Blog Juice for Educational Technology

So I’m not sure if this is the best online etiquette, but I feel compelled to share an e-mail I got from a long-time edblogger this morning with some really disturbing news. Basically, without warning, his district blocked internal access to all of his student blog and podcasting sites.

This afternoon, my district…officially blocked all of my 150 student blogs - both my online magazine and my 100 student blogs for my classroom. The urls you put in your book will work anywhere in the world except in my school, and maybe China.

Now that in itself is pretty ridiculous when you take it at face value. But it’s even worse when you understand, as this teacher does, that they’re not just blocking blogs. They’re blocking a community of learners and an innovative educator who are making great use of these tools. He says:

The blogs have energized my classroom this year. We’ve had over 11,000 hits to our student blogs and online magazine since October of last year. That’s 11,000 times that someone else is reading my students’ writing. We literally created a community of readers and writers.

And why did they do this?

As far as I can tell, the school’s technology officials had no valid reason for shutting me down. I have meticulously created the templates where we blog. I closely monitor all pages. None of the students are identified. Parents are aware of what we’re doing, and support it.

Surprised? I’m not. It’s becoming clear that we’re going to see this more and more, and while I’ll bet the district is going to raise the safety defense, it really has much more to do with losing control than anything else.

But what we have here, it seems, is also an opportunity for parents to stand up and come to the defense of good pedagogy. (What a concept…) And that might be a first. Isn’t it about time we read a newspaper or magazine article where parents and teachers and students are advocating for the learning that comes with less control rather than the ignorance that comes with ratcheting it up?

Updates as they come in…

I’ve been enjoying Inside the Net with Amber MacAuthor and Leo Laporte. Their most recent episode featured Merlin Mann from 43Folders and 5ives. Merlin is best known for his personal productivity hints, often related to the Getting Things Done methodology.
Atypically poor audio quality aside, the episode has some good tips about managing large quantities of […]

Secretary Spellings addressed board chairs, chief executive officers, and local council leaders at a meeting of the Girl Scouts of the USA. She announced ED’s first-ever national summit for girls on math and science.

The amount of creative, and free, software on the Internet amazes me. For every piece of limited, stale, and costly piece of software you find, there’s an equally fantastic, interactive, and free piece of software like Stellarium, a personal desktop astronomy program well suited for use in schools. Until I found this program mentioned in […]

Another reason why I haven’t had enough time to read of late is because over the last few days I’ve mailed out 93 packages with 104 books, much to the chagrin of the people standing in line behind me at the post office. This order fulfillment process is quite the joy, though I’m sure it’ll slow down real fast. (Won’t it?)

The really cool thing is that many of the books are going international, as in Brazil, Sweden, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Malasyia, UK, and Spain. It’s a reminder of the audience reach that blogs can have, and of how connected we can all become.

The recording industry has filed another batch of lawsuits against suspected music pirates, and it appears that college song swappers have been spared for the second straight month. A total of 750 people were named in February’s suits, but the Recording Industry Association of America did not specifically identify any campus-network users.

Stan Bubrouski, a computer-science major at Norheastern University, celebrated the purchase of his first cellphone in 2001 by concocting a nerdy private joke: He signed up for an account on vText, Verizon’s text-messaging service, under the user name “null.”

It was, he now admits, a colossal mistake.

Null@vtext.com, it turns out, is the final destination for unaddressed messages sent over the Verizon network. Over the past five years, Mr. Bubrouski’s phone has been inundated with thousands of phantom missives from absent-minded text messagers and unsolicited messages from over a dozen companies. (eWeek)

I spent much of last week at a retreat dealing with learning communities, “classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students.” Because writing can be applied to almost any discipline, writing courses are often parts of learning communities. One computer science professor, however, objected to the idea of combining his course with a writing course: “The problem with giving all these writing assignments is that then I gotta grade them.”

From what I could tell, “grading” writing assignments meant going over them with a red pen, writing “AWK” or “FRAG” in the margins. Several English faculty hastened to explain that not all writing assignments have to be graded. Indeed, one of their goals is to get students to see writing as an activity that makes and shares meaning, not as something done to get a grade.

This was my cue, so I stepped in. Blogs, I explained, are especially valuable for this purpose.

We came across this one courtesy of the PEN Weekly Newsblast. Twelve-year-old Jasmine Roberts of Benito Middle School in New Tampa, Florida, has captured the nation’s appalled attention with her award-winning science project. Check out the Tampa Tribune coverage posted on MSNBC, here as well as ABC, and some TV reports here and here.

There’s no such thing as a typical Wikipedia writer. Contributors to the popular online encyclopedia include doctoral students, ambitious high schoolers, even some people with actual jobs. But like almost any Web forum or online game room, the site has birthed its own subculture — one that finds members occasionally sparring over heady concepts like journalistic objectivity and editing strategy. (USA Today)

After a recent Los Angeles Times series found that many students drop out of school because of their inability to pass algebra, a Times reporter asked four candidates for the Los Angeles Unified School Board and one current board member to solve simple algebra problems, such as: Solve for X: 2X - 14 = 7 - X.

Among the four candidates: One answered incorrectly, two correctly, and a fourth declined to try. The current board member answered his algebra problem correctly. The mayor said he thought it the test was a “bit of a cheap shot,” the Times reports. What do you think?

And the answer to the problem above is: X = 7.

Users of Apple’s Macintosh computers have long enjoyed the technology equivalent of a safe neighborhood, where the viruses and security nuisances that bedevil far more common Windows-based PCs were much less frequent. No…

See political cartoons on progressivism and the 1912 election, the 1897 petition against the annexation of Hawaii, woman suffrage and the 19th Amendment, the Zimmermann telegram (1917), photos of the 369th Infantry, posters from the Food Administration during World War I, the Volstead Act and prohibition documents, and the unfinished Lincoln Memorial. (National Archives and Records Administration)