Blog Juice for Educational Technology

This is great. Two stories in Wired: one about current uses of wikis, and another that gives the backstory of the first story. The first story I linked to, "Veni, Vidi, Wiki," was coedited 348 times by Socialtext users. The second consists of the author’s reflections on the wiki editing experience. Read both the stories; they offer a great window into what wiki-style collaboration is like.

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There are lots of funny spoofs of those new Mac commercials; this one about gaming is my favorite. I instantly thought of all of you. I would have embedded it here, but Knews isn’t letting me do it.

Have you guys seen Dandelife? I think it's pretty neat. It lets you create a timeline of your life and insert various things in — blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. It bills itself as a "social biography network," in which you engage in "lifecasting." (Via Jeremy Hunsinger.)

A group of folks who are revising the technology section of the WPA Outcomes Statement. The version linked here is from 2000, and I wasn't able to find a more recent version. The one from 2000 didn't even have a technology section, so to have one at all is an improvement. The draft in progress is publicly available for comment, and several people have left comments and posted about it at their own blogs. Readers seem to agree the most on the problematicity of this statement:

(1) Schools and students who have access to technology are more likely to have the prescribed knowledge or skills than students who have limited access to technology. By imposing a set of outcomes related to technology, we are making school harder for those who are lower in the socioeconomic spectrum of society and consequently have less access to technology.

I agree with the general consensus that this part comes off as a lot of hand-wringing. A better approach would be to acknowledge the problem of access briefly by advocating open source courseware and content management systems, recommending them as an alternative to proprietary software and a positive step toward closing the digital divide. Some of us are working on a position statement on open source courseware, so please let us know what you think. I'd also like to hear other thoughts about the technology section of the outcomes statement.

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Apropos of my recent reading of Donald Lazere's recent article in JAC, I was thinking about what a great movie Bulworth was. Have any of you used it in a composition course before, or considered using it?

Ummm, hope ya like code…I could NOT figure out how to fix this so that the html didn't show up.

What follows are my notes on the Next/Text meeting for Rhetoric and Composition. At first I was really vigilant about preceding people's comments with their names or initials, you know, so they'd get credit for what they said. But then things got so rapid-fire that I got lazy about it. These notes represent what we, as a group, said, and each of us made contributions: myself, Cheryl Ball, Cindy Selfe, Daniel Andersen, David Blakesley, David Goodwin, Geoffrey Sirc, Janice Walker, Jeff Rice, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Karl Stolley, Kim White, Michael Day, Victor Vitanza, and Virginia Kuhn. To give a little background, Next/Text is one of the projects of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is part of the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Next/Text is focused on classroom textbooks in particular. Our meeting was devoted to imagining how we in rhetoric and composition would go about creating a completely new electronic textbook — new, as opposed to CD-ROM companions to print textbooks: your basic linear, text-with-images, PDF-esque, “take a book from the tradition of print, digitize it, and smack it up on the Web.”

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