Rupert Murdoch, the rich guy from Omaha, plans to offer free online access to the Wall Street Journal. This on the heels of the NYTimes decision to do the same thing. Hard to believe such “profit above all” businessmen are willing to give the rest of us such a gift. Perhaps altruism is setting in with age.
Wait! The media moguls may not be nice after all. Ad revenue from the sale of hardcopy papers continues to drop. It may still be about the money.
I have long been troubled by the instructivist vs. constructivist debate. I find constructivist theoretical positions appealing, but struggle with the lack of data supporting such theories. I do understand there are those willing to explain why my pessimism is unwarranted, but my training limits what must be offered as justification. Perhaps, one critical issue is what we are willing recognize as tests of our ideas. If we find ourselves stuck with conventional contexts, factors which may generate change may be difficult to implement and evaluate. I ran across an interesting Ted Talk that tested the power of exploratory learning in a very different context. This presentation concerns students learning about and with technology in an extremely “informal” setting. What is at issue in this demonstration (I am not sure research would be the proper term) is what are learners capable of learning on their own. I find this demonstration more persuasive that those who use children’s mastery of complex video games as evidence that exploratory learning can be successful, but again the connection with identifiable classroom content is evident.
I think I read Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read back in graduate school. For one reason or another, this problem seemed to disappear. Perhaps math and science issues became greater concerns.
Problems with reading proficiency are about to receive more attention. A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts urges attention to the lack of reading activity once students hit middle school.
“We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.”
Among the possible causes is the “profileration of electronic media”. The news article I have linked does include statements contending that the research does not include online reading and students may be reading, but reading different types of material.
This morning, many of the blogs I read echo the Amazon news about its new eBook Reader (e.g., R/Wweb). The Kindle offers e-ink technology (high quality display with low power consumption) and wireless (think cellphone and not wifi hotspot) Internet connectivity. The price point for popular books (from Amazon) is supposed to be $10. The cost for the device will initially be $400. Somebody is going to find a way to offer text/image content at a reasonable price point in a way that provides adequate compensation to authors. We all probably have features we would like to see in such a device – high on my priority list is the opportunity to highlight and annotate. There was no mention of these capabilities in the posts I read.
I will have to wait until I have an opportunity to try this technology, but it does sound promising.
P.S. – It is intriguing that my two posts for today comment on a new way to read books and the decline in reading proficiency among adolescents.
I use a couple of portal pages (iGoogle and NetVibes). I set these as the default home page for my different browsers on my different computers. When I connect, I start from the same place and have access to a list of web links, RSS feeds, calendar, etc.
One component of the iGoogle page is web history. At this point, I can explore the searches I have conducted since June from this page and ask Google to offer me summaries of my activities.
For example, I think it is fair to conclude that I spend a lot of my time in the evening online.
On June 6, it looks like I was trying to figure out what people had to say about evaluating student blog posts.
It is hard to know what to think about this kind of thing. It is kind of interesting, but it is also kind of creepy.
Richard McManus, Read/Write blog, offers some recent statistics on the popularity of social networking sites. For example, 17% of the 2.6 million Facebook users are < 18 years old. Let me get my calculator – 442,000 kids are on Facebook alone. MySpace has a substantial lead in attracting the younger set. More than 2 million individuals under 18 have MySpace accounts.
They may not be able to access from their schools, but they are connecting from somewhere.
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, has generated a series of instructional videos for Atomic Learning on Web 2.0 topics.
The videos are FREE during the month of November.
It looks like many of the tutorials are focused on the development of a personal portal (NetVibes – see my own analysis of personal portals).
Sorry, it took me so long to get this information out.
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Tags: web2.0