James points towards Robert’s post about the WordPress Aggregator Blog. If I understand this correctly, it is a WordPress hack that allows a blog to be created by aggregating several blogs. Fantastic – instant online community, just add water! I suppose there is an ethical/intellectual property issue here – what permission would a blog author need to give to participate in an aggregated blog? Does publishing a blog with an RSS feed imply that the posts are for public use? What about my content being aggregated into a blog with someone whose views I found offensive? Technology always seems to be one step ahead of culture’s ability to deal with it.

Stories from the Right Hemisphere About time! Now, let’s talk about podcasting …

It was great to see this article about the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School article in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. This is a model that needs to be developed in more school divisions. The most important difference, by the way, is not the use of computer technology, although it is a convenient medium for delivering content. “In a face-to-face school what we do is we spend 80 per cent of our time as teachers presenting material,” said Darren Cannell, assistant principal of the Saskatoon Catholic cyber school. “Here the computer actually presents the material so you spend the whole hour helping the students and . . . that allows you to get to know your students and there is more time for us to assist students in an online environment than there is in a face-to-face environment.” Nicely put, Darren (and thanks … Continue reading »

Of course, the fears are largely unfounded. Here’s the story: CBC News: Text messaging among teens raises illiteracy fears The article does point out (down towards the bottom, where not every reader will see it: In Europe, where teens have been texting for years, researchers report that claims that texting leads to illiteracy are unfounded. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that having teens communicate by typed text should actually increase their literacy. I am defining literacy as the ability to communicate effectively in a particular medium. If teens are becoming better at communicating through text messaging, would that have a positive effect on literacy in other mediums, such as the standard written essay (which may not be the best measure of literacy in the global sense).

According to post on the FlickrBlog, Yahoo will be acquiring Flickr. This fits nicely with Yahoo’s forthcoming Yahoo 360 blog/photo sharing/messaging service. I can only hope that they do better than MSN’s blogging service (so unmemorable that I’ve already forgotten the name). This does, however, seem to put an end to my dream of having Picasa being able to load directly to my Flickr account (or do you know of any clever hacks to make this work?).

Today is tidying up my web resources day. A major part of this is installing a new theme for the site called Neuron. So far my favourite feature is the ability to hide some of the content in the sidebar. This is configurable, and right now I’m working on trying to understand how this works. I also like the categories for each entry being printed in strong type at the beginning of each entry – for those who are reading the blog, this should make it easier to scan for content that you are interested in. One single bad feature – the datestamp at the beginning of each entry. You’ll now be able to see that I am usually blogging late into the night when I should be sleeping. :^) UPDATE – I’m going to be rationalizing my categories, so … Continue reading »

Ah signs of renewal are starting to show up in the ed-tech-blogosphere, most notable being a lively fresh rant from David Wiley entitled Pedagogy-Agnostic Standards and a Much Needed Rant. A brief sample: Why would we turn the greatest enabler of social interaction into a simple data download service? It’s like the great sequence of scenes in Real Genius. At a top school (I alway thought it was supposed to be CMU, for some reason) a lecture room is full of students and a professor. But before long, the professor has been replaced by a reel-to-reel, and students simply scrawl down notes from the recorder. By the end, the reel-to-reel plays in the front to a room empty of all but miniature tape recorders. That is the direction all this automation madness is going, you know. Despite labelling his treatise … Continue reading »

George Siemens on elearnspace has a post about Informal Learning. He articulates the challenge of integrating informal learning into formal learning contexts (like school) very nicely: I think there is a balance of formal/informal learning. Each has a place. Context and need should drive which one is utilized. One of the opportunities for formal education is to find ways to increase delivery of formal learning via informal channels. And George, I want to thank you for avoiding the P-word – I share your misgivings about it. ;^) It occurs to me that one of the apparent conflicts is between the process of informal learning and the emphasis on standardized outcomes in formal learning, although perhaps the conflict is not so great as one might think. In my Biology 20 curriculum, for example, one of the learning outcomes is Identify some … Continue reading »

A recent article in The Walrus Magazine – Missing Marshall McLuhan describes how the McLuhan Festival in Toronto. Like Harold Jarche, I found one paragraph particularly juicy reading: “The new media won’t fit into the classroom,” he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.” Harold added his comment: All of the action is outside the classroom – blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting – you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet. This seems quite true, and I think the difference in the use of technology for communication within and outside the classrooms is staggering. I had students in a Computer Science class play … Continue reading »

… not a d4 like that sneaky D’Arcy! ;^) Ah – life was so simple as a young proto-geek. Take the quiz at dicepool.com UPDATE – I finally browbeat my wife into taking the test – I always knew my wife was a perfect 10, but now I have data to back it up! :^) Do you think a d12 and a d10 are compatible?