Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

I’m a little slow getting to read this piece over at Forbes on blogging. In some ways I wish I hadn’t read it all; in other ways, I wish I had read it sooner. This is the most negative text on blogging I have ever read, making them out to be at best personal diaries and at worst,

they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns.

Kind of ironic, isn’t it, that the rhetorical strategy of this article is not much different from what it complains about?

This quote, Putt’s Law, came through my Google page today.
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
To what degree do you think we might substitute technology with education?

This quote, Putt’s Law, came through my Google page today.
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
To what degree do you think we might substitute technology with education?

At Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee, students in grades 7-12 carry their own laptop computers for use in their classes. In this, our fourth year of a technology immersion program, we have seen great improvements in writing skills and coope

Just when we think we’ve reached the bounds of creativity in developing technology applications for teaching, the advent of new software and hardware extends the horizon for new and innovative strategies to improve teaching and student learning. Sure enou

Five years from now, in 2010, what impact will technology be making on K¬–12 teaching and learning in your school district? To a great extent, the answer to this question depends on the vision you create, the priorities you set and the planning you do tod

You know you’re in trouble when characters cannot find a way to resolve their “issues” within the space of 370 pages. If our fiction places us with insurmountable obstacles to a fulfilling life, when we cannot even imagine what it might look like to be happy campers, when the best we can do is always already second best…well, like I say, you’re in trouble. But so is your culture. Or, perhaps, I would propose: so is our culture.

In her novel _Oryx and Crake_(2003) we are treated to another ‘end -of- the-world’ narrative. This is a particularly good one, as I remember, because some of the best descriptions I’ve ever experienced of technical brilliance and sensuous enjoyment find their way into the subconscious. But my focus here is on the condition of those engaged in applied rhetoric, another way of saying the field of composition.

In this corner,in the purple book cover, Mark Backman. Noted editor, child solitaire, imaginative designer, and, not least, author of the well regarded _Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness_(1991). As a young man he was quoted saying unlikely things: ‘Rhetoric is essentially an attitude about public expression’;
‘Rhetoric resides at the crux of the relationship between language and reality’; ‘The disposition to be rhetorical has always been controversial because it involves a kind of personal power, the capacity to influence the private thoughts of others through the public use of language’. Stealing from Heraclitus he once wrote: “Change is the only Reality.” Less controversial, yet also pointed he wrote: “Any structure well be effective, in the presence of chaos.” As a principle of life he was willing to assert: “Control implies consciousness of the self, the scene of enactment, and the other persons in the play.”

Another plug, but I couldn’t resist after reading Matt Barton’s review of the Steven Johnson book a couple posts down. I’d like to alert Kairos readers to a thread recently begun at if:book — the blog of the institute for the future of the book — where we have mounted a multi-post, ongoing critique of EBIGFY, in which Johnson himself is participating. We were moved to do this after witnessing the near-universal acclaim the book has received since publication. We’ve already come across numerous instances of it being assigned as essential reading for new media and design classes, in some cases by teachers who haven’t even read it. It seemed time for a more rigorous discussion…

Konrad Glogowski writes passionately about what student blogging achieves: “When I think of blogs, I think primarily of what this technology enables my students to accomplish. When I look forward to reading their entries and comments I am really l…

Dale Hodges is a library chairperson, a role that carries clout in the William Floyd School District, where the library is a full-fledged department. Located on Long Island in New York, the district has eight schools, more than 10,000 students, and a rema

Schools and libraries affected by Hurricane Katrina will have until Dec. 13 to apply for some $132 million in emergency eRate funding made available by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help rebuild telephone and computer networks and accommo

This is the K-12 ed tech conventional wisdom as I see it: It isn’t about the technology, it is about what we do with it; i.e., it is about teaching and learning. Teaching and learning must fundamentally change to keep up with technology driven changes in society. These two premises lead one to an oddly uncritical space. You don’t have…