Learning Aloud

The ipodlounge has a nice article on podcasting. Who is doing it? What does it take if I want to do it myself? Were is this activity going? Nice summary that answers a lot of questions.

eSchool News reports Taskstream intends to invite 50,000 high school students to sign up for a two-year research study intended to evaluate the value of eportfolios. Students will be provided free access to the eportfolio software. School districts and states are invited to propose projects.

The folks who oversee the development of web standards are involved in a dispute that will shape the future of the web as we know it. As the web takes on an every increasing role in many facets of life, there is a natural tendancy to expect more – to want the web to be capable of more powerful things. An important area of growth might be described as interactivity – how information can be exchanged between the user, the server, and other applications. (Note: You are getting my interpretation here so you might want to explore my sources.).

The basic mechanism for passing information is the form. You know forms as the text boxes and buttons you select to enter information or choices. Forms also convey information you cannot see – in this case this is a good thing and not some sinister hacker tactic.

The basic question is how to move beyond present capabilities. The controversy stems from companies pushing proprietary solutions – new capabilities that will work with one operating system, one browser, etc.

It seems possible that to move ahead to new capabilities we will move backward to a time when certain web sites and services will only work with certain software/operating systems.

ZDnet article

NPR has an audio piece on Wikipedia. At issue is the quality of Wikipedia as a resource for students and the general idea of Open Source.

You may have heard about podcasts and want to know and experience more. You will not find much on this site – I feel most comfortable writing. However, I can run down some resources that may be helpful.

You may be familiar with the work of David Warlick (writer, blogger, presenter and now podcaster). I would recommend this site to provide a meaningful experience with podcasts.

Every time I encounter his work, I wonder what he does for a living. I say this in a positive way recognizing the quality of the work he makes available and the time invested.

This is one thing I have noticed about some “experts.” I have the most respect for those who can do more than “talk” about what can be done with technology – those who have actually generated some content, completed some projects, etc.

This comment is mostly intended for my local readers – the argument I make may not apply to other locations.

There are simply too many institutions of higher education in North Dakota. Some are smaller than the high schools you may have attended. The various institutions continually push to expand their missions as a matter of survival. Funding for higher education has taken the approach here that appears evident everywhere. All institutions must act more and more like they are private institutions – they rely on the money they raise (mostly tuition dollars) rather than on funding from the state. The problem with doing this in ND is that there are too many institutions and too few students. In fact, the number of undergraduates represents a shrinking pool because of out migration.

The worse case of this problem involves graduate education. I am “old schools” so graduate education for me implies high standards for admission, demanding learning experiences, and an intense, mentored process. It is costly because of the faculty time and resources required, but it develops quality graduates. You should not get into this game unless you have resources and can attract a reasonable number of students.

It appears that some of the smaller institutions in ND feel they have the appropriate personnel and resources to offer graduate experiences. Obviously, this will not be done based on my “old school” model. In fairness, I suppose the question must be what alternative models are appropriate for graduate training in education.

It is not so much that different approaches are not worth trying (e.g., graduate school based on the junior college model). The problem is that distributing the pool of potential graduate students across more institutions will reduce the tuition resources available to any one institution. In areas in which there is competition (primarily education college programs), there will not be enough students to warrant the allocation of resources to run quality programs at any institution.

Grand Forks Herald Article.

I now have a Gmail account. I have heard the controversy regarding the ads and the reality that Gmail reads your messages. I decided to try a simple test. I sent a simple message to myself from another of my mail accounts – “Have you seen the new Mac Mini?” – just to see what would happen when I open the message. See below:

What do you expect for a free service?

It looks to be a nice system. I could not imagine the value of 1000 megabytes of storage space. The material that comes with system suggests you archive any message you may ever want to read again and then locate it with the Google search features. Makes sense.

The system appears to have some spam defense mechanisms. A good spam system on a free system would be impressive.

New York Times (Pogue) analysis (may need to register).