Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Learn about how genes work, exceptions to Mendel’s rules, how DNA gets replicated, genes and disease, current research and recent discoveries, and how applications of genetic research (biotechnology) are being used in agriculture, health, and pharmacogenetics (medicine) to change our world for the better. (National Institute of General Medical Sciences, supported by National Institutes of Health)

Secretary Spellings and Russian Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. Department of Education and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on expanding cooperation and exchanges in the field of education. This MOU is the first of its kind between the U.S. Department of Education and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

It’s an embarrassing revelation for a college to make: We’ve exposed students’ personal information not because we were hacked, but because we misplaced a laptop. Fortunately, only a handful of institutions have had to make such an announcement. Laptops, after all, aren’t all that easy to lose.

PDA’s, on the other hand, can disappear pretty quickly, so the thought of employees walking around with sensitive student information on their BlackBerrys can’t be a pleasant one for campus administrators. Just this week, officials at Miami University of Ohio’s Middletown campus disclosed that a PDA lost by an employee contains private data on about 850 students. (Associated Press)

Do college officials regularly carry sensitive information on their PDA’s? If so, what can administrators do to try to keep that data from leaking?

The Bodleian Library isn’t just the first stop for researchers at Oxford University; it’s also one of Europe’s oldest and most revered archives. So English Web surfers must have been more than a bit surprised to see the library listed on eBay with a reserve price of about $350-million.

Of course, Oxford isn’t really holding a fire sale: The Bod, as locals call it, was put up for sale as a symbolic gesture by Oxford students disgruntled over rising college rent costs. (Those costs, the students say, have increased by an average of 30 percent over the past five years.) (BBC News)

The auction may have been a nice piece of political theater, but it was short lived: eBay officials, who aren’t fond of symbolic uses of their site, have already taken the Bod off the market.

Sure, Facebook may seem to have the college social-networking market all but cornered. And MySpace gets its hooks in students before they’ve even left high school. But online entrepreneurs still think there’s plenty more money to be made at the nexus of the Web and college life.

One of the latest entries in the college-networking sweepstakes comes from Affinity Engines, a company that promises to “help individuals build and maintain personal and professional connections in a trusted and secure online community.” In other words, the company is providing social networking for college alumni groups.

Almost 50 institutions—including Northwestern and Stanford Universities and the University of Florida—have already signed up for Affinity’s service, which comes at an annual fee of between $10,000 and $25,000, according to the company. Affinity is hoping to distinguish its service from Facebook—which also lets alums sign up—by offering instant messaging and blogging tools to users.

Started as a pilot project in 1966, and made permanent in 1975, school breakfast has been renewed as a pet project of two former senators. George McGovern and Bob Dole are pushing to raise awareness about this federal service for school children in the name of hunger relief, a cause that both have championed since the 1970s. According to USA Today, “the pair are barnstorming the nation to get school officials, lawmakers, anti-poverty advocates, and parents interested in the program.”

“You’re not going to have highly productive, educated, competitive young people coming up in this country if they don’t get a good education,” McGovern says. “And they’re not going to get a good education if a third of them are hungry all the time, or malnourished.”

Although the program has grown steadily since the 1970s, currently, only about 9 million children are enrolled in the program, compared with the the nearly 29 million children receiving subsidized school lunch. With $328 billion approved by Congress (and largely unspent) for the program in 2005, unclaimed funds are returned to the Treasury.

Find information on school breakfast and the link of breakfast to improved learning by searching the NSBA School Health Programs database. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service has information online too.

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I’ll be doing three half-day workshops and a keynote at a literacy conference in Tucson today and tomorrow.  New literacy is an old shtick for me, though I haven’t done the workshops in quite a while.  In fact, this is the first time since the Web 2.0 thing has become so ingrained in my thinking.  […]

Four officials of a Connecticut library organization stepped forward on Tuesday to describe what they said was a harrowing experience—receiving a secret order from the federal government that required them to turn over library patrons’ records without telling anyone. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Consumer Reports WebWatch, a reporting service from the nonprofit publisher of that investigates the credibility of online services, has reviewed 10 web sites that purport to help students …

On the Media from May 19, 2006 had a segment entitled “Fair Use Follies” that attempted to highlight some of the challenges faced by documentary filmmakers who are finding it increasingly difficult to decide when their use of copyrighted work constitutes fair use. It was an interesting discussion, and one of the speakers led me […]

I realized it had been a while since I posted here. I miss the ability to just post at my blog and also direct it here. I’ll do better. I wanted to share a post I made on my blog this morning. The Wikipedia definition of pedagogy is the art or science of teaching. Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to…

I realized it had been a while since I posted here. I miss the ability to just post at my blog and also direct it here. I’ll do better. I wanted to share a post I made on my blog this morning. The Wikipedia definition of pedagogy is the art or science of teaching. Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to…