I found a great blog post you should have read a week ago. This Lifehacker post explains how to mirror you laptop harddrive to an external harddrive so that if your laptop has a CATASTROPHIC CRASH all will not be lost.
🙂
P.S. – the software is free!
File this under the heading – there is no way to avoid all problems in the real world.
I have been doing some exploration for a piece I am writing on educational uses of the social image sharing site – Flickr. Somehow, in this process, I began investigating a project that had students submit pictures they had taken that showed angles. As I scanned through the collection of images, I encountered the picture of a nude woman. My first thought and I am guessing the reaction of some might be that this image had purposefully been tagged to shock others involved in the educational project. There was really nothing about the posture of this particular nude woman that seemed to fit the concept “angle” so the tag made no sense.
I investigated further and found that the Flickr site hosting the image offered artistic photographs – very few of which involved any nudity. I then took a look at the tags and description. Here is my guess based on the context – I think the photographer intended to use the tag “angel” and made a typing error.
I pay attention to what is available in the way of CMSs and operate several open source CMSs just for the experience. I have been reading about a new CMS (SilverStrip) and considered setting up an implementation until I realized that I have no server running PHP5.
Somewhere in the middle of reading and thinking about CMSs I realized I have been talking about and experimenting with two kinds of systems without realizing CMS does not always mean CMS.
There are Course Management Systems such as Blackboard (or Moodle).
There are Content Management Systems such as Drupal or SilverStrip.
Now that I realize a CMS is not a CMS I may suffer from a sense of confusion. What if we changed course management system to class management system? I guess that wouldn’t solve my new found problem. Sometimes it is simply better not to know.
Maybe this personal insight into cognitive behavior seems intriguing to no one but me. I think it is one of those experiences that makes you go – “hmm”. Context must be everything.
BusinessWeek (Sept. 5) has a recent article commenting on new technology applications in K-12 environments. Use of “2.0” is beginning to annoy me. I am thinking it is a personal problem – I have a way of using the term in reference to technology applications and it is sometimes difficult mapping this personal understanding on the way the term is applied in another context. Maybe if this is a general reaction we should recognize that the term has no meaning and move on.
Anyway – the article contains some project descriptions that were interesting and new to me. Take a look.
There is a section that deals with safety and educational value. The topic is consistent with the way I think about “2.0” issues, but the discussion did not seem connected with the examples used in the rest of the article. I wonder if this is a journalistic technique – throw the odds and ends in at the end. I have one complaint about this section. There is a statement here I would like to verify:
About 1 in 5 children online is sexually solicited, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has created www.netsmartz.org to teach children, parents, and educators about online safety.
While the examples in the article are supported by links, the statements in the section on Safety and Educational value are not. I have read several studies from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children (see final comment) and know the organization has much more to say. What is said or not said makes a great difference in the context of the news item. For example, when students encounter online solicitation, where are they connecting from? If the connection is nearly always from homes, what might this say about the role of the schools? Perhaps social networking experiences and discussions related to social networking need to be emphasized in schools so that students are prepared for the encounters they might experience when mom is not looking.
Grabe summary of recent Missing and Exploited Children survey.
Grabe summary of recent report from the National School Boards Association.
Blogged with Flock
A number of bloggers attempting to promote the educational potential of specific web applications have recently become frustrated by the lack of response to their message and have voiced their frustration in their blogs. Gary Stager offers links to these “rants” and offers a historical account of another failed good idea (LOGO). (BTW – I was also fascinated with LOGO for some time, helped some teachers learn to use it, wrote about it in earlier books, and then realized that the classroom use had achieved mixed results (my summary)). At the end of his post, Stager, after explaining his own commitment to the value of LOGO, outlines the limitations he presently sees with Web 2.0 applications.
I think Stager’s list of limitations (of reform based on Web 2.0 not necessarily of the tools themselves) and the comments his post generated is interesting reading.
The present situation reminds of the more general literature concerning educational technology and educational reform. In other writing, I identified several positions (supposedly with data) on the connection between exposure to technology and reform that appear to align themselves along a continuum. The general question is whether teacher beliefs and practices can be changed. A simple summary of these positions follows.
1. Becker, H. & Ravitz, J. (1999) (see summary). The influence of computer and Internet use on teachers’ pedagogical practices and perceptions. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 31(4), 356–384.
– This is the most optimistic of the studies and claims a link between using technology and changes in teaching practice. The opportunities provided by the technology cause teachers to change how they teach.
2. Cuban, L., Kirkpatrick, H., & Peck, C. (2001). High access and low use of technologies in high school classrooms: Explaining an apparent paradox. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 813–834.
Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
– These are the most pessimistic of the studies and probably the most well known. The author(s) claim factors endemic to educational practice (e.g., departmentalization by discipline, 50 minute periods) make it unlikely student experiences will change. If change does occur, it will likely be that technology will be used to replicate existing teaching practices.
3. Windschitl, M. & Sahl, K. (2002). Tracing teachers’ use of technology in a laptop computer school: The interplay of teacher beliefs, social dynamics, and institutional culture. American Educational Research Journal, 39(1), 165–205.
– This is an intermediate position. The presence of adequate technological resources leads to change, but only among teachers with specific belief systems about teaching and learning. Technology provides certain teachers the opportunity to act on personally held beliefs.
If one were to wait another year or so, one could possible substitute Web 2.0 apps (say blogs, wikis & podcasts) for “technology”, repeat the studies described above, and probably achieve about the same range of results.
I find Cuban’s position frustrating, but he has pretty much made a career out of explaining why technological change comes so hard in educational institutions. Betting on “nothing much will change” is probably the smart money choice. I am guessing we all somehow see a solution in what we are doing. I keep think helping future techers experience the potential of technology in contributing to their own learning will change the way they eventually will think about how they should attempt to engage their own students.
A Sept 6 Wired article claims that the Justice Department has come out against the concept of Net Neutrality. Without an assumption that providers would be neutral to the content they deliver, providers would have the opportunity to control the rate/cost at which you receive categories of content.
to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.
Why and when is this an issue? As I understand the argument, this could be an issue because allowing differential pricing presents the opportunity for providers to shape content delivery to advantage their total business model. For example, DSL providers could slow or charge for VOIP content and cable providers could slow or charge for video content. Phone companies would degrade an alternative to their phone business and cable providers to their video business. This is not the way providers describe their motives – they claim they need to raise more money to upgrade services. The rejoinder is – if this general concern is true, why not simply raise prices and why request the opportunity to be specific about which packets cost what.
The failure of the argument that the “market” will not allow abuse because people will move to services that meet their needs is that not all users have access to multiple providers.
The Justice Department claimed:
However, the agency said it will continue to monitor and enforce any anticompetitive conduct to ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.
I would be more comfortable if the Justice Department would be more specific in describing at least the beginning of a list of practices that would be regarded as anticompetitive.
Previous posts on this topic:
The Washington Post has an interesting article considering the durability of myths (may require free registration to view) (I discovered in a Slashdot post). Don’t be put off by the word myth – most of the examples in the article concern disputed political positions.
The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people’s minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.
It turns out that people are not good at learning what information comes from credible sources and that we tend to forget labels/tags we attach to memories indicating that the information is not credible.
What are the implications of such findings in the Internet age and the related issue of information credibility? I am guessing the concerns expressed in this article are not relevant to biased information one might encounter on occasion. The capacity to critically evaluate such information as received might be productive. The situation described in these studies seems to concern information that we encounter repeatedly and followed by an explanation of why the repeated position is false/biased. For example, what might be the consequences of viewing/listening to a station/program with a consistent bias even if we also receive and accept an explanation of the bias that is present?
Does this mean it is pointless to address myths? The article claims silence is not the best course of action. However, dwelling on the falsehood may be counter-productive.
… it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth.