Author: abendelow
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It's not your father's fear-mongering campaign
By now you’ve probably heard about the National Organization for Marriage’s youtube video that has folks talking. I think it’s a great example of how things for oppressed minorities might get better in a read/write web world. These “Christian” “defenders of marriage” (who claim to be a “rainbow coalition of people who come together in…
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Now that the feds have had it a while, maybe we'll let the schools play with it
Interesting news from the US federal digital frontier, where the CIA and its related agencies (NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, ATF, etc.) have apparently been doing great things using the cutting edge of collaborative tools, according to an article in this week’s Time. Yes, it seems that the cleverest heads in the public sector have…
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We put leashes on our pets, so shouldn't we get tweets from our reps?
Gotta hand it to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grasssly, who is tweeting his way into transparency. Bravo! He leads by example, adopting the democratizing tool for speaking to and hearing from the vox populi. As you can see in this post-stream (left), the senator is letting his followers in on significant meetings and his whereabouts, and…
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A new way to "read" is what we're learning on web 2.0
We’re reading in ways no humans could before. Say I need to read a large text–an essay, blog post, or speech, say–but don’t have the time to read it all. I just want to get the “big picture” as fast as I can. Well, thanks to David Warlick’s 2 cents, I learned about IBM’s Many…
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"Confused consumers, massive layoffs, shrinking newspapers — is this what Web 2.0 has brought us?"
That’s the provocative conclusion drawn by poet and blogger John F. McMullen in this piece published recently at Web 2.0 The Magazine. In it, he acknowledges the disruptiveness of the new tools and yet urges attentive patience as we see over time how the media shift affects life in our society. In addition to the…
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Wake up, Schools, and smell the 2.0!
As a professional educator ensconced in the educational-industrial complex of an American public school district, I appreciate when we get criticized from “outsiders.” Oh, sure, there’s a lot of unfair criticism regarding the supposed ease of teachers’ lives, the foolishness of their debates, and the impermeability of union contracts. I’m not interested in those. Those…
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Been reading Neil Postman again
Technopoly (1995) this time, and feel moved to respond, in defense of the future he has not lived to see. I’d like to say, “Mr. Postman, you were right–technology is changing the way we do basic human, communicative things like teach and learn, report news and express opinions. However, the genie is long out of…
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This is the 21st century dance step all teachers must learn
It’s model it, guide it, and get out of the way of the learner, gradually. It reminds me of the Tao te Ching: …the Master lets things take their courseand thus never fails.She doesn’t hold on to thingsand never loses them.By pursing your goals too relentlessly,you let them slip away.If you are as concerned about…
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Sure, you can lecture, but can you micro-lecture?
Without the heft and verbiage of long, one-way lectures, and with the portability of podcasts, a community college is using 80 second, digital summations, and the students are learning. Nonetheless, it’s a different sort of learning than my generation knew. Information transfer, wheere the student has control of the rate/repetition frequency. As one of the…
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Podcasted lectures = better lectures
And let’s face it, lectures have been useful educational media these many centuries. But new technology makes them less one-way, and, as this e-school news article describes it, more effective than traditional lectures in facilitating learning. Will it be much longer before thousands of teaching assistants and seperately-employed lecturers are replaced by the best podcasts…
The Wikiness 