Imbee, a new “safe” social networking and blogging for 8-14 year olds, has just been announced. There is a cost for full service and I wonder how this will influence participation (there are free alternatives – e.g., blogmeister).
I would guess the success of such ventures depends on some type of “critical mass.”
Will your average 7th grader be interested if his/her friends don’t have the $30 per year to join?
How important is the “unknown audience” to bloggers? Perhaps knowing that the audience is restricted will reduce motivation to be an active participant.
I see that additional individuals can be added at a much reduced rate. Perhaps there is some way to enroll a class of paricipants if the class can raise the money.
I think critical mass is a crucial concept in the popularity of social networking. The challenge is how to achieve what adolescents accept as critical mass within a restricted environment. I do think it is great that investors are willing to offer some alternatives. The services likely warrant the price. Good luck.
I encountered an announcement for the beta Google Spreadsheet program and signed up. I received an invitation to try out the service and so far I have been impressed.
I did try to load a large dataset (64000 or rows of data) without luck. I did not read the instructions and this may exceed the limit allowed. I was able to upload and add to a 200 row dataset. Free and shareable – pretty cool.
I like reading blogs, but I am reaching the conclusion that blogs provide an incomplete and possibly distorted view of the world. To make well reasoned personal decisions, one has to gather and consider multiple perspectives and my concern is that in some areas blogs may not provide such opportunities.
I am personally very interested in student multimedia authoring. Part of what I know about this topic I have learned over the years by reading academic research (e.g., David Jonassen, Richard Mayer, Richard Lehrer). Part of what I know more recently, I have learned by following several blogs. Because I also read critics of this area, I still struggle with what I am willing to claim with certainty about this topic. When it comes to accepting a role in which one advocates, I think some healthy uncertainty is a good thing.
Here is what I have noticed about educational blogs. Influential researchers appear not to blog (try searching for the names I mention above) and influential bloggers tend not to publish research (try using Google Scholar to search for the name of someone you consider an influential blogger).
You may disagree with this statement and there are probably some exceptions, but I do think this statement generally holds and wonder why this is the case. Perhaps it is a matter of how people spend their time. There is not a great deal of recognition accorded university scholars for time spent blogging. Popular bloggers may not work in circumstances in which research is expected or possible. However, I am also concerned that research and blogging require different “styles”. When I began writing textbooks, the editors spent a great deal of time moving me away from a careful, conservative writing style. Simple and positive was good. Careful and nuanced was bad.
This is not a comment in which I am seeking to blame anyone for anything with the possible exception of those who think they have adequately informed themselves because they read the comments of popular bloggers.
A concluding contradictory example: I do think it is possible to completely ignore a commonly accessed information source. I “know” this because my wife is a fan of conservative talk radio. When I ride in “her car” this is the channel she has on the radio. Cindy has far from conservative views on most issues. I have tried to reconcile Cindy’s attitudes with what I have observed about her listening habits. Here is my conclusion. Some people who spend a great deal of time by themselves in a car sing along with the radio. I think Cindy likes to spend her time alone yelling at the talk show hosts she thinks are idiots.
Federal budgets are presently being developed and it appears that the process again starts by excluding the block grant money that goes to schools to provide for technology (EETT) money.
To locate the data that shows the change you will need to go through the attachment from the main page (see below).
If I remember, this is the way the process started last year. Is this one of those political games – zero out money so that states feel appreciative when less is later inserted?
Byron Dorgan (Democrat from ND) appears to be playing a central role in maintaining net neutrality (Save the Internet analysis).
The battle for Net Neutrality – or Internet freedom – has significantly stronger bipartisan support in the Senate. Senators Snowe (R-Maine) and Dorgan (D-N.D.) have introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006? that enjoys the strong support from the SaveTheInternet coalition.
Supposed threats to the Internet have floated through listservs in the past, but mostly these have been false issues. The COPE (pdf of legislation provided by Benton Foundation) legislation (you may recognize the phrase net neutrality) is very real and Internet users should pay attention.
COPE would allow providers to exercise control over the priority allowed different information types (again my interpretation). I know that my university does this to keep the university use of the Internet within assigned bandwidth limits (e.g., MP3 traffic is slowed during the day and allowed to move faster after hours). The difference is that the major providers could apply such priorities to their own advantage – e.g., those with an interest in traditional long distance could slow VOIP traffic to the point the low quality made such options useless.
I encountered a post by Ryan Paul describing a Google research project. As I understand the post, Google researchers have been able to capture audio from a television program, analyze the audio, and use the information gained from the analysis to suggest web links a viewer might investigate to gain more information associated with the topics covered on the television program. Again, if I understand the technology, the technique identifies the show from the pattern of the input (it does not actually understand the text) and then provides links matched to a database of programs identified by pattern fingerprints.
I am teaching a course this summer focused on multimedia authoring. In keeping with the focus of the class, the students and I will be creating a wiki. On a theoretical level, I find the idea of communal authoring very intriguing. On a practical level, I can’t escape the concern that the work of my students will be vandalized. It is not so much that the original material cannot be recovered, it is more the problem of what comments are inserted and how those who work in K-12 settings interpret such experiences. What is the point of working with such environments if the participants are then unwilling to transfer the experiences to new situations.
In keeping with this concern, I have locked the wiki down to the most conservative level allowed. As system administrator, I must enroll users who then select a new password. Using this approach, MediaWiki allows all enrolled users to edit all posts. What I would prefer would be a different set of constraints – a user could protect personal posts, but unprotected pages could be edited by anyone. Perhaps I have yet to discover the combination of settings that allow such options.
I will likely offer more comments on my experiences with a class-based wiki as I see how things go. It is really not possible to say too much about such technologies based on what one accomplish with the software alone. This is one of those areas in which you really need a combination of technology skills and experience with the tools in action.
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