December 2007
In My Mind's Eye, I See Hamlet in Second Life →
Part of my list of 2008 education resolutions is to try out some of the more educational uses of virtual worlds and
stop being so curmudgeonly about all of it. (Ken doth protest too much, methinks.)
Mary Zedeck at Seton Hall University keeps
me posted about SL projects, particularly Shakespeare stuff. (See, when you teach Romeo & Juliet to a kid in
7th grade and it works, they remember!)
...
Happy Festivus from Serendipity35 →
Perhaps it is most PC if we simply wish all our readers a Happy Festivus!
The airing of the grievances will come later…
Video via Google
Word of the Year? →
Weekend Word Watch
The Word of the Year, according to Miriam-Webster Inc., is
w00t (those are zeroes).
The word of the year doesn’t have to be a new word, just used a
lot that year.
Miriam-Webster describes the term as meaning “yay,” and “it could be [exclaimed]
after a triumph or for no reason at all.”
According to Wikipedia (truly a better source for this...
Upriver in Search of the Myth of the Digital... →
I was reading Michael Wesch
online over the weekend. He’s the professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University who drew so much
attention for his video, “Web
2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us”, which had millions of views in several versions on many sites.
In the
post I was reading, he’s commenting on [mis]interpretations of his video from this semester,...
Into 2008 →
Things have been quiet this month on the blog and at our main site.
It’s not just the holidays. You can add in some computer problems and those pesky day jobs that pay the bills. But, there will be new poems posted at the end of the month and a new prompt for the new year. Keep the ink from freezing.
Putting All Your Educational Eggs In One Basket →
I started using Eduspaces when it was called Elgg. It was about the same time that Tim and I were starting out with
Moodle (late 2005) and starting Serendipity35. It was self-described as the “world’s largest social networking site
dedicated to education and educational technology. With forums moderated by the leading experts in this field, this
service exists to promote the use of...
A Blackboard K-20 Connection →
Back in October (at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference), Blackboard Inc. launched their K-20 Connection. It’s an
initiative, like others that I’ve written about here, to get K-12 schools and higher education institutions to connect
and collaborate.
They plan to invest about one million dollars in “strategic and tactical imperatives that
enhance K-20 collaborative...
Courting the Muse on Internet2 →
I’ve been attending virtual meetings of the MAGPI K20 User Group for the past year. This
tri-state group meets every other month virtually by videoconferencing through the Internet2 Commons. I continue to be amazed at the things
schools are doing, and frustrated by how little we are doing with it at NJIT and SPHS. The purpose of this
user group is to bring together connected organizations...
MIT for High School →
Most of you have heard about MIT’s OpenCourseware project. OCW is the free publication of materials used at MIT
from over 1800
courses made available to the public.
Now, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making freely available to
high school students and their teachers a collection of material in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The material is available on a new...
MUVE into River City →
Remember the term
MUVE? It stands for multi-user virtual
environments that you find online. These days they are more often called “virtual worlds.”
Most of
the attention on virtual environments right now goes to Second Life, but there are other virtual worlds - for example, Croquet, There, ActiveWorlds. I haven’t been all that involved in virtual worlds in education, though I...
K-20, K-20, K-20 →
I have been filing away some stories about K-20 collaborations the past few weeks and this week I’m planning to use
them here.
I received two links in an email from a friend who attended the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference. He wanted to let me know that he attended a
session with over 100 higher education CIOs and e-Learning folks who were discussing a “continuum of education
from...
VectorMagic Precision Bitmap to Vector... →
North Pole Sunset? Nope
Cool image - and it’s all over the Net and in emails, but now I read that- “…it’s physically impossible for the moon to appear so much larger than the sun when they are seen together with the naked eye. Why? Because, given their relative distances from the earth, the moon and the sun subtend the same angle in the sky, which is a fancy astrophysical way of saying that from...
Image hosting, free photo and video sharing at... →
Protopage by Revathi →
Update: Palm Beach Poetry Festival →
UPDATE: The Palm Beach Poetry Festival has filled all its 96 workshop seats. I’m just back from sunny Florida to snowy NJ and I’m sure some readers would enjoy a trip to Florida in January to hear some of our best poets read and talk about poetry. 4th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival January 21-26, 2008 Old School Square Cultural Arts Center 51 N. Swinton Ave, Delray...
Marvel Comics →
“You don’t have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local (supermarket) any
more,” Marvel Publishing president Dan Buckley recently said. “We don’t have our product intersecting kids in
their lifestyle space as much as we used to.”
Ain’t that the truth. English teachers may be
complaining that kids don’t read the novels they assign,...
Is iTunes U For You? →
I was talking last week to some colleagues at nearby Seton Hall University about becoming an iTunes U school. It prompted me to add a
follow-up here to the webinar I did this month as part of a series on podcasting from Higher Ed Experts.
Ryan testing our pre-launch iTunes U in 2006.
One thing that makes it
easier now to get a school administration on board compared to when we started podcasting...
Wire and Lights in a Box →
Weekend Quote:
“This instrument can teach, it can
illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to
those ends. Otherwise it is merely wire and lights in a box….” - Edward R Murrow
He was
talking about television, but perhaps you or your students see applications to other technologies.
CNN in Second Life Video →
Here’s a link for a video from CNN’s All Access site that shows what CNN is doing in
Second Life. I posted about this
here a few weeks ago.
