The Village Green

By way of Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog, I’m adding information to the Associations page of this blog to include the International Edubloggers Directory.

http://edubloggerdir.blogspot.com/

By way of Learning is Messy, a study from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin shows that the Texas accountability system that served as the model for NCLB “directly contributes to lower graduation rates.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2008/02/11/daily31.html?b=1202706000%5e1592499 

Langwitches has posted a great list of student resources for the classroom.  Her list is inspired by the work of Larry Ferlazzo, who has his own collection of student resources for publishing.  Both are linked below.

Langwitches classroom resources: http://www.langwitches.org/blog/2008/02/17/inspired-by-larry-ferlazzo-the-listmaster/

Larry Ferlazzo’s ‘best way to create online content’: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/?s=best+ways+to+create+online+content+easily%2C+quickly

My own short list of publishing links on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/mwoolums/publishing 

BitTorrent, the protocol, essentially allows for the distributed exchange of files.  It isn’t really much different from http or ftp. Following copyrights and other applicable laws, it is efficient and simple. Distributing material in violation of copyright or other laws is wrong and creates problems for everyone else.  Comcast, in their infinite wisdom, has been putting BitTorrent on a slow track, ostensibly because it uses too much of the service for which its customers have already paid.  Turns out that won’t slow down the protocol for long.  TorrentFreak is reporting that work is already underway to circumvent Comcasts questionable restrictions.  The article explains the issue better than I can.

the new tracker peer obfuscation technique is especially designed to be a workaround for throttling devices

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-devs-introduce-comcast-busting-encryption-080215/ 

Okay, so this isn’t such a new computer, coming from the early 1950’s, but this is a fascinating look at the history of computing.  It seems interesting to me to see how many people it took to serve.. I mean how many people it took to use one computer.  Now I have more computers in my house than we have people.

While searching for some del.icio.us resources for a class I’m teaching, I ran across a cool little tool.  extisp.icio.us takes a username from a del.icio.us account and generates a clickable tag cloud with tags sized by frequency.  Here is my del.icio.us tag cloud: http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?name=mwoolums

Try it for your own account!

http://kevan.org/extispicious

I’m always interested in what the future might hold, and this short video by Boing Boing tv goes a long way toward answering what tomorrow might look like.  I can see this new sport going prime time.  It not only gives the techies a sport of their own, it also gives us a way to recycle all of the old cables.  Take a look.

Joyce Valenza has posted a review of a Microsoft study of teens and their online habits and attitudes toward illegal downloading. Microsoft has launched a new pilot curriculum (Intellectual Property Rights Education) to help teach students about property rights.  There are some interesting conclusions:

teens are less likely to illegally download content from the Internet when they know the laws for downloading and sharing content online. About half of those teens, however, said they were not familiar with these laws, and only 11 percent of them clearly understood the current rules for downloading images, literature, music, movies and software. Teens who were familiar with downloading rules credited their parents, TV or stories in magazines and newspapers, and Web sites — more so than their schools — as resources for information about illegal downloading. 

The complete study can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/download/press/2008/02-13KRCStudy.pdf

Joyce’s review goes on to include some terrific resources to facilitate learning about copyright alternatives and fair use.

While I’m sure the the study was well intentioned and the results fairly represent the current status for school aged children, I’m concerned about the launching of a new educational initiative aimed at curbing illegal downloads. I think that schools are unfairly being singled out in an effort to get them to fix a problem that the business world can’t. Schools have plenty of important initiatives already in place, such as literacy and mathematics. Trying to convince schools that they should fix a business problem seems disingenuous and would only dilute those educational imperatives. If students aren’t looking to schools as their primary source of information about illegal downloading, as noted in the conclusion quoted above, then focusing that effort on the schools also seems misplaced.

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/390021839.html?nid=3714

Multiple sources are reporting that U.S. Representative Edward Markey is offering up another Net Neutrality bill, this one called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.  Here is the Scientific American article on the subject.  While some are cheering the new bill, like the folks at SaveTheInternet.com, others are claiming it is a waste of money, like the folks at the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste.  I’m sure others will chime in about whether the legislation is needed or not, or whether this particular bill adequately addresses the issue.  My hope is that the legislation actual accomplishes more than just paying for a study and conducting public hearings.

In case you don’t think the Internet needs some sort of guarantee of openness, read this Scientific American article about the current practices of Comcast to decide which types of traffic should be restricted.  Some of Comcast’s reasoning sounds more like ‘customers are great as long as they pay for a service that they don’t use very much’.   You might also take a look at a recent turn of events where Google has decided to hijack specific web pages and replace them with their own content.  These are not trivial issues in a world that depends so much on access to information.

Oh, and just in case you wanted to make use of this in the classroom, besides being a controversial topic, here is a mashup that tracks the progress of legislation on a Google map.

http://www.whereabill.org/

This made me smile today:

posted on Connecting the Dots:
http://www.iconnectdots.com/ctd/2008/02/strategic-blogg.html  

According to an elearnspace post, kids are getting a little bored with social networking.  George Siemens quotes a statistic that says the amount of time users spend on their MySpace-type sites is down 14%.  Of course that could mean that kids are getting more efficient. I know I get more efficient with something new the more familiar it becomes. It also might mean that they are finding more interesting things to do.  Any ideas what those more interesting things might be?  My guess would be that it involves the cell phone.

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/003257.html 

OEDb, the Online Education Database has just published an awesome list of 100 Ways to Use your iPod to Learn and Study Better.  The list is broken into categories like study guides, tutorials, applications, classroom help, and others.  Each item is explained, and comes with a link to a specific example, download, or site.  If you have ever wondered if iPods belong in the classroom, this list of 100 uses should help you make up your mind.

http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/100-ways-to-use-your-ipod-to-learn-and-study-better 

I just wanted to thank the group of excellent teachers that attended a brief presentation on Web 2.0 in the Classroom.  I hope that they will find their own communities to support the transition to new tools.  The wiki for this session is:

http://iltworkshop.pbwiki.com 

I’d Rather Be Writing has posted another screencast, this time it is a screencast on how to use Jing!  If you have ever wanted to create your own screencasts, this is an excellent example on how to use Jing to get the job done.

http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/12/my-jing-screencast-getting-up-and-running-with-jing/ 

The report by Channel 9 News was about a service called Radar that tracks cell phone usage.  Texts and pics are captured, as well as the call log, but phone calls are not recorded.  I’m not sure this is really worth the $10 a month since all the calls are listed on each phone bill.  I also don’t think my kids are likely to be approached (called) by some random abductor.  Still, when my 17 year old starts keeping conversations, friendships, and text messages to herself, I can see the attraction to the possibility of reviewing her texts with her.  Walt Mossberg reviewed the service last summer.  Here is a link to the Radar site:http://www.MyMobileWatchdog.com.

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=86230