stevendkrause.com

You read it here first– well, maybe not first, but you read it here now:  this handy list of ultra-portable computers.  Something along these lines might be the next laptop I buy, frankly.

Article/link #2 I don’t want to lose when I reboot: “Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills,” from eNews and its annoying password/account-driven web site. The sub-head specifically singles out sites like Second Life. A couple paragraphs:

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for Chicago Public Schools and the webinar’s moderator, noted that gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making. The webinar was sponsored by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

Studies of the brain have pointed to data suggesting that repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.

Which reminds me that the next time I teach English 516, I’m going to have to once again re-add the units on gaming and writing.

A few links I came across in various ways the last couple of days before I get on to the conference business of the day, which is a trip to the beach:

• Mike Rose’s Blog.
• This article about podcasting turning into publishing. One of the points I think I want to make in my book project (oh yeah, that pesky book project… almost forgot about that…) is that one of the logical transitions/signs of success of a blog is the blog’s author gets some kind of book deal. So this makes sense to me.
• The design code rap:
  
• EveryZing. I haven’t played with this yet, but apparently, it’s an effort at creating a search engine that can look at multimedia for information. I heard about this at a presentation yesterday by Deborah Vess, who talked about…
• … this, Apple + iPods @ GCSU, which is about a pretty large and interesting Podcasting/videocasting initiative at Georgia College and State University.

I think I would prefer to actually be leaving for the airport today, but when I booked this trip, I didn’t know exactly when the conference presentations were going to happen and I didn’t realize that there’s almost nothing on the program Friday. So as long as I’m here, I think I’ll find out what St. Augustine is like.

Let me first be very clear: this mystery conference in Jacksonville has actually turned out to be a pretty good thing. I went to some good panels this morning and this afternoon, I had some nice chats with various folks, mostly from the community college world, my presentation went pretty well, and I got to catch up a bit with at least one friendly face I recognized from the computers and writing conference world. So it has been a much better conference than I had expected, and I am looking forward to some of the sessions tomorrow.

But it has still been kind of weird.

First off, the sessions this morning that I attended had some pretty small audiences– which is fine, frankly. That’s typical for academic conferences, and I just kind of assumed this is kind of a small conference overall. But when I went to the luncheon banquet, I was rather surprised to see a rather large ballroom with somewhere around 800 or so people in it, complete with a big dais of distinguished people. It was odd; I was just wondering where the heck all these people came from.

Then there was the mini-monolith. Before the keynote speech by Marc Prensky (the first 20 minutes of which were pretty good; the second 20 minutes which were kinda problematic; and the last 20 minutes of which were probably unnecessary), they announced the awards for the conference. Now, one of the reasons I was sent by folks at EMU to this conference in the first place was that I was the EMU nominee for an “Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology.” So I knew I was going to get something, and I also knew that there was 40 or so other winners. But I wasn’t expecting this:

This trophy is pretty cool, but it seems rather dangerous. It’s made out of marble, it’s about eight and half inches high and about three and a half inches in circumference, it is cut so it has a rather sharp point at top, and has got to weigh 10 pounds. Gian Pagnucci (a fellow winner, btw) and I were talking at dinner about this, and we both seriously wondered if you could actually take this thing onto an airplane in carry-on luggage. I mean, I have no doubt that you could most definitely brain someone with this thing if you really wanted to. I’m a little worried about what kind of damage it’s liable to cause in my checked suitcase.

Well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

Tomorrow, more mysteries await.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at this something of a mystery conference and listening to a guy talking about a laptop campus program at Cal State San Bernardino. It’s potentially pretty interesting to me because while CSU-SB is a lot smaller than EMU, the profile of what the school is like is pretty similar to EMU. I think this is a guy I should talk to at some point. One of the points he just made: the main complaint that various powers-that-be on his campus (e.g., faculty senate, tech committees, provosts, etc.) was concern about that one poor student who just can’t afford a laptop no matter what. So the solution they came up with was they collected old but still decent laptops from other institutional resources. So far, they’ve loaned out one.

Another fun-fact: 70% of the students at CSU-SB are on financial aid. At the same time, some huge percentage of students had computers, over 70% had high speed internet access where they lived, and over half of the students already owned a laptop before they were required to buy one. Again, given that CSU-SB has a similar profile of students at EMU, I bet that a survey would be about the same.

But a couple of other things I came across via my feed that kind of connect to the conference and that’s just kind of interesting:

• “Analysis: How multimedia can improve teaching,” from eNews (which features an annoying registration feature), which is about this Cisco study available via pdf here. I’ve only browsed through it; it looks very science-y and statistics and stuff, and kind of potentially interesting and useful.
• “Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?” from Inside Higher Ed. It’s basically an article about all sorts of different assessment tools going on around the country with all kinds of different universities. I know we’ve got a couple of different initiatives about assessment at EMU, and what I find reassuring about the article is that the efforts of higher ed on this already might end up fending off federally mandated standards.

It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:

• “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
• The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
• A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:
  

  For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.

• “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
• This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
• Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.

Here’s a pretty cool collection of links of stuff that is handy in education. Of course, a lot/most of these things are “just cool” tools– e.g., del.icio.us, Firefox, Flickr, etc. Some of these things I have found to be very useful for teaching, but I have also had trouble convincing some of my students about this. Google Reader is a very good example of this, and I’m going to try to make a much bigger deal out of this in teaching in spring 2008. Anyway, good list.

Well, since I’m not in NOLA and up to Lord only knows what Steve B. and Bill HD. and my other typical conference partners in crime are up to right now, I thought I’d post a whole bunch of links from my Google Reader feed:

• A book about cursing in over 69 different languages.
• A link to a mashup video of “I’m F*cking Obama.” I came across this on a blog I read on a regular basis (sorry, I can’t remember which one now) that suggested that this was a sexist video. I dunno, I think it makes sense because Clinton is on the attack and has kind of opened herself up to that. I have to think that it’s only a matter of time before we get to the “I’m F*cking Hillary Clinton.”
• Here’s a weird one: http://superbad.com/ You would think that this has something to do with the movie Superbad, but I don’t have a clue what this is. Entertaining though.
• “Professors should embrace Wikipedia” from Inside Higher Ed. This one might actually be useful in teaching about wiki and Wikipedia stuff next year, maybe even this spring. The comments are particularly telling.
• “Experimental Use of Blog-Based Peer Review Gives Mixed Results” in CHE and a reply/rebuttal from the site where the blog peer review took place. Personally, I think a blog is a better place to prewrite/think through a manuscript/project in progress rather review a draft polished enough to send to a publisher.
• What might be an interesting book/web site/blog/wiki to check out later, Wikinomics.
• Finally, another story in the New York Times of a plagiarism policy being plagiarized. Lots of good links here, too.

From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “Federal Judge Rules That Plagiarism-Detection Tool Does Not Violate Students’ Copyrights.” I have yet to read the whole things and absorb it, but here’s a quote:

Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U. S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.”

But this isn’t over yet– appeals from the students who brought the case in the first place are certainly forthcoming.

But hey, the way I look at it, there are lots of other reason other than the copyright issues to not like Turnitin. Like it’s just unethical and criminalizes students and doesn’t work well.

I have a Twitter account, but I think I’ve used it about twice and I am still not getting it. But this post on elearnspace makes me think that it might be worth the time to figure it out.