Well, I finally set myself up a Bloglines account and put everyone's blog into it. Now I can keep track of everyone's posts and maybe be a better commenter and, therefore, a better all-around member of the ENG506 blogging community. I already posted a couple comments on some blogs: giving someone some wiki help here, ranting about homeschooling there, and so on. I feel like a better person.
Sure, I had a Bloglines account for ENG307 (the undergraduate version of this course) last year, but I abandoned it early. Why? I don't know. I decided I'd rather just follow the blogs of the one or two friends I had in the class, and to heck with everyone else. But that's just not being socially responsible.
Anyway, I was disappointed to see that most people in the class only had one subscriber (before me) to their blogs. This tells me others are not using Bloglines. Get with the program, people! If you want to be an upstanding Blogospherean (Blogospherite?), you need to be tracking the blogs of others! Why would people care about your blog when you don't care about theirs? That's just selfish, folks. Selfish.
This also goes hand-in-hand with linking to other blogs within your posts. People have been fascinated that I've had both Will Richardson and Tim Wilson comment on my blog already, but it's very simple. You link to others, they see you've linked to them, they check out your blog. It's my new favorite word, cropping up again: connectivity!
So anyway, Blogospherers (Blogospheria?), keep in touch with your fellow bloggers. Let them know you're out there. Because, without social interaction, it's just typing into thin air.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Friday, September 22, 2006
More on Geocaching in the Classroom
I'd like to thank Tim Wilson from technosavvy.org for visiting my blog and showing me even more links regarding Geocaching in the classroom. So, on Tim's recommendations, if you're interested in this topic, please check out the following:
Geocaching in Education Wiki
Technosavvy.org podcast -- interview with Sonny Portacio (link at bottom of post)
The wiki is a little light in content right now (and still has nothing about English classes), but the potential is there for much growth as this topic becomes more and more hot. Perhaps Reid could add his ideas on a topographical local history project? *nudge nudge* :)
The podcast, meanwhile, has a really great interview with Sonny Portacio, first about Geocaching in general and, then, educational Geocaching in specific. It is very informative -- anyone who doesn't know about Geocaching, please listen to it! Sonny does an outstanding job of explaining it succinctly, which I have trouble doing sometimes. I get too excited about it and tell way more than any layperson cares to know.
OK, that's all I have on Geocaching in the Classroom at the moment. Stay tuned, for I will post here if anything else comes up!
Geocaching in Education Wiki
Technosavvy.org podcast -- interview with Sonny Portacio (link at bottom of post)
The wiki is a little light in content right now (and still has nothing about English classes), but the potential is there for much growth as this topic becomes more and more hot. Perhaps Reid could add his ideas on a topographical local history project? *nudge nudge* :)
The podcast, meanwhile, has a really great interview with Sonny Portacio, first about Geocaching in general and, then, educational Geocaching in specific. It is very informative -- anyone who doesn't know about Geocaching, please listen to it! Sonny does an outstanding job of explaining it succinctly, which I have trouble doing sometimes. I get too excited about it and tell way more than any layperson cares to know.
OK, that's all I have on Geocaching in the Classroom at the moment. Stay tuned, for I will post here if anything else comes up!
Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater
Here's an article I found in the "Oddly Enough" section of Yahoo News yesterday: And the grad students most likely to cheat are...
"Students have reached the point where they're making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're stupid, basically, or inappropriate."
Shouldn't students be allowed, at least to some extent, to make their own rules? I was observing in a class today, and as part of a demonstration of "intelligent behavior," two teams of students were to be building towers out of index cards. Now, of course, they were supposed to come up with their own architectural techniques. In every class period, though, without exception, one team would accuse the other of "cheating," and always for the same reason: a member of the opposing team would spy on them and share their good ideas with his/her own group. They called it cheating, I called it ingenius. How better to get an idea of how to create your tower than by seeing firsthand how someone else has already succeeded? I was so happy that my host teacher did not punish anyone for cheating, no matter how much information was stolen from the other team. I say, it's a collaborative world: so long as one person comes up with a good idea, the rest of us are set to take it and, if we feel so compelled, expand on it.
Just like the business students in the article are paraphrased as saying: "what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important." I could not agree more. This is a world where any information you need is at your fingertips. Why waste time creating a unit plan when you can find them posted all over the Internet? Why waste time making handouts when you can copy some off someone's website? Why not spend all that creation time coming up with better ideas of how to reach individual students?
These are the thoughts I have when I go into classes where I have to create those sorts of things. Of course, I always end up creating my own things (which usually aren't any good) because I'm afraid of getting caught. But as we get further and further into the age of Digital Natives, and we get students who are more and more comfortable with locating information online (I substituted in a 7th Grade class Wednesday in which many students had no idea how to properly use Google, but that's another story), we are going to face the potential that they can find anything they need for our classes online.
While I am of course not advocating plagiarizing (it is important to have individual thoughts and feelings in essays, after all), I am advocating that students should be allowed to borrow information from wherever possible, if it helps them meet the greater goal of learning something, somehow. Am I crazy? Perhaps. Do I need to think this out more, before I'm labeled as a radical? Absolutely. But I know what I mean, and I hope it came through it some way.
"Students have reached the point where they're making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're stupid, basically, or inappropriate."
Shouldn't students be allowed, at least to some extent, to make their own rules? I was observing in a class today, and as part of a demonstration of "intelligent behavior," two teams of students were to be building towers out of index cards. Now, of course, they were supposed to come up with their own architectural techniques. In every class period, though, without exception, one team would accuse the other of "cheating," and always for the same reason: a member of the opposing team would spy on them and share their good ideas with his/her own group. They called it cheating, I called it ingenius. How better to get an idea of how to create your tower than by seeing firsthand how someone else has already succeeded? I was so happy that my host teacher did not punish anyone for cheating, no matter how much information was stolen from the other team. I say, it's a collaborative world: so long as one person comes up with a good idea, the rest of us are set to take it and, if we feel so compelled, expand on it.
Just like the business students in the article are paraphrased as saying: "what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important." I could not agree more. This is a world where any information you need is at your fingertips. Why waste time creating a unit plan when you can find them posted all over the Internet? Why waste time making handouts when you can copy some off someone's website? Why not spend all that creation time coming up with better ideas of how to reach individual students?
These are the thoughts I have when I go into classes where I have to create those sorts of things. Of course, I always end up creating my own things (which usually aren't any good) because I'm afraid of getting caught. But as we get further and further into the age of Digital Natives, and we get students who are more and more comfortable with locating information online (I substituted in a 7th Grade class Wednesday in which many students had no idea how to properly use Google, but that's another story), we are going to face the potential that they can find anything they need for our classes online.
While I am of course not advocating plagiarizing (it is important to have individual thoughts and feelings in essays, after all), I am advocating that students should be allowed to borrow information from wherever possible, if it helps them meet the greater goal of learning something, somehow. Am I crazy? Perhaps. Do I need to think this out more, before I'm labeled as a radical? Absolutely. But I know what I mean, and I hope it came through it some way.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
My New Toy
About a week ago, I purchased one of these babies. That's a Garmin Foretrex 101 wrist-mounted GPS receiver, my friends. Accuracy within 15 meters. 500 waypoint storage capacity. 12-channel receiver with WAAS. Built in celestial tables. What does all this stuff mean? I'm not exactly sure about most of it. What I do know, though, is that it is awesome and I love it.
So what would possess me to purchase such a thing? An Internet-based hobby, of course. Geocaching is an activity which combines the goofiness of the Internet with the ruggedness of nature with the wonder of technology. People hide things in the woods, or in a park, or in a cemetery, or in any other public place, and provide the latitude and longitude for the hide on the website. People like me punch the coordinates on our fancy little GPS receivers, hop in our vehicles, drive out to the spots, and find the "treasures." Sure, it's pointless. But it's a lot of fun, and I've met a lot of really interesting people through it.
What does this have to do with technology in the classroom? Well, as far as English goes, nothing. But these devices (and, in some case, this activity of Geocaching in particular) have been used in other types of classrooms (gym, math, science, etc.) throughout the nation. Do a Google search on "Geocaching in the classroom" and just take a look at what comes up. Here's one blog post I found particularly interesting: The Savvy Technologist -- Geocaching Comes to the Classroom.
I just wanted a forum to brag about my new toy. I haven't had much of a chance to use it since I bought it, but I did go out last Thursday night and, using the very fancy backlight feature on the high-resolution screen, found a couple geocaches in McGraw and Blodgett Mills. Technology is wonderful!
Comic Relief
For anyone who hasn't been following the comic strip "Foxtrot" (which by the way, is pretty much the only readable strip in the newspaper), these have been the last three:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Ha!
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Ha!
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
"Yeah, I'll Get My Grandma to UPS Me Her Typewriter."
The quotation used for the title of this post was the utterance made by one of my clever classmates (she knows who she is) after this exchange occurred in a class earlier tonight:
Fellow student: "Do you want us to type up our answers [to the homework handout]?"
Professor: "Well, you could type them on there if you want, but you could also just write neatly."
Honestly. I am not kidding. The professor thought he was asking whether she wanted us to type our answers directly on the worksheet. With a typewriter. The asker of the question and I looked at each other in utter disbelief, until the title statement was made by another member of the class. L-O-L to the max!
Later in the class, I heard this said by another class member: "It isn't fair that we have to come here after 506. It's like actual time travel." I'm glad I'm not the only one who feel that way, and totally gets it!
It should go without saying that this is the same class as was mentioned in last week's Names have been changed... post. *sigh*
Fellow student: "Do you want us to type up our answers [to the homework handout]?"
Professor: "Well, you could type them on there if you want, but you could also just write neatly."
Honestly. I am not kidding. The professor thought he was asking whether she wanted us to type our answers directly on the worksheet. With a typewriter. The asker of the question and I looked at each other in utter disbelief, until the title statement was made by another member of the class. L-O-L to the max!
Later in the class, I heard this said by another class member: "It isn't fair that we have to come here after 506. It's like actual time travel." I'm glad I'm not the only one who feel that way, and totally gets it!
It should go without saying that this is the same class as was mentioned in last week's Names have been changed... post. *sigh*
Monday, September 11, 2006
For the Original Posts to this Blog...
The original half-dozen or so posts to this blog can be found at emke.blogspot.com -- if that link doesn't work (which it might not, for some reason), just copy and paste it into your address bar. There is some good stuff there, so don't forget about it!
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