Month: May 2006

We have a Mothers’ Day tradition. We walk in the Susan Komen Cancer Walk in Minneapolis. Cindy is a two-time cancer survivor. Here are some pictures from this year’s event.

Cindy

Team Grabe

Proof we finished.

My son Todd will be married next weekend. My older daughter is pregnant and will have a baby within the next month. It has been a shower or two a weekend for the last several weeks. This week it was the bowling shower for the family. Most of us have not bowled in the last ten years. It was a good time.

We also had the opportunity to catch a Twins game. The Twins scored 7 in the first and lost. They bunted into a triple play. Can’t say I have ever seen a triple play live before.

It appears that the Republicans (perhaps none of the Democrats were able to get their names in the article) are here to protect the youth of this country from the dangers of expressing themselves online. C|net News provides a summary of the bill that would require filterning of “commercial Web sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.” The proposal is called the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA. If I didn’t find this disturbing I would play around with idea of a DOPA bill, but the efforts of our elected officials should be treated with more respect.

Of course, there are dangers involved in multimedia authoring. These dangers will remain whether or not students can post from the school library. I would encourage schools to run their own blogs, wikis, and web sites. The reality is that many schools will not or are unable to assist teachers by doing this. If I remember, funds to support school use of technology have been cut. Why not get get rid of the inexpensive substitutes teachers might consider as well. No blogger.com for the interested teacher. If some feel such a bill is necessary, perhaps they should provide funds so that schools can add an internal Internet service to replace the free external Internet service.

The bill does appear to suggest that when operating under adult supervision schools may be allowed to “enable access for educational purposes.” What are the odds schools would actually do something like this? Does someone assume that the librarian has a button under her desk that can be pushed to enable and then disable the filtering of specific sites depending on which students are working? Even it were possible, how would such a suggestion be implemented. The basic idea with social sites is that one checks in repeatedly to see what others have posted. What would you do – turn on access so everyone can post and then turn off access so no one can read? We might end up encouraging students to view such sites outside of school without proper superivsion.

This is dumb (or dopey).

I assume that many bloggers will comment on this proposed legislation. Andy Carvin weighs in with one of the first reactions I have encountered. Andy’s post has attracted a number of comments – mostly, but not all, concerned with the proposed legislation. You are invited to comment here as well.

Will Richardson – Weblogg-ed Continue reading The Republicans Are Here To Help Educators – Again!

As some K-12 institutions are considering 1-1 initiatives, some university profs want to ban laptops in their classes (MSNBC). The explanation for their position is that students are off-task. It is unclear if the problem is that students are attempting to take notes and not participating in discussion or working on other things.

I am not sure what to make of this. It is true that a laptop provides an alternative when things are boring – I use mine this way when attending sessions at conferences. Of course, I also take notes and lookup things mentioned by the presenter. There must be a better way to establish priorities – e.g., evaluate particiaption if that is a priority.

So – is the laptop worse than the alternative – taking notes by hand and doodling or writing a letter home? Perhaps the profs distrust the assessment that the students of today are different and thrive on multi-tasking.

I found an article in the May 2006 Learning and Leading with Technology that kind of brought me back to my technological roots. An article by Richard Dillon described Quest – software for writing text-based adventure games. My original academic research interest was in the development of reading skills and I learned BASIC and assembly language coding for the Apple II in order to write programs that would create and run adventure games. My interest was in using adventure games to study and possibly develop reading skills. Sure enough, better readers could move through the levels of the games I created more efficiently. As things seem to go, I moved on to new projects and never had the time to return to what I still think is a good idea. I wonder if 4th graders would think text adventure games are still fun?

Quest turns out to be a Windows only application, but I thought others may take a look. Dillon’s focus is on using the application for student writing. I still think well designed games have potential to challenge reading skills. Hey, if you don’t comprehend, you end up stuck in the 4th level.