Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

I currently have 8 tabs in my Firefox window, not including this one. They have been their for various lengths of times ranging from a minute ago to over a week. I guess I’m keeping them open intending to read them, but just too lazy to bookmark them to delicious or Diigo. Why bookmark when you can just maintain the tabs in perpetuity? Another approach would be to blog the links instead of saving the tabs or bookmarking to D(elicious|iigo). Admittedly this takes more work than just bookmarking them, but on the other hand it gives me something to put in my long-neglected blog. Here are the tabs:

• Gmail – No surprise. This is always open
• 10 Rules That Govern Groups – This one came from a link tweeted out by George Siemens. It looks interesting from what I’ve browsed of it. I intend to go back to get a more detailed read of it or maybe I’ll just wait for someone else to read it then add their summary as a comment to this post. You can, in fact, consider yourself to do that for pretty much any of these links.
• Ten Simple Rules for Choosing the Perfect CMS + Excellent Options – I’ve been feeling the itch lately to play around with a new CMS. This link came up on Twitter at just the right time. I’ve set up and tweaked WordPress several times, dabbled in Drupal and once installed Joomla just to pass the time (yes – I’m that geeky). I’ve never heard of any of the others so maybe I’ll noodle around with one of the others just for fun. (Yes – I’m really *that* geeky!)
• Disconnected – An interesting looking post that I’ve has led to thoughts of writing a blog post in response/addendum. Obviously I haven’t written it yet but here’s the part that I really like:

Schools trivialize their value by at best reflecting a completely inauthentic and misunderstanding view of how technology and social media is so naturally integrated into all of the other aspects of our students’ lives.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and it may yet provoke me to write something about that.

• 10 Technology Enhanced Alternatives to Book Reports – I think this link came from Alec Couros on Twitter; I am pretty sure that Alec generates or passes along about half the links tweeted in any given day. I teach in the sciences, not English, so I don’t really have opportunity to assign book reports but I have assigned my share of research essays. A couple of years ago I reached the point where I decided that if I ever read another research essay again I would scream. This is a nice list of alternative assessments at my disposal.
• 100 Essential Skills for Geeks – I know or can do 34 of these. I promise to improve this. (Just checked online for one of them bringing my total up to 35. I’ll leave it up to your imagination which one that was)
• Living in a Digital Frontier Town – Passed along on Twitter by Jim Groom. I like this post because I’ve felt the same way about blogging and more recently Twitter having made the transition from frontier towns to civilized areas. Where is a edtech/media renegade to go now that the frontiers are disappearing?
• Tasks graduates from Gmail labs – I like Google’s tasks app, but I’ll keep using Toodledo until there is an app that can keep and sync a copy of my to-do list on my iTouch.

My browser is now cleaner since I’ve been closing those tabs as I blogged them. I remember, back in those frontier days before social bookmarking or twitter when this was how we shared links to cool stuff and discussed them. Ah good times, good times.