Online math tutoring in Spanish

Hotmath, Inc., a San Francisco based company, is now offering online math tutorials in Spanish (Business Wire). Looks like a 3-way race between English, Spanish, and Chinese for the dominant language in the world.

Flickr for low-level EFL students

Aaron Campbell has an excellent 6-paragraph article on using "Flickr for low level EFL students". Flickr is an online photo sharing tool. Aaron points out that setting up a gallery and profile is an authentic language activity that can, unlike in a closed traditional classroom, lead to conversations across the world.

15-year-old bilingual author

Maria Vilchis, an ESL 8th grader in New Jersey, plans on becoming an author in both Spanish and English (Miguel Juarez in Tri-Town News).

Sandvox, a new web publishing tool

Sandvox is a new web publishing software tool for Macs (OS 10.4.3) \that's beta now but soon to be released. Alwin Hawkin's brief but enthuasistic review led me to download it, and, yes, it's beautiful! From the site:

Sandvox, for Mac OS X. "Dig in" and download our Beta today.

Sandvox: A powerful, playful new website creation tool, for Mac OS X (version 10.4.3 "Tiger" required). From Karelia Software — the developer of Watson®.

Instant Gratification. Sandvox makes website creation elegant, intuitive and fun. It's the Macintosh way — the way it should be: drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and publish. Sandvox makes it easy to keep in touch via the Web with friends, family and customers.

Express Yourself. Sandvox will help you be more creative on the Web. Small business owners, show your customers your latest products and services. Authors, publish your stories. Photographers, share your libraries with the world. Families, keep your friends up to date with more than just a holiday letter.

There's More to Life than iLife. Sure, iWeb looks cool and similar to Sandvox in many ways, but it's just a toy. Can you afford to tie yourself to .mac? Not everybody wants, or needs, a .mac account — especially businesses who need their own domain name. iWeb has very limited choices for designs or pages; Sandvox will be extensible. iWeb provides no opportunity for custom HTML content when your needs demand it; Sandvox fits the bill. If iWeb isn't quite enough for you, then dig into the Sandvox.

Some of the features you can see at the website are drag-and-drop web assembly, pagelets, podcasts, video, and photo integration, and more.

Burned CDs don't last long

I thought burned CDs lasted longer, but it's likely only 2 years, possibly up to 5 years maximum. See John Blau's article in Computerworld.

The legality of taking and publishing pictures

For those interested in the legality of where you can take photos, what you can take them of, and whether you can publish them on the web, Andrew Cantor (Cyberspeak) has a good article: "New digital camera? Know how, where you can use it."

ESL student earns title of "world's best speaker"

An Israeli student earned the title of the 'world's best speaker' while competing in her second language of English.

Jan. 09 - A University of Haifa philosophy student, Anat Gelber, has earned the crown of the "world's best speaker" in her case, in English as a Second Language (ESL). She gained the title at the world rhetorical championships held in Dublin last week Gelber, 25, had previously twice gained the designation of "best ESL speaker in Europe," in 2003 and 2005. A graduate student, she had honed her oratorical skills as a member of the University of Haifa Rhetorical Society for the past five years. This debating club, set up only eight years ago, is considered one of the most successful in Israel. On the way to the title, Gelber was forced to deliver fiery speeches in English - not her native language - on such topics as the situation in Pakistan, atomic energy, the right to fertility treatments, animal rights, and illegal immigration. "In order to succeed in a competition like this," she explained, "you need not only speaking ability but also extensive knowledge and a mastery of everything that is happening in the world today."

Podcasting in the classroom

Wesley Fryer (via Stephen's Web via Miguel Guhlin who speaks of the urgency in corporating technology in the classroom) has an excellent introductory article on integrating podcasts into the classroom. He concludes,

We need to get serious about educating today’s digital natives for the digital knowledge landscape of the twenty-first century. In many ways, the traditional, “transmission-based” educational model of the past is insufficient for the needs of today’s learners and employers. Classroom podcasts can provide engaging opportunities for students to develop desirable skills as digital storytellers and cutting-edge communicators. The price is right, and the benefits are plentiful. Isn’t it time you and your students started a classroom podcast?

For language learning, podcasts are a good tool for students to practice and revise a presentation.

Diigo: social bookmarking with annotation

Diigo (via Tim Lauer) is a new social bookmarking/annotating tool.

Diigo is about "Social Annotation", a superset of social bookmarking. We believe that the social annotation service provided by Diigo can really enhance your experience for online browsing and interactions, and for information gathering and sharing.

As Tim Lauer says, diigo looks like del.icio.us except that it provides better capabilities of annotating bookmarks. This would be good for students as they do online reading and research.

50 Fun Things to do with your iPod

Kottke has a list of "50 Fun Things to do with your iPod."

Wikis in a middle school classroom

Clarence Fisher (of Remote Access), a middle school teacher, writes about how his class is "Wikifying Knowledge" about ancient history. He writes,

As we return to our study of Egypt this week, our wiki will become an active space again. Over the previous unit, as students used this tool for the first time, we learned a great deal about collecting and shaping knowledge. Students learned that they had to be active researchers, collectors, and designers of knowledge. They were interested in the fact that something written by one of their classmates could be added to, edited, and re - shaped by others. This was a new revelation for many of them. Starting to use this tool again this week, it first of all will be interesting to see if the kids still retain this understanding of using a wiki as a learning tool.

But he wonders:

But there is no original information that goes in to this space, it all comes from other spaces. So the question rises: is there any reason to use a wiki if we are using it only to collect information? Is it any different from taking regular notes on paper?

He responds affirmatively that there are some differences, differences of 24-hour accessibility, a public audience, and:

because the wiki is a space that anyone in our classroom can contribute to, it becomes much more then a single set of notes, it becomes an evolving, communal collection of our knowledge and understanding that grows in depth as our understanding does.

Using a wiki in this way also forces students to determine the importance and validity of information. Over the last unit of study, students were forced several times to confront the fact that they had posted information online that was not completely correct. They were forced to revise what they had written and re - think their understandings. Sorting, validating, and exposing overwhelming amounts of information is a skill that simply cannot be demonstrated or practiced using text that is not electronic.

I can't improve on what Clarence has already said, but I'd like to rephrase it. It is the interactions among the students and the recursive nature of re-visiting information that confronts them with contradictions between an individual's understanding and that of others, contradictions that lead them to reflect and re-construct their understanding, which in turn leads to a better understanding that is retained much longer.

It's important to realize that the teacher is a crucial element in wikis being used as more than a collection of information. As Clarence concludes,

although using a wiki to collect information can seem to be simply taking electronic notes, it can be a lot more.

JAlbum: free web photo album

JAlbum (via Education Weblog) is a photo web album generator. From the site:

This gallery software makes web albums of your digital images. JAlbum aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category - and free!

With JAlbum, no extra software is needed to view the albums, -just your web browser. Unlike "server side" album scripts, JAlbum albums can be served from a plain web server without scripting support. You can also share your albums on CD-ROM.

Online free photo sources

Photoshop Tutorials blog (via digg) has a list of online free photo resources.

NCLB vs. ESL

Michael Winerip of the NY Times reports on the problems Somali children are having learning English in Massachusetts schools, which have only English immersion classes. The children sit in class lost without translators, and no help seems to be forthcoming. Because there are only two translators, and they spend much of their time traveling from school to school by bus, one proposed solution was to cluster Somali children to ease the translation problem; however

Springfield officials have given a variety of reasons for not doing so. Last spring, according to Mrs. Caldwell, school officials said that clustering too many Somalis at one school would bring down its scores on state tests and the school could be labeled failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Mrs. Caldwell, a retiree who does volunteer work for several Somalian families, has filed a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights.

Why Blog?

Frank Catalano (via Darren Denham of Educause) writes an article "Why Blog" in THE Journal, listing the benefits.

Principles of learning

Bob Reynolds (via Stephen's Web) writes about "Parables on learning -- the basic principles." Reynolds writes,

There are ten basic Principles of Learning that, when practiced, help us grow in understanding and make us successful in whatever we attempt to do. These ten basic Principles of Learning are really a series of actions that successful people people can take in their daily lives. In fact, since learning is such an integral part of living, these rules might more appropriately be called the basic principles of a good life.

What makes it interesting is how he contrasts the examples he gives for the principles with what happens in education.

Successful High Tech Charter School

Dale MezzaCappa (The Philadelphia Inquirer) writes about High Tech Hi, a charter school in San Diego that successfully integrates education and technology.

It is "high tech" not because it trains students to fix computers and write software, although some do, but because technology is infused throughout the curriculum. Students work on networked laptops and maintain digital portfolios.

Some travel; this year, 12 seniors went to Baja California for eight weeks to study marine life, including plankton, whale sharks and sea turtles, as well as the area's history and culture. They not only collected specimens but also created poetry, a documentary, a mural, and a novel.

In the last two years, Jay Vavra's junior biotechnology classes designed, wrote and photographed a field guide to wildlife in San Diego Bay, with a foreword by anthropologist Jane Goodall.

It's encouraging to see a school that engages the students in real "work" as opposed to "learning" alone.

Crash course in learning theory

The blog "Creating Passionate Users" has a "Crash course in learning theory." Nicely done and useful in planning course activities.

Integrating educational social software into a course

Terry Anderson (via OL Daily) has an article on how he integrated social software into his own online course, using Furl, Elluminator, ELGG, and Moodle. It has some good insights into what worked, what didn't, and why.

Homeportals: a new extensible homepage

HomePortals (via TechCrunch) is a new personalized extensible homepage. TechCrunch has this to say:

HomePortals is really unique in that every module is customizable, and can interface with other web services. So you can create a new module (and allows others to copy it), and/or modify attributes of an existing one.

For instance, there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality in the other services I’ve reviewed.

HomePortals also has a very nice blogging tool module (see it in action on the HomePortals blog). Now this is getting interesting: I can see using the blogging tool, and adding in my flickr pictures and del.icio.us bookmarks to give visitors a really in depth overview of who I am and what’s going on in my life. It’s like SuprGlu, but the blogging tool is built in, not pulled in.

video iPods and unitedstreaming videos

At the Discovery Educator Network blog, you download Dennis Grice's instructions about using video iPods to download a video from unitedstreaming and then show it on a TV.

Tech Tools for Learning

Will Richardson has an article, Tech Tools for Learning, published in Access Learning, which you can download from his recent posting here. His opening paragraph reads:

Over the last few years, our relationship with the Web has been changing dramatically. Simple new technologies like weblogs and podcasts are allowing us to not only create content like text, audio, and video more easily, they are also allowing us to publish and share that content on the Web with very little effort. Instead of a “read only” Web, we’re entering the age of the Read/Write Web, where contributing knowledge is as easy as consuming it. Being able to publish worldwide this easily does raise legal and ethical issues for educators to be aware of, but it also facilitates a whole range of new learning potentials for students and teachers in the classroom. Here is a quick look at some of the technologies that are changing the way educators think about and deliver instruction.

He has quite a bit of information on technology tools for education (RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasting, and streaming video with links) packed into 4 pages. Recommended.

Blogging and audience

Bill Schachner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice article on blogging, "Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere" It begins:

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

The article gives quite a few stories leading to real-world interaction, and although most postings do not lead to such interaction, the potential creates a forum of real writing for real audiences: another reason for incorporating blogs into writing classes.

Drop in literacy among college grads

Lois Romano of the Washington Post reports on a study that shows literacy among college graduates has dropped in the last decade. According to Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno,

Review of Tinderbox

Douglas Johnston writes a review of Tinderbox as a Writing Tool (via Mark Bernstein, the creator of Tinderbox). He concludes:

These small gripes and oddities notwithstanding, consider me firmly in the Tinderbox camp. In all the various applications I’ve tried, both commercial and Open Source, I haven’t come across one that’s quite so attuned to the way I play with ideas and write text. I’m not sure if I think like Tinderbox, or Tinderbox thinks like me, but I know it’s an environment which encourages creativity without distraction, and yet feels wholly comfortable to use. A winning combination, indeed.

College counseling and diversity

The Associated Press (via CNN) reports on how counselors in colleges are adapting to meet the psychological needs of immigrants because "the old ways don't always work."

Janie Cisneros was having a crisis and needed to talk to a counselor. But there would be no embarrassing or intimidating visit to the campus clinic.

Instead, Sigrid Frandsen-Pechenik took Cisneros to the mall, where they had coffee and talked in English and Spanish.

Purposeful blogs and grading

How to grade a blog? For Ken Smith's rubrics, Aaron Nelson provides links here and here. Aaron also has his own summary of those grading guidelines focused on the purpose of blogging:

1. Grading around audience
2. Grading around freshness
3. Grading around developing a “house style.” - I really thought this was neat. Voice!
4. Grading around how well participants connected and built community.

All of these items make sense, but they're also abstract, which makes them difficult to grade and difficult for students to use in developing their blogging: the more abstract, the more understanding of the rubric can diverge among teacher and students. If the class discusses these guidelines and comes up with concrete examples, they could work not simply towards "purpose" but also in transferring to new contexts.

Aaron also cites James Mathew, who has his own article on purposeful blogging. Along the line of grading, James states,

Students should know exactly what is expected of them when it comes to blogs and the topics they blog about.

Performancing for Firefox

Performancing is a new blogging extension for Firefox 1.5 and above.

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Performancing can allow you to post into Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and Live Journal, and guidelines for using Performancing are available from Jed Brown. Of course, one can simply go about posting the normal way.

Peformancing will eventually incorporate RSS feeds and Technorati tags, too. The advantage, I suppose, is the convenience of integrating all of one's web tools into one application, the browser. But I must add that keeping up with the greatest and latest in web technology takes a considerable amount of time. Right now, I'm trying to decide on which personalized web page to go with: Yahoo, Google, or Netvibes. Then, if something else comes along, will I take the time to investigate that one, too? Will Flock, the first browser incorporating a blogging editor, come back with something even better?

On a sidenote, Firefox has many extensions available, such as Flashgot and del.icio.us. One of my favorites is NoScript, which provides an extra layer of security:

Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site).

Blog on bilingual issues

bililingual NYC, a new blog on bilingual issues in New York City, has just started.

Students reading and RSS

A few posts below, I mentioned Netvibes, a personalized web page service that allows for RSS feeds. Actually, Google and Yahoo have the same service, although Hinchcliffe said Netvibes was much better than those and other existing ones. One advantage of Netvibes is its integration with Writely.com, an online collaborative word processor. Students working together on the same paper could do so at writely.com, and whenever someone updated it, they would receive notification at their netvibes site. Netvibes already have modules ready to receive feeds from Gmail, Flickr, the weather, a variety of blogs, bookmarks, and those of one's own making. And there's a module for notes. All in all, it's an easy-to-use web resource that can promote students reading, analyzing, and synthesizing (and thus writing) skills.

School of Blog

I just came across the School of Blog this morning, a blog on immigrant and bilingual issues. Quite interesting.

Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education

The Center for Applied Linguistics is circulating a draft of their "Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education" and requesting feedback on it.

Best web 2.0 software of 2005

Dion Hinchcliffe offers his list for The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005, quite a few of which could support class activities.

One is Netvibes, a free, customizable web 2.0 homepage service that allows for data feeds. I've been thinking about how to introduce students to RSS feeds to promote more reading, analysis, and synthesis. It can also integrate with writely.com, an online word processing site.

Another free one is Rallypoint, which promotes online collaboration via the creation and editing of web pages. Those subscribed to the pages can receive email notifications when a page is edited.

Ross Mayfield (Many2Many) commented on some social software applications a few weeks ago.

Goal-setting, motivation, and achievement

Susan Nash, the e-learning queen, has a short summary of the role of goal-setting in facilitating achievement (i.e., learning), along with a good bibliography. As she writes,

Goal-setting, which is an aspect of self-regulation, can be a vital part of an adult student's success in online learning. It increases motivation dramatically, not only by building in rewards, but also by increasing skill levels and perceived self-efficacy.

Collaborative learning

Barbara Davis (via Cyberdash) has posted online a chapter on collaborative learning from her book Tools for Teaching. It includes general strategies for designing, organizing, and evaluating group work, plus a bibliography.

Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning

The All Ireland Society for Higher Education (via EduResources Weblog) has a free online book: Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning. From the foreword:

The purpose of this book is fourfold. F'irstly, drawing on Irish case studies and international perspectives, it seeks to encourage the enhancement of the student experience of learning, through the development of problem and Enquiry-based Learning. Secondly, it aims to share success stories while painting a realistic picture of the processes involved ...

It does this by discussing progress with initiatives and exploring difficulties, barriers, “mistakes,” improvements, alongside the strategies used to tackle these real emerging challenges. Thirdly, by drawing on many contributions from Ireland, it places Irish problem and enquiry-based practice in the international context. There are case studies from the seven Irish universities and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Mac "thinking tools"

James Fallow in The New York Times has a nice article covering a variety of Mac "'thinking tools' - software for storing, retrieving and generally making the best use of information," including mention of Tinderbox, a program I'm beginning to learn how to use.

Weblogs for teachers

From Weblogs: "Weblogs for and by teachers, educators, and learners. They contain ideas, resources, and tips that may be used in schools, universities, colleges, workshops and the rest of the academic world."

Press Plagiarist Award of the Year

Guido Fawke's Blog (via BBC via Slashdot) has solicited nominations for Press Plagiarist of the Year Award in a response to journalists lifting articles from blogs and passing them off as their own work in newspapers. Apparently, plagiarism is not limited to academia.

First-time ESL teacher's diary

For a glimpse into a first-time ESL teacher's experience in another country, read Dan Hinkley's "Talkin' Proper: Diary of a First-time ESL Teacher."

Writely for collaborative online writing

Brian Lamb at Abject Learning (via Educational Weblogs) recommends using Writely, an online collaborative writing environment, instead of Word 2004 for collaborative word processing.

Legal FAQ on student blogging

Electronic Frontier Foundation (via Stephen's Web) has a Blogger's FAQ concerning legal issues on student blogging, primarily on K-12 students, but also college.

Georgia opens dual language elementary school

Georgia opens its first public, dual language school, an elementary school where students will be taught in both Spanish and English (Associated Press, CNN).

Things you can do with RSS

On the Tim Yang Wiki, there's a great list of things you can do with RSS (via Blogniscient via Ed Bott via Steve Rubel).

Learning English via repetition

Success according to the "Kageyama method" works through repetition, and now it's being applied to learning English at Tsuchido Primary School (Midori Matsuzawa, Daily Yomiuri via TESOL Connections). The method reminds me of the audio-lingual method, which fell out of favor due to learners' inability to make the transition to new contexts. One difference is that it is being applied in a way that makes it fun for young children. Perhaps in Japan's context, it will be a good starting point for learning a language. Kageyama notes,

"I hope their parents don't expect too much from the book, such as hoping that it will suddenly make their kids fluent in English," he said. "More important than that, I'd like the drills to be used as props to help children enjoy time at home with their parents."

Jail the governor and legislators?

Arizona has not complied for more than five years with federal guidelines to help children learn English (Howard Fischer, East Valley Tribune.com via TESOL Connections).

Frustrated by a lack of resolution, a federal judge on Monday suggested he might have to jail the governor and legislative leaders to finally secure proper funding for students learning to speak English.

That would be appropriate.

Blogniscient and Memeorandum

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) reviews Blogniscient and Memeorandum, two news blogs that cover the most recent and most popular news and blog articles.

Melting pot or salad bowl

6000 immigrants to Hazleton, PA, including 1000 new students, in 4 yours create a mix of new life and tension (Janice Podsada, CentreDaily.com).

Flock: a new web browser

Flock is a new web browser that is a branch off Firefox. It has built-in tools for blogging, rss feeds, social bookmarks, Flickr, and so on.

Dual-language programs in Texas

(Via L. Lamor Williams, Star-Telegram) Texas has a large percentage of Hispanic students: more than 30% of 80,000 students in Forth Worth and more than 30% of 16,000 in Arlington. Dual-language programs are becoming popular; there are 231 programs in Texas with approximately 606,000 students. In these programs, both English and Spanish speakers are in the same class with a curriculum taught half in English and half in Spanish for a period of years so that the students become fluent in both languages.

According to Mildred Vazquez, a bilingual teacher in the article, the students need to continue through the fifth grade (they begin in kindergarten) for the program to be effective. Obviously a school needs a large number of L2 students for the program to be viable, which limits the programs primarily to Spanish. And it's not a small commitment on the part of families, but if I had the opportunity, I would place my son in such a program.

God vs. composition class

Two postings earlier (Oct 2), I noted how Ed Madden "disenfranchised religion from the process of democratic deliberation" with one word. In a non-ESL, university composition course at Victor Valley Community College, Bethany Haulf received a grade of F on a paper for using the word God 41 times (Leroy Standish, Daily Press). Michael Shefchik, her teacher, had approved the paper's topic, Religion and its Place within the Government, but forbade the use of "God."

Shefchik claims teacher prerogative to design class assignments, and Hauf claims freedom of speech. Putting a positive spin on both sides, I can imagine that Shefchik, like many teachers, avoids topics or content (e.g., abortion) that leads to regurgitation of concepts instead of critical examination of those concepts. I can also imagine that Hauf has a different worldview that Shefchik's, a worldview that is excluded from the privileged perspective of academia.

Question: In what ways is (ex/in)cluding cultural backgrounds of students in our schools different/similar to (ex/in)cluding religious worldviews? Is there room in diversity and multiculturalism perspectives to include strong religious positions?

ESL students multiplying in Hawaii

Hawaii's student ESL population is more than 18,000, an increase of 42% over 4 years, but the schools are not receiving the funds to educate them (Associated Press, Hawaii News).

"Thwarting great expectations" in Canada

Rick Johnson, Charles Pascal, and Marilies Rettig (Toronto Star) report that one-third of all students in Toronto schools are immigrants and annual immigration levels are expected to increase. The problem, they note, is that ESL students drop out of high school two to three times more than other students.

It is often said that our future depends on the life chances we provide for our children. It is time we treated our new immigrants as a resource to be supported and developed, and to focus with urgency, and as a matter of national priority, on the needs of their children. Their lives and futures are at stake.

ESL and language diversity in New Jersey

Citing Joan Lenard, a teacher at Monmouth Regional High School and Ocean Community College, in an article on diversity, Layli White of The Hub writes that more than 151 languages are spoken in New Jersey, USA, and that "it can take five to six years of ESL classes before a student is able to compete with the general population of the school."

Student blogs

My students have been posting to blogs for almost a month now. Some have personalized them in interesting ways. On "One Way Only," mickymice is incorporated images to complement the words, a picture of a birthday cake for, of course, a birthday, and an image of a young woman to indicate a state of contemplation (?) over leaking ceilings. JC uses a blue, italic font. These images seem to support VC's essay asserting that a blog "shows a little bit of the writer’s personality and life style."

Others (Francisco and Chiki) are incorporating quotations into their blogs, thus connecting to external sources. And the topics range widely from math to health to weather to attending a classical concert to relationships, and so on. The wide diversity of topics and approaches to posting is fascinating.

The power of a word

Ed Madden (The State) writes about the difficulty of moving first-year composition students (non-ESL) from "I have a right to my opinion!" to a process of evaluating arguments, reasons, and evidence.

So we have to move on to the necessary and sometimes difficult work of deliberation. And we have to talk about how to look for common ground, how to value and maintain community and civility, even in the face of deep disagreement, and how to work together in the context of disagreement. That’s how secular democracy — from the freshman classroom to the nonprofit board to the State House — works.

What's interesting is the word "secular" in "secular democracy." With a single word, Madden has disenfranchised religion from the process of democratic deliberation. I once overheard another composition instructor telling a student that the word "myth" did not mean something was not true, only that it was an academic word referring to ancient stories. Yet, this word always carries the nuance of "fiction." Thus, by a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the instructor effectively nullified the student's world view.

Questions: How does one maintain "separation of church and state" and simultaneously respect religious perspectives? What sorts of words might ESL teachers unwittingly use that denigrate, or at least do not respect, the cultural heritages of their students?

Koreans learning English in the U.S.

In The Korea Times, Semoon Chang, professor of econcomics and Director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of South Alabama, writes about the many Korean students who go to the U.S. to learn English in ESL programs, stating that many obstacles hinder that learning process, all centering around seeking out other Koreans and thus speaking Korean much of their time in the U.S. instead of English:

Sorry about discouraging you a little bit, but it is true that in order to learn how to speak English properly, you have to live in it, sleep in it, dream in it, and learn to love the culture of the place the language is spoken in. Remember that nothing worthy is easy. There is no such thing as free lunch.

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Reporters without Borders (via Australian IT news) has released a downloadable handbook giving advice on setting up a blog anonymously. They write:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

Losing posts

Several students have lost what they posted to the class wiki. Sometimes when in class with everyone on at the same time, it's just that their posting gets hidden in an earlier version because of the differences in opening the edit page and saving the edit page. When outside of class, it may be due to using a browser besides Internet Explorer or Mozilla. I'm not sure. Still this can be avoided if first one writes in MS Word, saving every few minutes; next emailing the finished product to oneself; and then copying and pasting into the wiki. Even if the "save" does not take effect, it's easy to copy from MS Word and re-paste in.

New TOEFL, new obstacles

A new TOEFL will greet students this Saturday (AP via CNN). It will include a speaking component that may disadvantage Asian applicants who have focused on reading and grammar rather than communication.

Now that test has undergone a major makeover, aimed at better evaluating how well applicants can communicate in English. As the test debuts Saturday, some students, particularly Asians, are worried they'll be disadvantaged because of how they were taught English in school.

Writing a book review

I finished the paper about the educational movement of Fethuallah Gülen (see entries for July 8 &15). I had difficulty making smooth and logical connections between character education, his movement, and other conceptual avenues. So I decided to put my Word document into Tinderbox. I broke the document apart according to concepts (including "scribbling" and "quotations") and put them into different notes. It's sort of like using 5x8 cards, but with the ability (1) to see them all on the floor at once, (2) to reshuffle the cards in different patterns, (3) to move parts of cards to other cards, and (4) to go back and forth among the cards (parts of the paper) with ease. With Word, I was scrolling up and down, looking for those parts with frustration. Now they're all visible at the same time.

First day with editme

Yesterday in class, we adjusted to the new wiki site, learning how to edit documents, how not to edit the wrong document, and how not to rename documents when simply adding new information to an existing document.

And there were glitches. Some computers in the classroom apparently stopped students from logging in. When registering students a few days ago, I assumed wrongly that the default user permissions included editing pages. And I hadn't considered how to identify individual students' work.

editme, an excellent wiki

For a free wiki, schtuff.com was good, but to do anything interesting required a knowledge of HTML. In contrast, for just 4.95/mo., editme.com offers WYSIWYG with all the features you would find in word processing, which will allow the students to focus on ideas and design rather than the underlying HTML.

Technology in the classroom

Will Richardson reports on a teacher creatively using a tablet PC, photos, video, and Powerpoint in a Spanish language classroom:

it was clear what was happening. Students were creating and sharing and loving the process. The teacher was using the technology to connect their learning, and it was their learning, not his. They were in charge.

Technology in the classroom

Will Richardson reports on a teacher creatively using a tablet PC, photos, video, and Powerpoint in a Spanish language classroom:

it was clear what was happening. Students were creating and sharing and loving the process. The teacher was using the technology to connect their learning, and it was their learning, not his. They were in charge.

Isn't this what learning is all about?

Posting on a wiki

Last night, the class submitted article summaries, individual and group, on our wiki space. Somehow, work was being deleted, and so, we had to go to earlier versions to copy the deleted work and paste it back into the current version. In fact, my home page document was replaced by another document! In the process, although I helped a little, much of the learning occurred through students assisting each other.

Wikis at Penn State

Marissa Carl reports on English classes at Penn State using wikis, I suppose, much the same way we are in our class.

Working with schtuff.com

Tonight, my class experimented with posting on our wiki, learning a few tags and how to make a link. After the class ended, I learned how to delete items. It's easy to delete an entire document, but if it's only part of a document, you need to simply erase that part, because "delete" applies to the whole document.

Citing blog sources

The Blog Herald provides excellent guidelines for referencing other blogs.

Composition & Rhetoric Wiki textbook

(From Kairos News) Matt Barton has started a Composition and Rhetoric Wiki book for first-year composition and is going to involve an upper level composition course in helping. He writes:

I've decided to conduct a rather risky experiment in my Computers and English course this semester: A semester-long class project whose goal is to create a free wikitext for use as a first-year composition textbook. The course is cross-listed, with about 13 seniors and juniors and 2 (maybe 3) English graduate students with teaching experience at the college and high school level. Some of the students are English majors, but others have mass comm and IT backgrounds. In other words, this is in many ways my ideal mix for a project like this. I started working on the Rhetoric and Composition Wikitext nearly a year ago, but development has been slow. The project is hosted at wikibooks, a project specifically devoted to the purpose of creating and distributing free educational materials. I think this is a valuable service learning project that will help the class reach several of its goals--gain experience with writing technologies, develop good collaboration skills, and learn about writing and writing instruction all at the same time. I think it's going to be a fun project, and so far the class morale is extremely high. Everyone is excited about the project, especially me!

First day of class

School has begun, so this blog will focus more on my classes now. This semester, we are exploring "What is good writing?" We will research what it is, how to achieve it, and then create a web resource for future students of this class.

For right now, you need to post twice a week in your own blog. If I don't give you a topic, then write on anything of interest to you.

For the summaries next week, write about one paragraph. Include the title of the article, author, the source, the main idea, reasons for this idea, and your opinion about the article.

tag: 1430

Lack of ESL support

Noreen Navin reports that more than 40,000 ESL students cannot receive ESL support in Australia.

ePortfolios

Matt Villano (in Campus Technology via Educational Technology Weblog) covers the development of electronic portfolios.

Driven by a variety of goals—including assessment and professional development— the electronic portfolio technology has caused a good deal of excitement in the academic world during the last few years; for some schools—those fully adopting the technology—it is dramatically changing the way they require students to demonstrate competencies.

It wasn't clear from the article how students changed other than from print to electronic with the ability to include a wider and flashier variety of data. Is there greater competenece in their major or career? Eportfolios needs to go beyond simply showcasing more of one's interests: They need to improve competence, if only in reflection.

Writing for the Web

Graeme Daniel (at wwwtools for education) has provided a large number of links on Writing for the Web.

Organizing thoughts with Tinderbox

I've started again on the paper about the educational movement of Fethuallah Gülen (see entries for July 8 &15). I was having difficulty making smooth and logical connections between character education, his movement, and other conceptual avenues. So I decided to put my Word document into Tinderbox. I broke the document apart according to concepts (including "scribbling" and "quotations") and put them into different notes. It's sort of like using 5x8 cards, but with the ability (1) to see them all on the floor at once, (2) to reshuffle the cards in different patterns, (3) to move parts of cards to other cards, and (4) to go back and forth among the cards (parts of the paper) with ease. With Word, I was scrolling up and down, looking for those parts with frustration. Now they're all visible at the same time.

What makes a strong post

From Weblogs in Education, a teacher lists student comments on what makes a strong post. As a group, students pretty much nail it on the head. One interesting comment, the author noted, was,

long posts create a community in the comment area / short posts not so much.

RSS search engines

For a review of RSS search engines, read Sherman Ellis's article at SearchEngineWatch.

Categorizing search engines

Google is an excellent search engine that can focus on images, shopping, news, and so on. Some other search engines cluster the search results according to category, which cuts down the number of internet sites you need to look at. Some clustering search engines are iBoogie, KartOO, and Vivisimo. Out of these, KartOO is the most aesthetically fascinating.

Outsourcing of tutors

In USA Today, tutoring services are being outsourced online. Although no mention was made of ESL outsourcing, it is more than just a possibility. Imagine having an online tutor knowing both one's native language and English, plus charging much less than tutors in western countries.

ESL students increasing in Arkansas

The number of ESL students in the U.S. is constantly increasing, as noted in Fayretteville, Arkansas and elsewhere.

More software tools

From Educational Weblogs:

schtuff.com: a free wiki service

Schtuff is a FREE Wiki service. A Wiki is a website that lets anyone easily create and edit pages, promoting group collaboration.

photon: another free software tool.

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

It's the missing link between the world's greatest photo management software and the world's favorite blogging platforms.

Immigrant falls in Iraq

(Via Eyewitness news) Immigrant Min Soo Choi falls while serving in Iraq.

Gregarius, a web-based aggregator

(Via Educational Weblogs) Gregarious is an open-source, web-based aggregator for RSS, rdf, and Atom.

Tinderbox and coding

I got my first comment a few days ago, and surprisingly, it spread to every posting in this blog and in my other one. I was using the same account for both, and the postings were not unique. After creating another account for the other blog, I then used "id," which is unique to each posting. However, it didn't work. I put my problem on the Haloscan forum, and someone said "id" was apparently being treated as text. So, going back to the manual, I tried 117 in the template. Success! And for once, it took me less than an hour to figure something out with software.

Moveable Type is free

You can download for free Moveable Type, software for writing blogs, or you can get better support with a greater number of authors for a reasonable price.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

Download for free FlickrExport, an iPhoto plugin that lets you upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr.com. The software was created by Fraser Speirs, who has started a new company, Connected Flow, which has one other product, Xjournal, a client for the LiveJournal weblog (i.e., blog) service.

English up but foreign languages down

BBC News reports that the number of teenagers taking "GCSE language exams has fallen sharply," physical education and religion rising the most, and math and English having the most entries.

Disinterest in first-year composition

Bud Beck (at Political Gateway) writes about first-year composition, probably for native speakers, on the disconnect between subjects in class on supposedly important topics and his students' ignorance and disinterest on those topics:

I thought about it. These adults were low paid hourly workers, many of them heads of single parent households, all struggling to make ends meet. They are not the wealthy upper or upper middle class. Tax cuts mean nothing to them and a vacation is a week in which they don't have to go to school. They are not in tune with the issues because they are too busy working and trying to make that last buck so they can hang in there one more week.

Not one of them has a moment of spare time to participate in evening vigils, nor can they take a Friday morning to oppose the privatization of Social Security. They don't travel to Washington to demonstrate and they certainly can't take a week to go to Crawford to join Cindy. They can't because they are busy trying to survive their lives. ...

A brutal fact of life, one the Democrats are missing, is my fifty students are representative of Mr., Mrs. and Ms. America. Forget the polls and forget popularity and approval ratings. They mean nothing until an issue has some sort of impact on them. They complain more about the price of a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk than the war or a judicial appointment.

Smackdown learning

Although not related to ESL or technology, Kathy Sierra (via Learning Circuits) discusses the smackdown learning model, presenting different perspectives that forces students to make a choice.

New technologies and software

Via Educational Weblogs, here are some new technologies:

MediaTuner: a rich media RSS aggregator/player that handles text, podcasts, videocasts, etc. (free)
Blog.mac: a weblog editor designed for the Mac ($29.99)
Free vlog tutorial
mefeedia: an aggregator for videos

From Sudeep Bangal at Brilliant Ignorance (via XplanaZine): a list of essential freeware for PCs

Language barrier

Perhaps the biggest incentive for second language writing to become more important is business. Paul Brown (The New York Times) writes about "A language barrier to sales":

It seems impossible to believe, when you realize that just about every call to a toll-free number asks if you want to proceed in English or Spanish, but the vast majority of retail Web sites are English only.

That decision - or oversight - is costing merchants tens of billions of dollars in sales a year, according to the current issue of Forrester Magazine, published by the research company of the same name.

Blogs in law classrooms

For those interested in ways of incorporating blogs into the classroom, consider reading law professor (Ohio State U.) Dan Doublas Berman's Prawfsblawg posting (via Depraved Librarian). For one example, he has a link to Sentencing Law and Policy, a blog he used for one class.

More Hispanics take ACT

Hispanic PR Wire (via HispanicBusiness.com) reports:

More Hispanic high school graduates than ever before are taking the ACT and planning to attend college. But, test results from the graduating class of 2005 suggest that many of these students are missing some of the academic skills they’ll need during their first year of college. ...

just 48 percent of ACT-tested Hispanic students achieved an 18 or higher on the English Test, indicating they are likely to earn a “C” or higher in freshman English composition

First-year composition and ESL students

From DeAnn, aka Flash!topian, a teacher of first year college composition:

You don't do anyone any favors when you pass an incompetent student. You make everyone's lives miserable, especially the student's. This is doubly the case for ESL students, who will show up in an advanced class, having been shoved through the preliminaries, without the basic knowledge required to understand the material. You're the teacher. Teach them. If they don't learn, send them to a tutor. If they still don't learn, gently inform them that another semester at that level will help them.

Podcasting potential

For a variety of uses for podcasts, read Marc Fisher's "Podcasting Potential" in The Washington Post. Among the more unusual was the one for obituaries:

The need to have newspaper obituaries read to you via your iPod may not have struck you as an imperative for the new media technology, but audio obits nonetheless await your download at http://blogofdeath.com .

ESL students and mentors

Heather Kays of the Herald News (via NorthJersey.com) reports on the The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey Health Literacy Program, in which teens mentor young ESL students.

Life cache

From Will Richardson (via Jeff Davis), I learned a new phrase had been coined: Life cache. Life caching apparently means to tell stories of one's life, which has been made easy by electronic story-telling tools, such as Nokia's Lifeblog (to be used with its cell phones), which and HP's Storycast, a digital storytelling with photos and narration. See many more at trendwatching.com. A generation of storytellers is being born.

Blog resources for teachers

Annette Lamb (via Anne Davis) has two pages on using blogs in the classroom here and here, of which the latter has more than a few good resources.

Preschool helps ESL students

From Medical News Today:

Preschoolers whose first language isn't English adjust better to kindergarten if they attend a school-based readiness program with their parents, say early education researchers at the University of Toronto.

Blogger for Word

Blogger for Word: Blogger has an add-in for MS Word, so one can save drafts, edit, and post to Blogger all from within Word.

Blogging mistakes to avoid

Kurt of "30 stories up" (via The Blogherald) writes about "7 mistakes [to avoid] your first week blogging." Kurt refers readers for a fuller treatment of the subject to postings by Darren at Problogger, called "31 days to building a better blog headquarters."

RSS Glue

Will Richardson, in his "RSS Magic" post, comments on RSS feeds being the "glue" that hold blog conversations together. He sums up the potential for class interactions (within and without) well:

And maybe that's the new strategy, get teachers and students rss-ing first. Give them a framework for understanding how disparate looking pieces of content really aren't as disconnected as they seem, and that there are new ways to find and collect and archive ideas from any number of previously unknown places.

Graduation and English Language Learners

According to the Associated Press via CNN,

Huge numbers of students who don't speak or read English well may be denied a high school diploma based on graduation tests that do not fairly measure their skills, a study suggests.

As the article notes, the issue arises between two conflicting interests: holding everyone accountable to the same standards and these tests not being able to measure English language learners ability in subject content due to language interference.

Interestingly, the article states that "these exams continue to have little connection to college."

Question: Should high school exams be related to going to college or not? Why?

Graduation and English Language Learners

According to the Associated Press via CNN,

Huge numbers of students who don't speak or read English well may be denied a high school diploma based on graduation tests that do not fairly measure their skills, a study suggests.

As the article notes, the issue arises between two conflicting interests: holding everyone accountable to the same standards and these tests not being able to measure English language learners ability in subject content due to language interference.

Interestingly, the article states that "these exams continue to have little connection to college." It's not clear to me why (1) exams should be tied to going to college rather than having proficiency standards related to high school and (2) the purpose of high school should be considered merely and only a stepping stone to college.

The iPod and God

Michelle Meyers talks about the iPod and God:

A lot of people worship their iPods. Now they have a new way to use their iPods for worship.

That is, iPocketBible lets iPodders read "Holy Bible, New Living Translation," listen to it, or do both.

Awhile back, Duke gave all incoming freshmen an iPod for coursework. They've scaled back since to give them only to those courses in which they'll be used.

One professor (I forget where I read this), who drives more than an hour one way to work, uses the iPod for listening to an audio version of electronic texts, thus saving time away from the office.

The iPod of tomorrow will likely be the computer of today, and after that, perhaps human beings will become integrated with their technology.

Moving sites

I moved my site from .Mac to this site, hosted by Lunarpages. At .Mac, I had 250 MB storage for about $100/year, while here I have 3000 MB for $95 plus $15 for the domain name. There's more, too, but the main one I plan to look in, perhaps next year, is Moodle, course management software for educators.

The only real problem in moving my site was changing the links for the categories. It's not easy to retype links without crossing them in Tinderbox, at least for me. It was just easier to rewrite all of them and relink them. The rest was straightforward.

The right blogging tool

Susannah Gardner (via Edublog Insights) gives guidelilnes on determining which blogging software is best for your purposes and also defines blogging jargon. She also has a related Blog Software Comparison Chart.

Exporting text in Tinderbox

It's difficult to get the text in Tinderbox, the software for this blog, to look like I want, and the text looks different on PCs and Macs. I found preferences for text export, but that doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

The photo touch

This weekend, I started to set up my new website, Second Language Writing, where I plan to move this blog. For starters, I used Yotophoto, a search engine for free photos, to collect pictures of writing in different languages, and then I put them into a Flickr badge. These software tools help to add a nice photo touch to one's website.

Digg: social bookmarking, RSS, blog and more

A new software tool Digg combines elements of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. From their site (via Ulises Umejias):

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

This seems to combine all the software tools into one. But what's different is that the users decide which articles are the best.

Podcasts: mainstrean and underground

Robert McMillan (Washington Post) writes about the paradox of podcasting.

Podcasting has done what no new technology that I'm aware of has ever accomplished: It's gone mainstream and underground at the same time.

Keeping up with blog reading

Nathan Matias (via Mark Bernstein) details how to keep up with reading lots of blogs via aggregating RSS feeds, along with describing popular RSS aggregating software.

Putting photos online with Flickr

Flickr is a software tool for putting your photos up on the Internet. For tips on how to use it, read Giles Turnbull's article at MacDevCenter.com.

Find free pictures online

Anne Davis (Edublog Insights) posted about Yotophoto, the first search engine for finding free photos and images on the Internet.

Google RSS feeds

Google announced yesterday that it is now offering Atom and RSS news feeds.

Design theory for new bloggers

The Blog Herald has an article on guidelines for designing blogs.

"KISS theory equates to keeping an idea simple: literally keep it simple stupid, and it should also be a theory that is best applied to new blogs by new bloggers, because although design is not a major factor in determining the success of your blog, bad design actually works against future success by driving readers away before they can become hooked by your content.

At the same time though new bloggers should consider customizing their blogs to some extent. Whilst the days of Blogger Blogs all having the same generic orange heading are gone, I still find that amongst free services that one blog tends to look the same as the next blog on that service."

The article gives the 4 C's of blog design as: Clean, Concise, Color, and Customize.

Question: How well do the 4 C's of blog design integrate the rhetorical principles of pathos, ethos, and logos? What else might we add, if anything?

Turning blog text into podcasts

A new software, Talkr, transforms blog text into podcasts. Talkr states:

"Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast."

According to Jeff White on Kairosnews,

"I took the couple minutes register, and the next thing I know...I was listening to posts from kairosnews.org being read to me in a quite pleasant voice. I was actually pretty impressed by the intonation skills the synthesizer had."

The Internet and persona

Although I've mentioned articles that talked about the downside of blogging with respect to academic search committees, Michael Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about how an Internet presence can aid one on the path to tenure and promotion:

"For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions.

Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews."

The disagreement between the articles is only an apparent one. Those against blogging were against blogging that presented a less-than-professional ethos, while the article in favor of an Internet presence recommended establishing a professional persona.

Appropriate ethos is determined by audience, of course. What's interesting is that the job applicants were unaware of what was an appropriate ethos, even though they had a Ph.D. in their discipline.

Question: If such unawareness of audience is present at that level, then what level of audience awareness should be teachers aim at for first-year composition?

Social bookmarking comparison

At ConsultantCommons.org (via Kairosnews via Depraved Librarian), there is an excellent comparison made of social bookmarking software tools and their functionality.

Tech plagiarism

Just a day after his article on not giving credit where due, David Pogue learned that the same observation on Apple's "'Give away the razors, sell a lot of blades' business plan" had been made at least three times going back almost two years. Not citing others, plagiarism in academia, apparently appears more than rarely in newspapers. Perhaps some tech columnists didn't take first-year composition in the university?

Social bookmarking and safe blogging

In today's posting, Will Richardson mentions that Rob Slater is developing a social bookmarking program for teachers called scuttledu and wants test drivers.

In yesterday's postings (Edu Blog Hosting), Will listed some possibilities for those wanting to begin blogging in their classrooms in safe ways, including features "that offer the teacher preapproval of student posts/comment moderation capabilities."

Blog content theft

Duncan Riley of The Blog Herald writes about content theft. (This seems to go far beyond plagiarism. Perhaps bloggers need character education?) It seems that quite a few, Duncan says perhaps millions, blogs are using RSS feeds to steal content for posting on their own blogs, at times for profit. In fact, some sites even advertise that ability. Duncan posts this ad from an anonymous site:

Never hire another writer again and always have fresh up to the minute news and articles from your industry on your web pages. Add one line of code to your website and your pages will update themselves forever.

I don't think I'll need to worry about content theft, at least for the near future, but I like one solution posted by Paul Short in a comment to Duncan's entry. He says to add a copyright comment to the content itself:

(C) 2005 Blogherald.com If you’re not reading this in your news aggregator, this material has been stolen. Please contact editor at blogherald.com so we can take immediate legal action.

I imagine that once the thief notices it, they'll just delete it, as Rob Lewis in another comment to the entry said.

Podscope.com

Another of Pogue's articles mentioned Podscope.com, who has created "the first search engine that can find podcasts according to the words spoken during them."

Attribution and credibility

David Pogue often has good comments on technology. In the last week, he has had several excellent articles, two on writing.

"Attribution where attribution is due." One was on checking one's sources. Although he cited his source, that source didn't give appropriate credit, perhaps unintentionally, but still it's technically plagiarism. As Pogue said, "Foolish moi!"

"Choosing words carefully." In this article, Pogue had offended the folks at Apple through his choice of words. Pogue concurred. The ability to say one is wrong is great for one's credibility, and note how well he does it with his concluding paragraph:

"In short, if the column’s opening paragraph left anyone with the impression that I believe Apple is somehow coasting on existing technologies, let me set the record straight. Innovation *is* Apple’s heart and soul. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name another company whose fresh technology ideas affect so many lives so often."

Tinderbox agents and categories

I've just figured out (it only took 90 minutes plus reading the manual carefully) how to do categories for my entries with Tinderbox, the software I use for my blogs. Tinderbox is great for querying words in a text and then gathering those notes into one category. The only problem I had that took another hour was how to exclude items from the sidebar and other places. I tried the simple code in the manual, but it didn't work. Finally, from the Fortran course I took in 1983, I remembered to group the included items and excluded items as hierarchically equal.

Increase in malware

Louisa Hearn (in the Sydney Morning Herald via The Blog Herald) reports a large increase in malware targeting computer uses. Moreover, hackers are becoming more innovative by residing on blogs and community sites like wikis.

"Photo albums, scrapbooks, blogs, screensavers and free greeting cards are all becoming potentially dangerous destinations as hackers and cyber criminals take advantage of a lack of security features on many of the hosting sites where they reside."

iTunes and podcasting

David Pogue in The New York Times writes about Apple's software iTunes podcasting features bringing podcasts into the mainstream by making it easy to make your own podcast plus access to thousands of podcasts online.

Ethics camps for science teachers

"Hello Justice, Hello Fairness: Teachers Discover Ethics Camp" by Michael Werner covers how science teachers "learn nifty teaching exercises" to use in their classes. Learning new strategies for lessons is good, but nothing was said about teachers discovering ethics in their own lives. I wonder why it's assumed that students need ethical training but not teachers.

Understanding linking

On The Blog Herald, Duncan (via Anne Davis) has an excellent article on the role of links in "building traffic and gaining exposure for your blog." On accomplishing these goals, he makes some recommendations, the last one being,

"And the best of all: Link to others. Lead by example and link to sites and provide credit where credit is due. You’ll find that sometimes you get a link back! There is nothing worse than a blog or blogger that doesn’t give credit on posts where the idea is taken from elsewhere."

The notion of not giving credit resembles that of plagiarism in academia. Perhaps the concept comes to life naturally when ownership of writing is real as opposed to course requirements.

Spyware and adware

After reading the article on spyware and adware below (7/17/05), I decided to update my Dell desktop at home, spending about 8 hours online reading and downloading freeware, including Ad-aware, MS AntiSpyware, Hijack This, SpyBlaster, and quite a few other free items Saturday night at school instead of at home via a modem. Sunday morning, I installed most of it, reenabled the firewall, ran the software, and got lots of popups asking for permission to "allow" or "deny." Some of it I recognized, and some I didn't. Taking care of a PC is almost a full-time job unless you want to pay someone else hundreds of dollars. A good starting web-site full of information is the "Home PC Firewall Guide" with links to hundreds of online sources and articles.

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

Which language to use for blogging?

Barbara Ganning has written an interesting article on choices of language in blogging, whether to blog in one language, across languages in one blog, or to keep multiple blogs, each one for a different language.

PDAs in the classroom

In a pilot project, elementary school teachers are using PDAs loaded with diagnostic software to assess students on reading proficiency for immediate feedback and adjustment of lessons. I wonder how that could be adapted for first year composition.

Why not diversity in testing?

In a The Times article, Alfie Kohn speaks out against standardized testing, stating that it leads to a "checklist" of what to teach and turning our schools into "test preparation factories." Although agreeing with Kohn's position on overrelying on test scores, William Librera, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education, responded:

"Standards that are vague are not useful," he said. "You need clear standards and rules. If you make them unclear and undefined, you have a wide variety of what is considered quality and that does not help."

Although somewhat sympathetic to the commissioner's position, I wonder, Why is diversity in many facets of education good but not in testing?

Haloscan

I came across Haloscan, a free web-commenting software (free for the basic set-up). The steps were easy enough to follow; however, they didn't work, neither for the comments box nor for their icon on my page. I looked at the icon code, and it looked right, but then again, I don't know html that well. So, I just copied their icon, put it in my Tinderbox collection, and copied the html for the Tinderbox icon. That worked well enough.

Next, I looked at the commenting section. There was only a straight line. But that was due to just not putting it up on the web, and that was also the problem with their icon. Once on the web, it all appeared. The next problem was the font size of the Comments was just too large, so back to their Forum for advice: set the font size, type and color before the Haloscan script. That worked.

Trying the Comment pop-up, it came up with my email and site info, but it should be blank for the commenter to fill in. Back to the forum. Turns out it fills automatically from a cookie on my computer. On another computer, it's different.

The only thing that troubles me about Haloscan's commenting is that the comments and backup are on their computer. If I wanted to move to another location or another commenting device, then I would lose the previous comments.

Disposable PCs

According to a NY TImes article, PC owners are beginning to buy low-end computers rather than take the time to maintain and rid their machines of malware. As Bora Ozturk said, it took him 15 hours to learn how to transfer pictures and music from a paralyzed machine to another one before doing a clean re-install on the hard drive. I recommend buying a Mac.

(Re)writing the Gülen paper

I've started working on the Fethullah Gülen (see July 8 entry) paper. Actually, I'm taking a conference paper that I wrote before and reframing/revising it. The earlier paper was simply introducing his movement. This paper intends to analyze in more depth his positions on education and the approaches his adherents have taken, compare that analysis to other figures in education and character education, and then, I hope, suggest how his approach might be adapted to a U.S. context. That means more research, more reading, and more thinking, especially thinking, so I can come up with something a little original.

Being original will be the hardest task. The second hardest task will be not to denigrate U.S. education. To show the negative is easy. Showing the negative with the positive, and even showing how those I disagree with have good intentions and in some ways good results, that is often more difficult, at least for me. However, as Gülen points out the necessity of compassion, tolerance, and dialogue, it would be ironical if I did not follow his principles when supporting them in print.

"Study great ideas, but teach to the test"

It appears that the five-paragraph essay is more important than learning great ideas. A NY Times article shows the pressures on teachers to teach to the test rather than to teach good writing. This summer, Becky Karnes, a high school English teacher, finished a graduate-level writing course on learning "better ways to teach writing to kids." Will she use what she learned when she returns to class?

"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test."

For an excellent book on how high stakes testing and accountability dumb down the curriculum, read George Hillocks' book, The testing trap: How state writing assessments control learning.

Write online and get fired

Writing, at least publicly online, can be dangerous to your career not only in academia (see July 10 entry) but elsewhere. In a NY Times article, ex-NYPD police officer Polstein claims he was fired for comments on his website criticizing NYPD.

Others over the last several years have lost their jobs, too. Joe Gordon was the first blogger to be fired in the U.K. The U.S. has a considerable head start, going back to February, 2002, when Heather Armstrong was the first to be fired for blogging, coining the word "dooced," meaning losing your job for something you wrote on your website. Even those working at innovative high-tech companies are not immune. Mark Jen was fired from Google for his blog, and Joyce Park was fired from Friendster, a company "known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers."

On the legalities of blogging about work, read Jaime Weinman's article. To the point, Robert Scoble says you need "be smart" about what to publish online and "don't piss your boss off."

Podcasters will be forgotten

On CNET news, billionaire founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban says podcasters will be forgotten.

Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as “the next big thing”, you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved.

Try to find any of the many that created original content for PSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others that I have long forgotten.

There is a good chance that their history is your future.

He's talking about making money at it. Still, podcasting has great potential for ESL/EFL purposes.

More on RSS feeds

On RSS feeds, Elise Bauer has a good introduction to them and lists some software that can do it easily. Although I can do a single RSS feed with Tinderbox, I haven't learned how to aggregate them all into one document yet. That will be an going project. For now, I will use iBlog to do it. iBlog, although blog software, is also an RSS reader, and a good one at that.

You may have noticed in the previous posting on Blogging controversy that the font in the quotes are different from my writing. I haven't quite figured out how to get them the same. I'm using HTML codes blockquote and font. The blockquote worked, but it made the font too large, so I inserted font, trying to control the size and style, but for some reason, I can't get it to be just what I want.

Blogging controversy in academia

Yesterday, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, an anonymous humanities professor published an essay on how blogs could derail an academic career. He frowned on academics who posted personal items for a "therapeutic outlet" (including "air[ing] departmental dirty laundry"), wrote"way-out there opinions that are not peer reviewed, and spent too much time in the computer lab:

"It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job."

Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at U of Maryland, responded, and these are my reasons, too, that academic blogs also helped to network and to motivate:

"The idea was to keep myself motivated. By writing in a fishbowl, I reasoned, I would have some real, external pressure to keep at it. I would never know who was reading (watching)."

Fethullah Gülen vs. character education

I'm wondering why Fethullah Gülen's educational movement has spread to such an extent throughout the world, while there does not appear to be anything comparable in the U.S., despite having different "character education" organizations here. Of course, I may just be unaware of other widespread groups. But also, I guess that (1) many of the countries in which they're established have a shortage of good schools, creating an opening for them; (2) those inspired by him are willing to make sacrifices; and (3) he is inspiring because (a) he lives what he preaches, (b) serving a higher cause motivates, and (c) the focus on love motivates.

Although there are exceptions, from my brief online review, many of those involved in character education seem more interested in their platform than actually living it, even more do not even consider spirituality (probably because of our culture of separation of church and state), and almost none mention love. And, although some talk about the culture of the school and teachers needing to be models, almost none talk about "character education" for teachers and school staff. Instead, the focus is on how to create lessons with character education in them. A lot on lesson methods and technique, but little on developing their own character.

Mellel, an inexpensive word processor

Sometime ago, I bought Mellel, a word processor oriented towards academics and technical writers, and for Macs only. It was cheap: only $29 for teachers and students, $39 for others. And it looked prettier than MS Word. But I never got around to using it. Why? I'm at a primarily PC campus and our department's printer didn't have a Mac driver. Well, there's a new printer that my iBook can print from. So now I'm ready to try this software. For those interested, two reviews are at MacWorld and The Times Online.

RSS feed problems

Today, I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make an RSS feed in Tinderbox, the same program used for making this blog. For those unfamiliar with this term, it's a way of having the news from your favorite websites sent to you automatically instead of you going to them. It's supposed to be a time saver--not including the time in setting it up, that is. Anyway, I went into the manual and followed each step carefully: create a note, put the news web address in the document preferences, set the attributes to fetch, and then just open up the note. Well, I followed those steps and it didn't work. I double-checked, quit the program, double-checked again, and it still didn't work. Finally, I gave in and emailed Mark Bernstein, the creator of the program. I dislike querying him until I've done my best to figure something out. I imagine he's busy enough as it is. Even so, he emailed me back in 2 hours. (I need to add that a quick response from Mark is the norm.) I had placed the web address in the wrong place. It should have been in Attributes. Tried it, and it worked. One word from the expert is worth a 1000 attempts by the novice! Thanks, Mark!

Difficulty in writing

A friend has asked me to write a paper on the educational movement of Fethullah Gülen for presenting at a conference in Houston in November. It is quite difficult as I'm not sure where to begin. I know only a little about Gülen. I suppose I'll need to read some more of his writings and perhaps connect it to the concept of character education in the U.S., contrasting it with the type of character education that is transmitted through words rather than through the example of living. Perhaps I can tie education for life, civic participation, and service to humanity to the concept of Gülen's Golden Generation, a generation of complete human beings who live for others. Obviously, our K-12 system is oriented toward material and career success. What would be the outcome if our teachers and schools were oriented toward service to humanity? Would their embodying and modeling character (rather than teaching it) have a significant effect on our students? What will be the outcome if we do not change our orientation? How can we achieve such an orientation?

Technology: some success

Well, after spending four hours yesterday and two today trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to add titles and taglines to my weblog, I decided to go to the academic technology lab for help. Three of them tried to help out even though they had no experience with Tinderbox. One, Kim, who had more experience with web pages after about 30 minutes finally came to attributes, and noticed that we simply needed to type in the name. What is strange is that I had already looked at the attributes window and somehow didn't understand that I could type in the values for title and tagline. That's a lot of hours for such a little piece of information.

The next few hours, I spent figuring out a problem with assigning URLs to my blogroll. For some odd reason, when adding a new site and then the URL, it would overwrite the previous blog, so that they both would have the same URL. I figured out some awkward retyping workarounds and Mark Bernstein suggested using the browser for reassigning the old URLs.

Technology: bane and boon

Technology is both bane and boon. It's great for communicating widely and quickly, but the learning curve is steep and takes time. I spent 6 hours learning to use iBlog, a fairly simple program, and now I'm spending even more learning to use Tinderbox, even with the aid of templates. I have to admit, however, that much of the steepness is due to not reading slowly and carefully. Regardless, isn't learning a major part of the reason I'm a professor: I like to learn--at least if time is available after preparing for classes, looking at students' work and giving them feedback, and attending committee meetings.

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Many thanks to Derek Powazek, creator of {fray}, who designed this blog template.