Blog Juice for Educational Technology

So does anyone else get a little freaked when the whole Google kingdom seems to be offline as it is at 6:30 am EST?
Or is it just me?

technorati tags:Google

So, using David’s questions about blog assessment, here is how I might assess this post as I write it (with some commentary on the questions along the way.)
1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. […]

I had a great day, yesterday, introducing educators in Gaston County to Web 2.0 and blogging. Today I’ll be doing sessions on podcasting and a “Telling the New Story” presentation.
During the sessions yesterday, I introduced the audiences to Hitchhikr, as a loose example of a mash-up site. One of the teachers asked an […]

I had a great day, yesterday, introducing educators in Gaston County to Web 2.0 and blogging. Today I’ll be doing sessions on podcasting and a “Telling the New Story” presentation.
During the sessions yesterday, I introduced the audiences to Hitchhikr, as a loose example of a mash-up site. One of the teachers asked an […]

Yesterday, the measures intended to maintain “Net Neutrality” failed in the Senate Commerce Committee, meaning it looks like the bill to change Internet access pricing will be headed toward a full senate vote. If passed, telecom companies will be able to create a two-tiered system of Internet access based on how much you can and […]

Technology NewsTeachers are using computers more to teach core curriculum and less to teach computers, according to a recent survey. Sixty-eight percent of teachers reported using technology to teach critical thinking skills in 2006, according to results

In New Jersey, education officials didn’t notice that standardized test scores from three Camden schools had risen in 2005 at a seemingly inexplicable rate - and thus might be worth investigating - until prodded by reporters. Had the same sort of test res

The Hamilton County school system is leading systems across Tennessee in developing a statewide curriculum for online courses, education officials said. Representatives from the participating systems are meeting here through Wednesday to discuss the proje

Kathleen Leos, assistant deputy secretary and director, Office of English Language Acquisition, participated in a seminar discussion at LULAC’s 77th national convention regarding Education Policy Today: A Report Card on Latinos.

Secretary Spellings announced the upcoming availability of, and the state-by-state requirements for, Academic Competitiveness Grants and the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grants. These grants provide further incentive for students to take more challenging courses in high school and to pursue college majors that are in high demand in the global economy, such as science, math, technology, engineering and critical foreign languages.

Food for thought for the week: Blogging Pedagogy points to a thoughtful essay by Joseph Ugoretz on “Social Software, Folksonomy, and User Reviews in the College Context.”

Mr. Ugoretz, the director of teaching and learning with technology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, argues that much-trafficked Web sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, and even RateMyProfessors all belong to a “constellation of tools” that is dramatically altering the way users process information:

[I]n all of the cases, these tools, these resources, lack a central authority or a hierarchy of editorial control. In all of these cases the content and the conclusions and the references are communally negotiated and collaboratively assembled. And our students are using these tools. They are going to use them, whether we want them to or not, or whether we have thought about them or not.

Mr. Ugoretz goes on to suggest a number of steps that professors can take to focus that communal energy instead of fighting against it. He encourages professors, for example, to create exercises that require students to test online resources against each other—or against students’ own knowledge. And he recommends that professors use class wikis as motivational tools: When students know their work will be floating out on the public Web, Mr. Ugoretz argues, “the responsibility for the quality, efficacy and accuracy of that work is deepened.” —Brock Read

Almost any computer-science student would be nervous if he knew he’d have to show his work to Bill Gates. But for the young programmers who converged on Redmond, Washington this week to do just that, there was added reason for anxiety: A $25,000 prize was riding on their presentations.

The students were from seven college teams that have emerged as finalists in the software-design portion of this year’s Imagine Cup, an annual competition that Microsoft holds to recruit young talent. This year the company asked contestants to use Windows—no Linux or Macs allowed, of course—in a project that could improve the quality of health care, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Teams that rose to the challenge included a group from Virginia Commonwealth University, which designed a system that lets doctors put medication reminders and medical information on patients’ mobile devices. Other entries came from students at Brazil’s Pernambuco State University—whose team developed a “virtual eye” that can help vision-impaired people find specific points in a city—and the United Kingdom’s University of Hull—who devised a bedside computer for patients recovering from critical illnesses. The winner of the competition will be announced in August. —Brock Read

Alan Liu posted the following on Humanist. I asked his permission to repost it here, and he consented. I'll post some thoughts of my own as a response to this post. For now, I'd offer that Dr. Liu's post seems to strike a good balance; I wonder how students would react to this statement.

Subject: Request for Comment: draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia

Dear Willard,

This message is a request for comment (the humanities version of a RFC). 2006 appears to be the year that undergraduate students discovered Wikipedia in a big way. My colleagues and I have been seeing an increasing number of papers that use Wikipedia inappropriately as the sole or primary reference. For example, I just read a paper about the relation between Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism in which every reference was to the Wikipedia articles on those topics with no awareness that there was any need to read a primary work or even a critical work. After writing comments to a number of students on this topic, I set to work on a general policy statement addressed to the student that might be shared among my local community of scholars (see draft below). I thought such a statement might be of general use. I welcome any suggestions from, or discussion by, the Humanist community as well as pointers to any similar statements that
may exist. (Still to do is a one-paragraph version of such a statement suitable for inclusion in a course syllabus.)

–Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara

TO THE STUDENT: APPROPRIATE USE OF WIKIPEDIA

In recent years, Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) has become one of the most important and useful resources on the Internet. Created by an open community of authors (anyone can contribute, edit, or correct articles), it has become a powerful resource for researchers to consult alongside other
established library and online resources. As in the case of all tools, however, its value is a function of appropriateness. In the case of college-level essays or research papers, students should keep in mind the following two limitations, one applying to all encyclopedias, and the other specifically to Wikipedia:

(1) As in the case of any encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not appropriate as the primary or sole reference for anything that is central to an argument, complex, or controversial. "Central to an argument" means that the topic in question is crucial for the paper. (For example, a paper
_about_ Shakespeare or postmodernism cannot rely on an encyclopedia article on those topics.) "Complex" means anything requiring analysis, critical thought, or evaluation. (For example, it is not persuasive to cite an encyclopedia on "spirituality.") "Controversial" means anything that
requires listening to the original voices in a debate because no consensus or conventional view has yet emerged. (For example, cite an encyclopedia on the historical facts underlying a recent political election, but not on themeaning or trends indicated by that election.) These limitations are due to the fact that encyclopedia articles are second- or third-hand summaries. They are excellent starting points for learning about something. But a college-level research paper or critical essay needs to consult directly the articles, books, or other sources mentioned by an encyclopedia article and use those as the reference. The best such sources are those that have been refereed ("peer-reviewed" by other scholars before acceptance for publication, which is the case for most scholarly journals and books) or, in the case of current events, journalistic or other resources that are relatively authoritative in their field.

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