Technology Dependency August 28, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Opinion.add a comment
The other day a computer glitch delayed flights across the country. It is nearly impossible for commercial planes to function in an technology environment from a century ago. If the technology infrastructure isn’t in place, planes don’t fly. What does this have to do with education? Not much. Schools open, teachers teach, and learners learn whether the technology infrastructure is up or not. If you needed additional evidence that education is behind the times and not taking advantage of the potential of technology, all you had to do was try to catch a flight last Tuesday. Of course, if schools in the US ever do get caught up, we’ll have to prepare for the eventual ‘learning delays’ caused by technology dependency.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10026301-93.html
Police Scanners August 26, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Tools.add a comment
I just experienced another sense of how connected we all are. I need a word for that. Kind of like deja vu, but with an aspect of epiphany. Let me know if you come up with one. Wired published an article that links to a web site that is streaming the Denver Police radio scanner. I guess there is some sort of convention going on that makes this of interest to people outside of Colorado. Makes me think of an audio back-channel to the city around me.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/democratic-conv.html
http://co.scanamerica.us/index.php?county=Denver
Kindle for Kids August 25, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Fair Use, Hardware.add a comment
The Tech Observer, among others, is reporting that Amazon is hinting to investors that they may introduce a Kindle for the textbook market. I am not convinced about the long term viability of the Kindle as an e-book reader, however, based on the three people I know who have one, they all love it, warts and all. I can also see how it would make sense for text books to be loaded onto a Kindle. Students would gladly trade in their hefty texts for a single device that contained all of their course reading.
The Kindle is only one direction. Give every student a laptop, or let them use their own if they have one, and provide digital content is another option. Of course, file sharing and copyrights become an even more important issue for the book publishers if all of the material was available in digital format. This sort of reminds me of the transition from vinyl to compact disk way back when I worked in a record store in the mid 80’s. Short-sidedness on the part of the recording industry hasn’t done them any favors. We’ll have to wait and see what happens to the text book publishing industry as the world rapidly goes digital around them.
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/the-tech-observer/2008/08/25/rumored-textbook-plans-for-kindle
No More Auto-posting Delicious August 25, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Link Collections, Tools.add a comment
I’ve decided to discontinue auto-posting my del.icio.us link as a blog post. I know, it is now just delicious.com, but my fingers refuse to leave out the punctuation marks. Besides, the old address provided a great opportunity to talk about domain names. Anyway, the daily posts from delicious seem to clutter up the blog, and this way I also remove the fall back position of not blogging because I saved another link that day. No more excuses. You can always follow my links through the RSS feed: feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/mwoolums or just adding me to your network.
By the way, here are a few more to track while you are at it.
- Lucy Gray, also known as elemenous: http://delicious.com/elemenous
- Silvia Tolisano, also known as langwitches: http://delicious.com/langwitches
- Vicki Davis, also known as the Cool Cat Teacher: http://delicious.com/brightideasguru
- Vicki Davis, while not a del.icio.us account, she also moderates the educator group in diigo, another social bookmarking site: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/educators
- Larry Ferlazzo, while this isn’t a social bookmarking site, he is one of the best collectors of educational links you can find: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/
Word Frequency August 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.1 comment so far
Another interesting site came up today that tracks word usage frequency. More than 86,000 words are tracked in order of how often they are used in the English language. The data comes from the British National Corpus®, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. The most frequently used word? ‘The’. Least used? ‘Conquistador’. Who knew? Where do your favorite words stack up? ‘Education’ is number 337, ‘Technology’ is number 843, ‘Books’ came in at 764, while ‘Book’ is number 357. ‘Blog’, ‘Wiki’, and ‘Podcast’ are not currently in the list. ‘Twitter‘ shows up, but I’m guessing that is not referring to the micro-blogging tool.
http://www.wordcount.org/main.php
Remember When? August 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Humor.add a comment
Just in case you were getting nostalgic for your old school days, what with the start of a new school year and all, along comes a funny site that lets you start with a picture of yourself and shows you what you might have looked like in a year book picture. You can choose any year from 1950 to 2000 in two year increments. Here is a small gallery of myself in different decades. Having attended high school in the 70’s, those pictures were just too painful to publish here. Maybe you’ll look better back then than I do. I did?
1958
1988
1996
Light Switch August 12, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Opinion, Tools.1 comment so far
I’m sitting in on a Google Docs session. Great collaboration potential with Google Docs, but like most technology, there is a catch. In this case, it looks like only one person can actually edit the document at one time. The videos all seem to show more than one person typing at the same time, but in practice, only one person is able to edit the document at a time. Pair writing would be a more accurate description than tandem writing. One person edits, saves, and then the next can contribute. This is still the same document, just not synchronous for more than one editor. Technology has a lot of potential, and Google Docs is just one example, but I still think technology needs to be simpler and more reliable. There isn’t much question about how to use a light switch. Flip the switch to turn the lights on or off. When classroom technology is that simple, we won’t wonder how to use it, because it will be obvious and ubiquitous.
Running with Scissors August 11, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Conference Sessions, Tools.add a comment
This morning I’m jumping in to demonstrate Web 2.0 to a group of teachers. This is a fascinating subject with lots of potential directions. Blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking. What would you include as Web 2.0 for teachers?
