The Education Blogs

This Thursday I’ll be heading down to Longwood University to do a workshop on Web 2.0, blogging, and the like. Liz Kocevar-Weidinger of the Greenwood library at Longwood saw a few of us from UMW present last year on the work we’ve doing, and she invited us down. I caught up with her at the EDUCAUSE conference, and I inquired whether they have a blogging platform of any kind they are working from currently, and they don’t. So, as Gardner and I charged during our presentation, why can’t we do this together?! Why can’t UMW help Longwood?

Image Credit: “Sometimes pictures just compose themselves” by phxpma.

Re-visiting my overflowing WFMU feed is always a pleasure, and last night I actually spent some time listening to The J’s with Jamie’s “Hey, Look Us Over!”, and while I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole album–the first song, “Hey Look Me Over,” seemed like a perfect, upbeat anthem for these tough times.

I have recently posted about a WordPress education email list I joined and was pretty excited about. Well, less than two weeks later I am a bit confused by what exactly Automattic is thinking with this list. It’s moderated by Douglass Hanna, and he just sent out the following message to the list talking about creating an “Implementation Guide” for using WordPress in education. I’ll reproduce it below:

Hi everyone,

Source: bavatuesdays

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Martha Burtis is back in action at UMW, and she returns to us with a project that I am following with great anticipation: blogging WordPress as a CMS. As she notes in her introductory post on the topic:

It often seemed…that when push came to shove, there was always something that prevented WP from being the right CMS solution. Although I think I’ve always suspected that with the right mix of plugins and the right theme, the problems could be surmounted.

Source: bavatuesdays

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Bruce Lee play’s ping pong with Nunchucks via Andy Rush who got it via Eric Holscher’s tweet here.

Update: Keep in mind that there are comments on the video that suggest this is not Bruce Lee, but I don;t care. It is real in my heart!

I will be posting at length about WordCampEd soon (which was a great event), but I want to throw a link to an absolutely amazing video I saw this afternoon at the Hirshhorn Museum called Magnetic Movie, created by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor. Remarkable, but not surprising, that artists are leading the way for thinking about visualizing unrepresentable concepts such as magnetic fields through digital art.

I have been moonlighting around campus this semester as a Dog, CogDog, introducing students and faculty to Alan’s 50 Ways to Tell a Digital Story.  Well, there have been a number of good projects that I promise I will add to his wiki and tag in delicious accordingly. But one in particular for Judith Parker’s Psycholinguistics class is pretty wild. Justin Toney created his science poster for the class with Glogster, and I think he did so to some great effect—I dig the aesthetics of it. Imagine that, a web-based science poster that isn’t a progeny of PowerPoint!

Image Credit: WordPress Revolution by Tom Woodward

Note: All images not otherwise noted come from Gowtham’s stream from WordCampEd

The award winning consulting company Kineo reviews Dokeos software this week. The article highlights what Kineo open source considers 5 key assets of Dokeos:

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There are a few key people who reformers flocked to during the campaign for assurances that Obama would embrace reform. They were the people whose names kept popping up that campaigned vociferously in public and private for our President-elect. And friends voted their way because of them. They gave Obama political cover [...]

• Weblogg-ed » New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators

  Selected points from a MacArthur study, “Living and Learning with New Media,” with points about how technology can help students become more self directed and allow them more control over their own learning

  Source: Experiencing E-Learning
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(Sing to tune of 12 days of Christmas):
During the second week of transition, Obama gave to thee:
Four Berkeley lawyers,
Three Clinton holdovers,
Two union operatives,
and a severely status quo team for DOE.

All that talk about reform. We kept saying people are policy. A look at the latest education transition team members is telling on that score.

In the recent past, I wrote about not really getting Twitter. Since then, I have to say that it has grown on me. I am not and never will be an addict. But it does add a nice social dimension to my day, particularly given that I work alone from my home office a lot of the time. It lets me feel a little more connected with friends and colleagues, and does so without taking up unacceptable amounts of time. So, for my former fellow Twitter skeptics, I have a few suggestions for how to get the most out of it:

(...)
Read the rest of Learning to Like Twitter (520 words)

• NSSE 2008 Results

  Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement. The full report has limited information about online learning, but does include results showing that students in online courses report more deep learning, intellectual challenge, and reflection than those in face-to-face courses.

  tags: education, e-learning, research

  Source: Experiencing E-Learning
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Poor college completion rates - suggested solutions even worse.

The results of a first-of-its-kind study recently graced the front pages of the Boston Globe. In Hub Grads Come Up Short in College, James Vaznis revealed an all too similar refrain regarding college completion rates.

Of the members of the graduating class from Boston high schools for the year 2000 who had gone on to higher education, nearly two-thirds of the class had not earned a college diploma seven years after they had begun collegiate studies.