THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

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We made the big decision to get another dog 1 1/2 years after Hannah died. After a couple of months of looking and talking about it we contacted Adoptalab.org and within a few hours we were signed up and decided to take Hera aka Pudge who we will call Willa. She is a yellow 4 year old lab and we could not have picked a better dog.

I have had a Netvibes account for about a year, ever since Will Richardson demonstrated it at a conference I was at. My interest in Netvibes was increased when I saw how Michael Wesch uses it in his classes, but I never took the time to really learn it. Now that I have read  how Jeff Utech uses Netvibes I want to dig in and really learn how to use Netvibes. Give Jeff’s blog post a look and see what you think.

If you have not seen the movie Julie/Julia you should. Not only because it is fun and Meryl Streep is always great, but because it is a great example of why the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn.

The movie’s main plot revolves around Julie Powell, who lives in Queens with her husband, and her attempt to cook every receipt in Julia Child’s cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. The other half of the movie follows Julia Child, who is living in France in 1949, as she learns to cook and struggles to write and publish the cookbook.

Julie Powell starts a blog, this is 2002 just when blogging starts to become popular, as a way to chronicle her life and cooking. As the movie moves back and forth between the two women and their lives you start to see how quickly life has change due to computers and the Internet.

It takes Julia 2 years using a manual typewriter to do the first draft of the cookbook. Julie uses a computer to write her blog everyday. Julia has several false starts as she and her co-writers try to get a publisher interested in their cookbook. Julie’s blog starts to be read by hundreds of people and she is featured in a NY Times article. This exposure gets her several offers from book publishers.  Julie write a book, Julie and Julia: 365 Day, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which is popular and becomes the movie Julie/Julia.

As I was watching Julia Child struggle to publish her book I was struck how different it is today. Julia, like Julie, could have self-published through a blog or wiki. She could have made videos and posted them on YouTube, or use a self-publishing tool like Lulu and sold it on Amazon. Today anyone can become an author or a make a move, it is just that not all of them will be at Barnes & Noble or at the movies.

In case you don’t know, Mozilla is the parent of Firefox, Thunder Bird, and other free open source applications. Mozilla grew out of Netscape and Firefox is now the second most used browser (300 million users) after Internet Explorer.

In this talk at WordCamp in San Francisco, Mozilla CEO John Lilly, talks about 7 insights and 2 problems in Mozilla.

Insights:

1. Superior products matter
2. Without excellent experience and utility the rest is meaningless
3. Communication will happen every possible way, make sure it is reusable
4. Make it easy for you community to do the important things
5. Surprise is over rated, it is the opposite of engagement
6. Communities are not markets, members are citizens
7. The key is the art of figuring out whether and how to apply each of these ideas

Problems:

1. Engaged citizens are noisy
2. At scale there are no maps

So what does this have to do with education? It has everything to do with education because the 18th century model no longer works and we need to look at what is working in the world of open source. Education, like American auto makers, is being forced to change and the transition will not be pretty. So watch John Lilly’s talk and see if you agree.

T.H.E. Journal reports that Texas is leaving the door open for schools to purchase electronic textbooks in addition to paper books.

While this change does not take education to the totally open and flexible iTunes purchasing model as some would prefer, it does provide significant flexibility to districts. In addition, it opens up the Texas market to a large number of companies that heretofore had no chance to compete. For the basal publishers that have owned the market, creativity and flexibility will, or at least should, become a new mantra.

California’s e-learning proposial is stil being sorted out.

There are already worrying signs that California is trying to go digital on a shoestring. Traditionally, publishers provide schools with a complete package: student textbooks, teacher’s guides with sample lessons and tests, and teacher training courses. In the emerging model, teachers must assemble their own package, combining e-books with free course “wikis” (shared online resources any user can update or revise), and networking with other teachers over the web to share best practices. It’s a new responsibility some would prefer to avoid.

The digital divide needs to be closed not just in hardware, but even more important in what to do with the hardware and software. Most teachers are not online in any significat way and and have never created a wiki or blog. Schools will have to open up their filtering and the 19th century modle of edcation will have to be scraped.

I am visiting my 96 year old father and 85 year old mother who are both in poor health. It is important to stay mindful of the drama that plays out in families so that divisions do not become wider. It is amazing how quickly children can divide into camps about what is the right thing for mom and dad to do. Spouses of children are not spared the trama and can be deeply involved also.

I have been working on developing an online geometry Moodle course as part of the grant that I am currently working under. Every time I develop another Moodle course I learn more and more about the power and versatility of Moodle. The Assignment block is a Moodle function that I was familiar with but had not used. It allows you to design the course so that students can not proceed to the next lesson unless they pass a quiz at the end of each lesson.

I am also using Geogebra, an interactive math website. This will give the students real experience in constructing geometric shapes. They will be able to discover geometric rules by manipulating the geometric shapes they build.

Have you ever been over whelmed by the number of Web 2.0 applications? I know I have, that is why The Best of Lists are helpful. By their nature Best of Lists are self limiting, but at least they narrow the list of Web 2.0 applications to a managable few. 

Larry Ferlazzo, an English teacher is Sacramento, CA is a blogger and Best of List developer who can help you cut through the Web 2.0 clutter to find some gems. Look on his sidebar for links to the Best Of pages. 

On Saturday, May 2, I was fortunate  to be able to attend the New Media Literacies Project conference at MIT. When I first saw the email about the conference I was integrated, but little did I know how important this conference would be.

At NML’s May 2nd conference, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include “The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP,” “Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries,” “Using Wikipedia in the Classroom” and many others. Henry Jenkins’ closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.

As happens in most conferences the workshops were great but too short. Most of the workshops were based on research that is current or ongoing so I feel like the participants were exposed to a scholarly discussion. At times the workshops fell into research jargon that you had to listen carefully to to gain understanding.

I was also struck by how young many of the researchers were. MIT does attract some of the brightest young minds in the world. The Learning Library and teaching resources they have created will help the classroom teachers and tech directors begin to infuse new media literacies into the curriculum.

I had heard of Henry Jenkins, but I had never heard him speak before. He is leaving MIT for USC so it was a gift to be able to hear him in. Here is a link to a talk he gave at USC in 2007. The MIT conference was recorded and will be available on MIT’s Techtv.

If you do not know who Bill McKibben is you need to lean about him. Bill is an environmentalist and writer who writes about global warming, alternative energy, and economics. Nena and I attended his talk on 4/2 at Mt. Holyoke College. It was standing room only as Bill started the talk by telling us he was there to depress us.

Bill is touring the world to let us know how important the number 350 is. 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is the upper safe limit for humanity. Right now the measurement is 387 ppm, so we are past the level of CO2 that is safe for us.

Bill, and others, are organizing A Global Day for Climate Action on October 24, 2009. So go to the web site and find out how you can join. Bill is also on FaceBook and Twitter so that you can stay connected.