CECA Breakout

I was a participant in Clint Kennedy’s last presentation at CECA and have finally found some time to blog my response. First, it was a wonderful session, very thought provoking and enlightening; I was also relieved to hear others with similar web 2.0 concerns.

I was disappointed that the CECA session ended so quickly as we were just beginning to enter some important topics, chief among them that I fear in my school is the impact of software patents, such as blackboards and now IBM’s (although I’m not completely clear if IBM’s will impact education). I currently have a Drupal site (www.mrseal.org), independent of my school, for my classes (a novelty for my students, and administrators). My fear is I’ll not be allowed to continue because of the threat of litigation regardless of how preposterous that threat may be.

And that’s just the beginning without even mentioning DOPA…..

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Textbooks in public ed?

A month ago (giver or take) Clint Kennedy posted some interesting questions in his blog.

What if teachers and administrators used some/all of their PD days to prepare materials for students? They could use web resources, existing texts, each other, etc.  They could publish this content online, as paper copies, via a blog or email or even a wiki. Students and teachers could then add/modify these resources over the course of the year/years.

 

In thinking about these an as I’m enrolled in classes at UCONN, I realized this is already happening with some higher education courses. Many teachers are finding articles and using them in classes, and the nice ones are giving full references for students to locate the digital copies themselves and save on buying the textbooks. I’m in my final year as a master’s candidate and have had to buy relatively few books, but have megabits of digital paper as references.

 

As will most technologies changes, most of the changes happen at the top, the real question is how do we help facilitate it downward?

 

K12online initial reflections

I really enjoyed the Keynote address by David Warlick and the examples. I'll be listening again on my commute and will continue to post reflections here. I also cannot wait for Monday's conference here in Connecticut.

First thoughts are the analogy to the rails was excellent, one I hope to use with administration (all levels) that have not caught the vision of these powerful tools.

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Citation Machine

David Warlick in his 2 cents blog gave me more than 2 cents worth of help when his son needed help with citations for social studies and created Son of Citation Machine a simple tool to keep track of the mundane tasks of creating a citation page. He even created it for multiple formats (APA and CMS to name just two). Very nice. Thanks David.

School 2.0 Brainstorm - excellent start

What a powerful concept, just looking at this and I want to move here, to teach, raise my family, and belong to this community.

School 2.0 - Join the Conversation States "School 2.0 is a brainstorming tool" well it got my brain storming.

How pervasive is the web?

I was thinking about my research question and took a step back to realize, what if only a small portion of the working world actually needs the web to complete there work? Specifically what about the trade technologies, do they really need and use the web? Is it web 2.0 or 1.0 that they are using? Could a high school graduate of 2007 find a job that they would not need the computer and internet?

Just some thoughts to guide my research focus.

Possible Research Question

After looking at Directory of open access journals I started thinking, do we really know How accepted are online open access journal's? Who really is using them, and how they relate to their print "accepted" counter parts?

Just thoughts to consider.

By the way, I really love the ease of bloging this new Diingo allows.

Diingo - WoW!

Social Annotation: Seamless Integration of Social Bookmarking, Web Highlighter, Sticky-Note & Clipping

This is a powerful tool I just found thanks to a posting at edtechtalk . Can't wait to start using it!