduworlds, I kept getting more and more embarrased at the fact that when I showed my Bloglines account, which has ballooned up to 197 feeds, it was obvious that while I might be subscribed, I’m not keeping up with my reading. In fact, if you totalled up the number of unread messages in my list, it’s a very audience appealing 3739. If that doesn’t motivate some people to dive right in, I don’t know what will.

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Web English Teacher Site

Great link via Ray Schroeder of Educational Technology

Site of the Day: Web English Teacher - techLearning
Brief Description of the Site: Carla Beard thinks of her site as the faculty library or workroom on a global scale and it’s a real find for English and Language Arts teachers. Links include Advanced Placement, Book Reports, Children’s Literature, ESL, Grammar, Mechanics, and Usage, Journalism, Literature, Mythology, Phonics, Poetry, Reading, Shakespeare, Speech, Study Guides, Vocabulary, Writing, and more.

Puzzled but pondering

I’m going to get to podcast again with the kids next week. The last time they talked about comments and what they meant to them.

I began thinking about podcasting topics and a puzzling situation that recently occurred came to mind. There’s an elementary student in one of the blogging groups that I follow and work with some. This student has one of the best “voices’ I have read on blogs. He’s creative. The topics are well-thought out. Punctuation and flow is not always perfect but the writing is excellent. I’ve seen continued improvement since this student has been blogging. In one of my conversations with the principal it came out that this student was not a good writer in his classroom That floored me. His classroom teacher could not believe his good writing on the blogs. It just didn’t add up.

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One : One Laptop Ramblings

Miguel started this conversation - Tom and Doug have jumped in … here are my ramblings:

How important or “worth it” are laptops, or any other technology? How valuable they are as learning tools should be the decider of how much we are willing to invest. Not that I think we shouldn’t expect that $200 dollar laptop, but it will be important what those $200 laptops can do – we have had PC4’s that could do word processing and some other applications for less than $200 but that hasn’t been enough – they were hardly used … what is enough?

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Not just soccer in Brazil

Yesterday I returned from five days in Rio de Janeiro where I attended and blogged at iSummit 06. The event was awesome in several dimensions. The New York Times summarizes the Creative Commons facet of the conference and its origins here. I was a panelist for the Education iCommons; I described that panel in my blog post for the iSummit here. Mobile was a frequent informal topic and I predict it will be a major theme at the next iSummit to be held a year from now in Dubrovnik, Coatia.

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Blogs vs. wikis vs. podcasts - why schools like wikis & podcasts

At TCEA 2008, I heard a number of teachers say that they are able to use wikis or make podcasts at their schools, whereas blogs were discouraged or blocked. My initial reaction was that it was simply a knee jerk reaction based on popular uses of each. Blogs = MySpace = pedophiles, while podcasts seem safe and wikis are associated with Wikipedia, which at least sounds educational.

But as I thought more about it, I don’t think it’s that simple. I think it reflects a larger issue of assessment and comfort with the status quo. In most schools, curriculum focuses on student product rather than process.

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How Journalism, and Writing, is Changing

Jumping off of the CUNY discussion from yesterday comes this piece in today’s Times about how a Swiss magazine decided to cover the recent riots in the Paris suburbs. It’s a great comparison of how traditional methods are being replaced by the immediacy of the new tools.

The blog turned their work routine upside down. Typically, they would do their reporting, then write the main piece for the magazine, and finally perhaps, a related feature or a reporter’s notebook.

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