Category: Uncategorized
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The technology of historical theater
Timeline Theatre Company’s staging of The Front Page (which runs through 12 June 2011) is an enjoyable, thoughtful comedy. But it also demonstrates the special value of this Chicago artistic enterprise.The company loves to stage plays that delve deeply into specific times and places in history, or explore famous, infamous, or just interesting historical personages.…
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The technology of speech, pt. 1
is something poignantly drawn in this fascinating Ted talk with one of my very favorite Tweetple, Roger Ebert @ebertchicago. Taking away a critic’s voice is tantamount to shutting him down, and only twenty years ago, before the advent of text-to-speech software and a robust, ubiquitous Internet, Roger would have been shut down and silenced– “isolated…
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The technology of music: rock and roll
The power of music to powerfully stir human spirits is very ancient, and so it is no surprise that the révolution du moment in Libya has its own version of the Hebrew shofar, or musical instrument that inspired the Isrealites and brought down Jericho’s walls. Today MSNBC reports that in Libya rock star Abu…
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Google should really send me a Cr48 if they want me to be fair to them
when I suggest purchasing thousands of netbooks. I don’t want to believe the stories of the Google Internet device‘s disfunctional trackpad and memory limitations, or its jerky scrolling you can read about at sites like this, this, and this. After all, I’m a happy Google app user, and would expect the same functionality in an important piece of…
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"Cracking the 'Native' Information Experience
David Warlick’s “Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience” at the District 219 Technology Conference in Skokie, Illinois today offered educators insight into working with the amazing young people who are coming into our schools. These kids amaze the old teachers because they have abilities and dispositions unknown when the teachers were students. The kids have expertise…
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KAT eats English teacher?
If you fully implemented Pearson’s essay-grading program, which relies on something called “Latent Semantic Analysis,” you could lose large numbers of passionate, energetic English teachers, whose jobs today consist to a large extent in making assessments of student literacy. Ask any English teacher about “grading papers,” and s/he’ll probably groan. Well, that might be about…
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Educational Technology 6205: Tablet or Laptop?
Suppose there were a budget of $10,000 and a task–to outfit one classroom with WiFi-enabled devices. The question is posed: Laptops or Tablets? MacBooks iPad2s cost n=11 units $9891 =11 MacBooks $6,000 = 11 iPad2s ease of use requires keyboarding and mouse manipulation skills user interface (UI) is easy, but keyboard based very intuitive, requires…
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The technology of literature, pt. 2: thoughts on teaching
Another great enjoyment I can only now receive from reading Jane Eyre is the extent to which the book makes pedagogical points. Jane is a teacher and a governess, as well as a remarkably sensible, sensitive, and independent role-model. She points out important aspects of the job–even to the 21st century teacher. In Chapter 34,…
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The technology of literature: imparting wisdom AND self-knowledge
When I was “a young and callow fellow” at IWU, I was assigned Charlotte Brontë’s novel along with a few other 19th century British novels, and I read it, but it did not impress me much. The function of literature, in the time I first met Jane Eyre, was to get knowledge of important social…
The Wikiness 