I read a very brief piece in Technology and Learning (April) I had to check out. The short article summarized some Technorati data reported through valleywag showing that interest in blogging may have peaked. If you check out the technorati data, the key is not the number of blogs, but the number of active bloggers. It appears that numbers from Mar. 2006 and Mar. 2007 are similar. The number of active bloggers appears stalled at about 15 million.
I wonder if this is “real” or if some are now being pulled over to other forms of online expression that offer greater flexibility (e.g., social networking sites.).
Steve Hargadon just posted a list of free/open source software (FOSS) suited to the K-12 environment. There are some resources noted that were unfamiliar to me so I thought I would pass the list on.
The site looks a little different. This is another consequence of the lack of required commitments the summer provides. Anyway, WordPress (the blog software I use) has undergone an upgrade that offers the opportunity to use widgets. I suppose I could get by without widgets but when the alternative comes down to playing with the server and reading another academic book my weakness for exploring kicks in.
Only some of the themes (the general look and feel of a blog site) turn out to be “widget aware” so I selected a different theme. The change to a different theme is really the reason the appearance of this blog is so different. Cindy thinks the new look is too “spartan” (translate boring). “It always works for Apple”, I reply. Maybe there are some other design issues I don’t understand.
Anyway, here is a brief intro to how widgets are applied (see the image that appears below). Widgets are chunks of code that a system allows you to manipulate at a higher level. At least, that is how I would describe it. The software on the server automatically inserts the chunk of code associated with a widget into a framework of code representing a part of the display. In the case I am using as an example here, the framework is the sidebar (the right hand part of the total display you are looking at). If you examine the image below, you will note a collection of available widgets (the section at the bottom of the image) and the vertical space within which the selected widgets have been placed. This is a simply process of drag and drop. You should be able to match the list of widgets applied with what you see in the sidebar.
There are limitations to this approach. The system works by assigning an insertion point within the base code for a segment of the final page (the sidebar in this case). It is not possible to mix the functions provided by the widgets with functions that are already part of the base code. I ended up hacking the basic code for the sidebar so that the “search blog” box could appear at the top of the sidebar. This is a function I assume may be most useful to visitors and I wanted it to be obvious. I also added some other features at the bottom of the sidebar by inserting segments of php and javascript. You can’t always find a widget to do what you would like done.
Manipulating objects rather than writing code is becoming a popular way to personalize many services (personal portal, Google Creator). It must be a successful approach because the trend toward this method seems to be accelerating. I guess it is very much like the move from authoring web pages using a tool such as Dreamweaver rather than writing html code by hand. While you can’t always create exactly the look you want, the efficiency is a tremendous advantage.
Many of us are curious about Second Life. The online environment defies explanation because it fits no existing models – it is an online experience that largely allows the users to shape the environment to their own interests. Educational bloggers (e.g., David Warlick) are fond of speculating on the potential of the environment for educators and learners.
Philip Rosedale is one of the founders and has some interesting things to say. He offers a perspective on this environment from the perspective of a developer. If you are interested in an overview of how it works, the video demonstration is very interesting. I understand this as an example of object oriented programming – create an object, program it to have certain capabilities. As millions of objects are put in place, interesting and unanticipated (emergent is the way Rosedale describes it) things begin to happen. Emergence is the key.
The end of the school year is rapidly approaching and long-term projects are being wrapped up. One of the more interesting projects Cindy worked on this year was called “Books of Hope”. As part of their participation in this project, students from Nathan Twining elementary and middle school wrote books that were sent to Uganda.The 6th graders were working on a unit concerning ancient Egypt and wrote stories by reworking traditional American fairy tales within an Egyptian setting. The 5th graders wrote an original story on a topic selected by the student (everything from an ABC book to the story of a student’s trip to the hospital).
The project allowed U.S. children to learn something about the experiences of children faced with difficult and dangerous conditions and also to participate in an authentic language arts activity resulting in the production of a book. The books become reading material for children who have few resources.
A page on the Twining web site offers additional information about the project. A local grant from the Qwest foundation provided a way to extend the project by preserving and sharing the books for other audiences. The books were converted to enhanced podcasts with Garageband or Kid Pix. Sometimes sharing involved a parent who might be away from home. While clearly not facing problems of the magnitude faced by the children from Uganda, Twining school is located on a military base and these students face their own challenges as parents are deployed.
If you are curious, the podcasts are available from the Twining web site (use link provided above).
Our Mother’s Day tradition for the several years now has been to participate in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Susan Komen “Race for the Cure.” Cindy, a two time survivor, is the force behind our participation and commitment to this cause prompts my annual post on this topic.
For us, taking credit for participating in any form of a “race” would be a misrepresentation. Cindy, just a few weeks past recovering from a broken leg to the point she could move without crutches, completed the “race”. Even the walk moves at a crawl because of the thousands and thousands of participants.
This is an event with many traditions.
It is a sad event because so many are walking for departed loved ones. It is also a celebration because of the courage of the many survivors.
Our Team
The walk was just the beginning of the day’s activities. Daughter Kim graduated from the University of Minnesota in the afternoon. Her request for a celebration was to take the entire clan to the Twin’s game. The mother’s day game incorporates some of the same themes – many of the players use pink bats. The Twins have been struggling lately, but not last night – Twins 16 – Tigers 4.
The conclusion – researchers are poorly prepared in an era more focused on evidence and even a greater public appetite for proof. The result – a series of untested and poorly formulated reform proposals based on ideology rather than data.
Among the problems:
researchers often prepared by faculty with little personal research experience, and
need for faculty and an expectation that most institutions promote research results in the hiring of many with poor credentials.
Some ideas:
reserve the Ph.D. for researchers, and
focus research expectations in fewer institutions.
To some of these ideas I would add –
It is much more difficult to do applied research than some may assume. Opportunities to work in schools are difficult to secure because of the imposition such research requires. It is even more difficult to conduct research involving expected standards of random assignment and control. Creating the right circumstances for meaningful classroom studies is very costly and funds for such efforts are generally very limited. While the preparation of researchers is certainly an issue, meaningful research requires the cooperation of institution outside of higher education.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
