Holding public officials accountable (e.g., Dan Rather) has been touted as one of accomplishments of bloggers. I was listening to public radio this morning and heard an interview with one of the core group from factcheck.org. This individual discussed “spin” and our tendency to be taken in. The example I remember concerned a famous Republican ad in the Bush-Kerry presidential election. You probably remember the ad – it contained a pack of running wolves and a statement that after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Kerry had voted to decrease funding for the intelligence community. What the ad failed to make clear was that the “attack” was the bombing in the 1980s and Kerry had voted on several occasions to increase funding since. So, the information, but not the intended message was truthful. The emotional component (the wolves) and personal beliefs tend to lead to the “interpretation” intended by those sponsoring the ad.
FactCheck focuses on political issues and is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. I see they also have a book – “unSpun”.
FactCheckEd (a division I assume) offers educational resources for secondary school.
If you are interested in video games, you might find a site from PBS to be of interest. The site offers supplemental material associated with a program entitled the Video Game Revolution. The site does contain video segments from the program and a flash approximation of a classic game (similar to Galaga).
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).
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