Waiting for the turkey

Happy Thanksiving Day to all.

I am enjoying a little down time. One of my children is home today and another is coming tomorrow with her family for leftovers. Family gatherings in Grand Forks are becoming rare and we typically are on the road for holidays so this is a nice change.

I was looking for a post topic and noticed that my last.fm account has now been active for a year. Last.fm is a social music site that among other features keeps track of the music you listen to (iTunes, last.fm radio, pandorafm, etc.). According to my stats I listened to a little over 27,000 songs last year. The data, most popular artist, song, etc., are interesting to examine. Most popular artists from last week appear at the end of this post.While not directly relevant to my professional interests, my experience with lastfm has influenced how I understand social network applications. I don’t spend any time interacting with other music fans, but I do enjoy examining the overlap in our musical interests and exploring the work of new artists who are unfamiliar to me. I suppose this is how tapping into the collective intelligence is supposed to work.

 Kim (daughter) and I had a chance to walk along the river and take a few pictures.

red river ice

While we were driving back from the river to see if the turkey was done, Alice’s Restaurant was played as a special selection on the campus radio station. It gave me an opportunity to tell my youngest daughter about the old days when dad was in college.

Remember – you can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. Enjoy your turkey and your friends. Happy Thanksgiving.

Loading

The World Is Changing Around You!!

 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.

Loading

When will learners teach themselves?

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.

Loading

Why Johnny Can’t Read

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.

Loading

Amazon eBook Reader

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.

(Newsweek Article)

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.

Loading

What Google Must Know About Me

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.

Google Search History

For example, I think it is fair to conclude that I spend a lot of my time in the evening online.

Google Search History

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.

Loading

Popularity of Social Networking Sites

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.

Loading