Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I spoke, yesterday, at the TechForum conference in Chicago. You probably know that already, since I blogged the keynote by Hall Davidson. As an additional note, it is evidence of blogging’s conversational quality, that Ewan Mcintosh posted a comment, with links to a web site where people can explore using The SIMS as […]

I just watched Voices from the New American Schoolhouse trailer at YouTube after hearing about it at Boing Boing. The clip concerns a radial experiment in education taking place in Fairhaven. It’s a school where kids (of all ages) make the rules and decide what they want to learn and when.

Of course, I’ve heard about projects like this before, and we can find parallels in the history of universities (such as those of Bologna). Somehow, though, I’m skeptical. If I were 12 and allowed to “make my own lesson plan,” it would consist entirely of videogames and the occasional SF flick.

I just watched Voices from the New American Schoolhouse trailer at YouTube after hearing about it at Boing Boing. The clip concerns a radial experiment in education taking place in Fairhaven. It’s a school where kids (of all ages) make the rules and decide what they want to learn and when.

Of course, I’ve heard about projects like this before, and we can find parallels in the history of universities (such as those of Bologna). Somehow, though, I’m skeptical. If I were 12 and allowed to “make my own lesson plan,” it would consist entirely of videogames and the occasional SF flick.

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McGill University has shut down the Web site of a professor who posted pictures of McGill students culled from Playboy’s current “Girls of the Top Ten Party Schools” issue.

The professor, Luc Devroye, posted the racy photos alongside a story noting that McGill had made Playboy’s list of North America’s most bacchanalian places to get a baccalaureate. (Evidently McGill’s ratio of women to men — and the prevalence of French-Canadians, whom the magazine describes as “famously open about sex” — pushed the university into the top ten.)

But campus officials didn’t think the images were appropriate for a Web site hosted by the university. Now Mr. Devroye’s site stores only a message expressing the professor’s displeasure with McGill administrators:

Luc Devroye’s site is now closed. He is still alive and kicking, but on April 24, 2006, censorship and political correctness won against academic freedom. To the students who are counting on my course notes: sorry. To the researchers who are trying to download my work: sorry…. We may be up again one day after purgatory. (CTV)

An undergraduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham was so horrified by the prevalence of online sexual predators that he took matters into his own hands.

The student, Kevin Cope, started posing online as a 13-year-old girl. When one online coversation steered toward sexual topics and the possibility of a meeting, Mr. Cope reported it to the police.

They assumed the identity of the 13-year-old and continued the conversations. After seven online chats, police arrested a man from Jackson Township, Pa.  (WJAC-TV)

Everything must go! Congrats to Tim for his new gig as Director of Technology for the Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose Schools. I think we need ed-minded people in IT jobs right now more than tech-minded people in ed jobs. Also, Tim has a link to the new Google SketchUp. If you haven’t realized it by now, this move should make it clear that…

At Sussex Central High School, students use the computer daily to chat with one another. But they don’t discuss social happenings and their teachers don’t mind. Sussex Central High School students are the first in Delaware to use WebCT — an interactive,

When you see the acronym RFID (radio frequency identification) in a paper, you immediately think about how Wal-Mart and other big retailers plan to replace bar codes. But two students from Purdue University got a brilliant idea and are using this technolo

UMASS nursing students at Boston and Lowell campuses are trading literally thousands of pages of medical reference texts for a state-of-the-art digital solution that puts the information, and more, right into the palms of their hands. UMASS faculty and li

At the end of March I posted about the continued, and in some cases increased, need for supervision of students using the Internet in the classroom. Many schools have been blocking blogs, wikis, and other social sites in an attempt to eliminate the need for supervision. Rather than embrace the new technologies they have “washed […]

An undergraduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham was so horrified by the prevalence of online sexual predators that he took matters into his own hands.

The student, Kevin Cope, started posing online as a 13-year-old girl. When one online coversation steered toward sexual topics and the possibility of a meeting, Mr. Cope reported it to the police.

They assumed the identity of the 13-year-old and continued the conversations. After seven online chats, police arrested a man from Jackson Township, Pa.  (WJAC-TV)

Facebook, the social-networking site of choice for countless college students, now hopes to fill the same role in corporate America: The Web site has opened its doors to employees at a handful of well-known companies.

Workers at Apple, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, among other workplaces, will now be able to create profiles — and digitally “poke” each other — on the network. And if Facebook’s corporate strategy is anything like its collegiate one, it’s likely that employees at many more businesses will gain access to the site in the coming months.

Justin Smith of Inside Facebook — yes, a blog devoted to news about the site — says Facebook will work to keep its corporate clientele separate from its college users: “As long as Facebook stays safe for students, expanding into the corporate world should not adversely affect their dominance in the college and high-school markets.”

But it seems given that Facebook’s corporate foray will make college career counselors uneasy that unscrupulous employers might use the site to dig for dirt on students who have applied for jobs. (Inside Facebook)

This is a moblog, typed in real time during the event. Please forgive misspellings and awkward text.>
It’s TechForum 2006 in Chicago, and Hall Davidson is doing the keynote. The speech title is “The World is Shrinking”. He just said that one thing that is definitely shrinking is the distance between imagination and […]