Cory Doctorow hypothesizes the question in a story called “Scroogled,” appearing in Radar Magazine. I read the first couple screens, but I need to get to work, so I’ll look at more of it later. It seems to me to have some interesting teaching potential, though.
Buy a laptop, get a laptop
From the NYT comes this piece “Buy a laptop for a child, get another laptop free,” which is about the Nicholas Negroponte “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. Here’s a quote:
The marketing program, to be announced today, is called “Give 1 Get 1,� in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399.
One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.
Besides being good reading for ENGL 516, I think it might be something I would be interested in doing personally. I like the idea of the goal of this project, and I suspect my 10 year old son and I might enjoy playing around with this new machine. I’m trying to convince him to be more of a computer geek by pointing out it isn’t just for games anymore….
Getting the most out of gmail
Some good tips from this Web Worker Daily blog posting, “Getting the most out of gmail.” I left EMU’s email system more or less behind about six months ago and I have not even a teeny regret. 356MB of email in my account and I’m using 12% of my allocated space, versus EMU’s limit of 20MB.
A couple of software doo-dads for winter 2008 teaching
As sabbatical lite continues, I come across things that might be good software to incorporate into teaching in the winter term. That is slightly up in the air, but I know I am teaching English 516, and it looks like it’s going to be online again. This is good news for me because I thought the online version ultimately turned out great last winter, and it might aid and abed my quasi-sabbatical strategies.
Anyway, both of these software doo-dads come from a tech-rhet discussion. The first is Google Page Creator, which is a so-so web page editor (and it’s so-so since it hide the code, etc.). It’s a tool to at least check out, and it is possible to upload more traditional HTML and CSS documents. Since it hosts up to 100 MB of stuff, it might be a pretty worthwhile alternative to the puny amount of space from EMU. And actually, combine that with Blogger and Google video and/or YouTube and you’ve got a whole Google-verse of web 2.0 goodness!
The other cool thing is an MIT project/product called Scratch, which is described as “a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.” They claim it is something for ages 8 and up, so it might be something I can figure out. But I’ll have to worry about that later– pesky book and research, doncha know.
The computer of 1999 (as seen in 1966)
Via boing boing, this might be kind of a fun thing to include in a class when talking about the whole history of writing technology thing: 1999 A.D. (shopping from home).
"Faking" the Palmer Method
As part of my always on-going interest in things like early writing technologies and teaching, I’m posting this article from the Cheboygan Tribune, “I was taught the Palmer Method, but mostly faked it,” a reminiscence about learning how to write way back when by Bruce Callander. The most interesting part of the article for me is Callander’s description of how Palmer came to be so popular in the early 20th century:
Palmer was good at fancy writing, which included drawing birds and leaping deer along with the letters. As a school teacher, however, he developed a less-complicated method of writing that retained the free-flowing letters but not all the embellishments. His basic idea was that you should use your whole arm, not just the fingers.
If he had stuck to teaching, things would have been easier for the rest of us, but he began to write out his lessons and publish them. By 1912, he was selling a million copies of the course per year. By the time he died in 1927, some 25 million Americans had learned to write by the Palmer Method. I was not one of them because, at that date, I was only 3 years old, but, along with thousands of other youngsters, I was soon to be exposed to his approach.
Thank goodness I type….
My spam blockers are failing me…
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been getting an unusual level of spam lately, and it is spam powerful/resilient enough to get through my usually robust spam blocking filters. I don’t know if anyone else out there in blog-land is experiencing similar problems or not, but as a result, I’ve turned on “must have a comment approved” as an option. It’s not that big of a deal in that I don’t get a lot of comments here anyway, but if you have a comment that is held, that is probably the reason.
wikirage
Via a blog that I ought to perhaps add to my RSS feed, Read/WriteWeb, comes this article, “Wikirage: The Wikipedia Zeitgeist.” To quote about Wikirage:
Wikirage is a zeitgeist based on the number of edits to Wikipedia articles. Wikirage shows the top 100 most edited articles over the past hour, 6 hours, day, 3 days, week, and month. For each topic in the top 100, the site also has a historical graph of edits for the past 4 weeks, as well as its relative ranking over time.
Obviously useful for teaching about wiki stuff for sure.
A couple more teaching kinds of links
Gee, maybe I am thinking about teaching too much. Of course, I had at one point planned on writing a book about the history of different writing technologies, so both of these links are still quasi Sabbatical Lite like.
- The Classic Typewriter Page, which I found via boing boing and which is maintained by someone who teaches philosophy at Xavier U. Cool stuff.
- Johndan’s work/space blog had this cool link here to a site on “The History of The Discovery of Cinematography,” but it appears that that site (not Johndan’s, the other one) is now gone. Well, maybe it’ll be back….
- From Canada’s Globe and Mail comes “Researchers question school in high-tech age.” Basically, the folks being interviewed here ask what’s the point of the conventional classroom at all when it could all be done electronically. It’s a bit over-the-top, but I do think this passage is largely true:
“It’s pre-Gutenberg,” says Don Tapscott, futurist, lecturer and author of bestsellers such as “Wikinomics,” laughing as he recalls the assessment he heard from a university president.
“It’s a prof working from handwritten notes. The students are all writing it down and the prof is writing on a blackboard. The assumption of the printing press is not even a fundamental part of the learning paradigm.”
Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. But in education, a teacher could walk into a classroom after a century and get busy.
BetaBloglines as your next RSS reader?
I’ve been pretty happy with Google Reader as my RSS Feed reader (and you might be able to tell, given this is my third post in a row, that I’m just catching up on that feed this morning), but I have to say that the beta version of the new reader for Bloglines looks very promising. Something to keep an eye on both for teaching and for BAWS. Via TechCrunch.