The Education Blogs

I should’ve posted this a year ago, but since I’ve just got an email request for the document I’m taking this opportunity to set that to right and post it here on the blog. Here is the overview from the document:

I’m a fan of TorrentFreak, it’s one of those rare blogs that streams interesting news on a very specific subject and openly acknowledges its biases while providing the reader with a ton of information to fend for themselves. In fact, I have come to think of TorrentFreak as one of the outposts in a war over our culture and piracy that goes generally unacknowledged in the educational sphere. We talk a lot about licensing and open resources in educational technology, but I think the 5000 pound elephant in the room that is the internecine battle over cultural distribution for the 21st century is being waged silently on the margins.

It’s been hectic on the Mary Washington campus these last few days, and in all the hustle and bustle of classes starting up a pretty honor for one of our faculty was announced. Professor Claudia Emerson was named the poet laureate of Virginia by Governor Kaine on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008.

Digital History enhances history teaching and research through primary sources, an online textbook, extensive reference resources, and interactive materials. This is fantastic - A must-see!

So a few days ago I jumped ship from del.icio.us becuase their updates broke the daily blog post feature. I starting using diigo for my social bookmarking… just in time for their updates to break their daily blog post feature! They swear it will be back up tonight, so I’ve just bookmarked something good. :)

In the meantime, here’s a few gems from the last few days:

• Custom Video: Google Reader in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

  This has been linked to often in the last 24 hours or so, but I want it easily accessible to my readers, too. It’s the latest installment in Common Craft’s excellent video series. Each video explains a technical tool in non-technical terms (with quaint but effective “paper” animation). In this case, the team explains the use of Google Reader. Cool.

  Source: Educational Technology and Life
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Lesson Plan: Put Kids Over Teachers
Rocky Mountain News, CO, August 25, 2008
An eclectic mix of Democratic wunderkinds, tough-talking education reformers and one elder statesman - former Gov. Roy Romer - are challenging their party to step away from teachers unions and return to fighting for the educational rights of poor and minority children.

Despite this thoughtful tweet, I’m now welcomed by the message below when I check in on my daily blog post settings at diigo. Well, I’m not loving this service. Any suggestions?

Oops~~500~~

Sorry, we are either doing a backend upgrade, or experiencing some temporary difficulties.

Please try again later.

If the problem persists, please kindly report to us.

• Ruminations of a Learning Professional: Call a Spade a Shovel - but make sure you describe!

  One learning professional asks if the title “instructional designer” is perhaps not the most accurate description for what we do, especially with learning 2.0 and increases in learner control.

  tags: instructionaldesign, career, web2.0, learning2.0

  Source: Experiencing E-Learning
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Cooperation-iws is an Open Source intranet nomad web
server that relies on Live CD/USB persistent technology. It offers web
services of Open Source web applications like Claroline. The aim of CIWS is to take with you on a usb key or usb hard drive your
eLearning portal. You then just need a pc for the server which is
connected to clients with an Intranet LAN.

Cooperation-iws has recently been released in version 0.3.2 with Claroline as new module.

More information and download can be found on their official website.

» http://cooperation-iws.gensys-net.eu/blog

One of the best parts of my trip to Lego and exploring their factory was the minifig production lines, where the head and body of the most famous toy citizen in world gets painted and assembled at uncanny speeds. To celebrate its 30th Anniversary, here's a video showing how they are built, from raw plastic to final assembly.

UMW Blogs has got a brand new bag, with no small assistance from Andy “EDU” Rush nation who turned me on to the beautiful theme PrimePress (Andy’s the go to theme guy without a question), along with Serena Epstein an Jerry Slezak who provided the gorgeous header images featuring the UMW campus. The redesign took a couple of days with some on and off work, and before I get into the details of that, I wanted to take a quick poll. PrimePress offers you two different looks, and I wanted to know which one people preferred.

David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen. He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact.

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