Earlier this week, I was asked to respond to an inquiry from one of our high school students. He’s writing an article for the school paper about technology in the schools, and he had several questions about how technology has changed society and school since the start of the millennium. Because this was an inquiry about the high school, my remarks are more 9-12 focused … Continue reading An Encounter with an Interviewer

EarthCast 2008 is a  webcast taking place on April 22, 2008. It started at midnight GMT, and continues for 24 hours. This is a continuous, day-long conversation about the Earth and taking care of it. Matt Montagne has spearheaded this effort, with a great deal of support from Doug Symington, Jose Rodriguez, and others in the EdTech community. Jason Robershaw created an outstanding promo explaining … Continue reading EarthCast 2008 Continues

We can’t keep up. We can’t know about everything. Just because something’s famous, even in the relatively small world of education and technology, that doesn’t mean I have ever heard of it. Sure, I know about Creative Commons. If you license your work with a CC license, you allow others to use it, with some limitations. You can require attribution. You can specify that derivatives … Continue reading Mayer and Bettle

One of the interesting things to come out in the Beta Survey was a shift in how teachers are using technology and a shift in the availability of technology to students. Teachers reported that they’re spending more time on Internet-based activities, both to provide instruction and to use as a research tool. The most-often-used technologies are now Internet for Instruction, Internet for Research, Word Processing, … Continue reading Same Money, More Computers

World Have Your Say is a call-in radio program. There’s nothing special about that. Nearly every station on the AM dial has one. The hosts talk about current events, and people can call in to give their opinions. WHYS, though, takes the idea of talk radio several steps further. First of all, it’s a global show. Originating in London, it actively seeks participation from the … Continue reading World Have Your Say

Over the last couple days, we’ve had a discussion in my department over Microsoft Office versions. We’re trying to build an image to run on old computers. We want the performance to be as good as possible, even though it’s going to be running on 6-7 year old computers with limited processing power and memory. Dan used the excellent nLite Windows Installation Customizer to weed … Continue reading In Search of Simplicity

I attended a meeting last week that wasn’t a complete waste of time. A shock, I know. Sure, it did take 45 minutes to drive the 13 miles to the meeting. It was rush hour, after all. All told, the trip took me 4 1/2 hours, which included about 2 1/2 hours of presentations. The presentations were mostly of the endless-Powerpoint-bullet variety. While they did … Continue reading The Un-Conference

A pdf version of this document is also available. What is Del.icio.us and Why Do I Care? One of the first things we learned about using the web is how to save bookmarks. You are visiting some web site, and you want to save that link so you can come back to it later. So you save it as a bookmark (or favorite), and it … Continue reading Getting Started With Del.icio.us

How’s this for a goal? Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. All key information about all life on Earth? That’s a lot of information. There are 1.75 million documented species on Earth. So far, they have about, umm, 25 more-or-less … Continue reading Encyclopedia of Life

I just finished listening to the “Multimedia” episode of the Web EdTech Podcast. At one point in the conversation, John Rappold and company were discussing web filtering in the schools. They struggled with the question of what types of content should be blocked by the web filter, and who should be making those decisions. In most school districts, when teachers disagree with the filtering decisions, … Continue reading Making Filtering Decisions

The Recording Industry Association of America considers you a criminal. They sue people for sharing music online, sometimes using questionable legal tactics. They also consider it illegal for you to copy music from a legally-acquired CD to a computer or MP3 player. If you run a radio station, you have to pay licensing fees to play commercial music on the air. That’s a 180-degree change … Continue reading Eschew the RIAA

I’m not a bleeding edge kind of guy. I don’t generally install new software right away. I wait for the bugs to be worked out. I let a couple minor revisions go by. Then, I upgrade, but only if there’s something that the new version has that I need. So why am I so frustrated with WordPress? After all, it was less than a year … Continue reading Waiting for WordPress