Blog Juice for Educational Technology

More today on the widening tech gap between two prominent Democratic hopefuls. I pointed out earlier that Edwards was really ruling over Obama in the web race so far. That trend seems to be continuing. For instance, Edwards has over 11,000 MySpace Pals. Obama? Dude is so left behind that he thinks kids are still playing gameboys! Maybe he’s part of the “Nintender” generation, eh?

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I’m in a bit of a quandary over my domain (http://mattbarton.net), and I’m hoping some of the clever folks here will be able to help me out. In a nutshell, here’s what happened. During the first week of the semester, the commercial (managed) server I had hosting my mattbarton.net (official classroom site) went on the blink, crashing several times and staying down all during some of my first classes (a PR disaster). I tried to be patient, but when it happened the next day, and after they didn’t respond to my emails or phone calls asking what was going on, I decided to switch to site5. I managed to copy my website and database over to the new site, but there’s one last hitch–I need to get mattbarton.net pointing to this new server.

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Time is running a review of two recent books that argue the same thesis: Piling on the homework just makes kids dumber. It wears them out, makes them hate learning, and does something else called “straining parent/student relationships,” though one must wonder (must be awesome having parents who actually help you with your homework). Of course, I’m always a bit skeptical hearing about kids studying for 70 hours a day or whatever. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had the comic book hidden between the soc. text. Eh. What am I talking about. I was the kid with the flashlight under the blankets reading the soc. book.

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Finally. Some clever guy has made a video to explain complex rhetorical concepts to kids and posted it to YouTube. It’s probably safer than teaching them how to shoot rifles or order a Happy Meal. Check it out below!

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Wow. There’s some great things going on at USF these days–check out this podcast with Joe Moxley and two of USF’s best graduates, Ryan Meehan and John Nieves. It’s a fun listen with some good tips for composition teachers looking to integrate wikis and collaboration into their programs. Now, if only one of them would start jumping on the couch, we’d have a hit on our hands here.

I’m madder than Galileo in a geocentric solar system over this nonsense about Pluto being discriminated against just on account of its small stature.

Let’s get one thing straight. The only reason why a pack of raving former commies in Prague are dissin’ Pluto is that it was discovered by a good ol’ American, and that makes’m as jealous as Karl Marx at a Wal-Mart executive meeting. I say, we’ve got to step up and defend Pluto’s planetary rights. Because if we don’t, then we might as well declare Rhode Island a county and Washington D.C. as a suburb. What next? Maybe America will return to colony status, since we didn’t clean up the goldarn neighborhood around us (to wit, Canada, Mexico).

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This speaks for itself: Don’t Download This Song. I love you, Weird Al!!

Lately, besides the usual viagra spammers and Bloggers from Planetoid Pluto, we’ve been seeing more folks who seem to have the right intentions, but a less than ideal approach to posting on Kairosnews. The result is almost always unnecessary derision and angst from the community. Although we’ve got an About page that hopefully will get new bloggers off to a good start, I think it’s a good idea for us (hopefully others will chime in here, including Bob, glmaranto, Edward, and King Charles the 00), to help new talent establish themselves with a minimum of fuss.

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Well…Guess what. You know how all those curmudgeons who don’t know the first thing about linguistics like to talk about the degeneration of our language? How all those kids running around “googling” things are butchering the language? Well, looks like they might have some legal reinforcement now: Everybody’s pet rock company is now sending C&Ds to publishers asking them to stop “googling” things. Why? Because it’s obviously a violation of Google’s trademark. They don’t want to be xeroxed into generic oblivion, for God ™’s sake. Looks like the little honeymoon with Google as a company run by actual human beings ™ is over, folks. Now he’s fat and drinking too much beer. Ew. Stinky Google.

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For the past few months, glmaranto and I have been peering into the sinister world of Facebook and MySpace, uber-important “social networking sites” for kids of all ages. After exploring these sites for awhile, we’ve been experimenting with different metaphors to help us better understand what’s going on here. One that keeps returning is cruisin’, or driving up and down a little “strip” with other teenagers. If you haven’t ever engaged in this rather peculiar teenage activity yourself, suffice it to say that it has a lot more to do with being seen than in socializing. There have been plenty of films documenting the behavior, though I guess American Graffiti is probably the most well known.

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One of my students pointed me recently to this YouTube of the Colbert show on Comedy Central. Colbert is here mocking the Wikipedia, claiming it’s “bringing democracy to knowledge” and establishing a “wikiality,” or a reality we can all agree upon. It’s a brilliant bit of satire, but apparently hordes of Colbertians have taken his tongue-in-cheek advice seriously and began attempting to alter the wikipedia’s Elephant page to report that the African elephant population has tripled in recent years. The wikipedians responded accordingly, locking the page “to prevent vandalism” and taking the issue to the discussion page.

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Here’s a great example of free content being delivered in an apparent vacuum: Totally Free Math, a collaborative effort of some 250 teachers interested in producing a freely available textbook for elemenatary algebra students. I say “vacuum” because it doesn’t take advantage of wikis, and is protected under a traditional copyright (there’s even a link to the US copyright office for those who don’t “get it”). Uh…no creative commons here? Yeah. I’m having a hard time getting to the facts of how this came about, but apparently it’s the result of a commercial publisher (Bernard J.

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It took some doing, but I finally got my Mac “gaming rig” from the U…And, Heavens to Murgatoid, it is sweet! The model is an iMac with a really large widescreen (maybe 20″?) It’s definitely going to take some effort to adapt to the subtle nuances of the interface, but I have no doubt I’ll get the hang of it. I don’t know how many of you are aware of my musical background, but I’ve been having lots of fun with Garageband (I’m actually thinking of ponying up for the keyboard–piano style, that is). I think I could have amazing fun annoying the neighbors with this one. Is there some way to hook up my electric guitar?

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