Yesterday, I saw a post from Tod Maffin extolling the virtues of Basecamp. And then today, on English360, I noticed a post from last month mentioning that a Basic Level account is being offered free to educators.
Maybe it is time to check Basecamp out.
An official list of iTunes compatible Digital Players & CD MP3 Players from apple.com….
A US soldier in Iraq responds to one of Bush’s recent Strategy for Victory speeches in A Will to Exist.
While Jimbo Walestakes hits for “obsessively monitoring his own biography” (which I’d probably do too, if I were Jimbo), my own bio remains a stub. Meanwhile, the Cluetain entry in Wikipedia carried notices that say The neutrality of this article is disputed and This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. A look at the edit history of the piece shows that none of Cluetrain’s four authors have contributed anything to the entry.
All that said, I still regard Wikipedia as one of the most important and remarkable documents of our time, and perhaps ever. Kudos to Jimbo and the other folks who…
Our students frequently cite Wikipedia as a research source, but a recent post from Gloria Bobbie casts doubt on the validity of such a citation.
The key to validating material is the critique of the author. Unless the author can be identified and plagiarism checked (perhaps all submitted material should automatically be scanned and someone found submitting plagiarized material could be banned from ever posting) it will never be acceptable as a reference source. It is fine for preliminary research to get information about a topic, but when my students cite a source, I want them to give credit to the author of the material and be able to tell me why they accept the author’s views as credible….
Read the Q. & A. with Seth in E-consultancy.com’s December 2005 briefing. As always, he boils it down. Real simple. Incisive. (Scroll to the bottom of the interview for a good explanation of Squidoo, Seth’s new venture.) I like this sound bite:
Q. (Chris Lake) Should every business use the internet to communicate? What are the basics of an internet communications strategy?
A. (Seth Godin) You should only use the internet if you want your communications to
be FAST and you want to reach LARGE NUMBERS with no intermediaries. If
you can’t handle that, though, you shouldn’t try.
And this one (valid question, BTW, as Seth made his name as the king of permission marketing):
Q. You’ve written about permission marketing…
In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner notes that “one argument made against teaching ‘on-line’ is that the process of placing coursework on-line not only restructures that work, allowing for greater control and scrutiny of faculty performance and course content and intensifying the work of teaching, but it also better enables institutions to claim [...]…
I spent an hour with some teachers today discussing the merits of required PowerPoint and Photoshop activities for ninth and tenth grade students in our school. Since we do not offer an “intro to computers” course, we rely on teachers of required classes to teach the tech skills that are needed to accomplish the learning goals of their courses. Though we teach fewer skills than we would prefer in this manner, the skills are well-embedded within meaningful learning activities and educational contexts.
The interesting part of the discussion came when we attempted to identify which tech skills were essential supports for teachers’ classes and which were “nice to have” but less essential. Microsoft Word formatting (document, paragraph, and character),…
Dan Karleen is interested in exploring how podcasts can be used as a tool to assist student recruiting. As part of his work for Thomson Peterson, he gave a presentation on the topic at the AACRAO conference held on November 15, 2005 in Chicago. I haven’t been able to find audio or slides from his presentation. Dan did set up a blog with links to the many resources he covered.
This is a useful starting point for those who, like me, might be trying to convince the powers that be at an institute of higher learning to consider podcasting and other new media technologies – not just for recruiting. I am still working my way through Dan’s list. I’d like to remind myself to notice how podcasting is featured on front page of Mansfield University’s web site. It looks impressive and compelling. If you know any powers that be, you might wanna let ‘em know.
