Author: abendelow
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To close the "digital divide," let's have some bold efforts, please
This spirited discussion of the almost-total digital desert in rural places in Mississippi–places where still no broadband internet is available–brings up some interesting points, and the notion that maybe a “Civil Rights” movement is called for. First, the findings: “With far too little internet access in communities of color, hundreds of thousands are effectively prevented from…
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Some reasons kids love social networks–translatable to schools?
review of: Boyd, D. (2007) “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life.” In D. Buckingham (Ed.), MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity. The author undertakes to find out how socially-mediated communication (the sort that happens in online social networks like MySpace and Facebook) are affecting the normal…
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Arne said what?
Thanks to Anthony Cody, who alerted me a recent post to some surprising speech from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. According to this story in the Raleigh News & Observer, Duncan told a group of educators there that they should avoid teaching to the test.[emphases added] “We want to give every child a chance to…
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Sometimes I feel like a textile mill worker, circa 1910
Difficult work: a fabric mill …like a laborer in the deafeningly loud, particulate air-filled factory in the photo at right: I am trying to do an impossible job at high efficiency, and losing hope in the process. In the last ten years, every teacher in my typical English department has had five classes a day…
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Wikipedia: a model of a rational discourse
Review of:Hansen, S. Berente, N., and Lyytinen, K (2009) “Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse.” The Information Society, 25: 38-59, 2009. The authors of this article look at the phenomenon of Wikipedia –the “open” knowledge repository of the Internet–as an example of what critical social theorist Jurgen Habermas called “rational discourse.” In…
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Why blog? It allows for more and better thought, authors say
Nardi, et al (2004) provide an overview of the web-blog, or blogging phenomenon of Web 2.0. In general, it affords bloggers a platform for expressing views that are more subjective than the more transactional wiki article or bulletin board posting. While the frequency, purpose, and tone of blogs vary widely, all blogs have certain key…
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Open your eyes, old teacher! — Meg Ormiston's keynote at the Concordia Univ. Chicago
I was privileged to hear new-literacies proseletyzer Meg Ormiston this morning at the 34th annual Concordia University Chicago Reading Conference, “Lighting the way with multiliteracies.” Her keynote message was admirably simple: “Reading and writing have changed. We must change with them.” She reiterated it for the elderly: “Hey–old people in the room–we have to change!”…
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Feeling rather Puritanical about my faith–my faith in Education, that is
And if there were a church of Internet faith, a puritan would read from the book of wikipedia, the repository of global knowledge not tainted by commercial sin or secret self-interest. Institutions like Encyclopedia Britannica by contrast are tarted up like a Popish whore. I got the ad that follows from EB, which (for younger…
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"Open" resource of professional development
Not able to attend the national conference “EDUCON 2.2″ in Philadelphia, I joined via twitter (which anyone can do using the instant filters of #hashtags!). Twitter, freely accesible and community-sourced, could be called an “open” resource. Twitter functions at these events (and sports events, I’ve found) as a rich “back-channel” of communication that anyone can pick up. Using…
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Why I wished to Diigo with my students
I remember getting my first masters degree in the pre-Internet era. Research was done in large buildings called “research libraries” and documents were all “hard-copies” that one found on shelves or via plastic micro-fiche. The “site” of information was on these shelves, or other linear devices.If you didn’t have a lot of money for xerox…
The Wikiness 