Academic Aesthetic

I’d like to make a clarification on my last podcast.

When I talked about Second Life not being the best place for education, I was referring specifically to the standard model that most administrators would probably try out. Mainly: “Hey, let’s make a virtual classroom and have all of the students hang out in the same room while the teacher teaches.”

You can do meetings like this, but really they would be little more than bandwidth heavy chat rooms.

There is, however, another way. Imagine an area filled with interactive tools and toys, where students could interface with a variety of media at their leisure. Teachers would select the curriculum (or most of it), as always, but students would choose the order and the pace. That, I think, would work much better in Second Life.

But still, I could build a web quest that does the same thing for a fraction of the bandwidth and without the chance of it being blocked by my school’s firewall.

Second Life CAN be a tool for educators, and it may even be a good one. Unfortunately, other than it’s user interface I don’t see too much that I can’t get elsewhere.

My 62nd podcast is mostly my opinion of Second Life.

Second life is a fun, addictive game that can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be. Since users are encouraged to create modifications/additions/etc. there is a growing movement striving to see how Second Life could help educators. I’m not convinced, but that’s just my opinion.

That being said, it’s still addictive.

Here’s some sites that have dissenting opinions:

• Pathfinder Linden is a Second Life employee who focusses on working with educators.
• The Second Life Education Community isn’t too shabby, either.
• They even have an education wiki.
• Art and Language Arts teacher Bre Pettis is having a grand old time meeting movers, shakers, & makers.
• Ed Tech Talk # 45 toured Second Life about a month after I joined.

I still want to move this site over to a more dynamic host than Blogger, but I don’t want to dive in head first without checking how deep the water is.

I’ve heard very nice things about WordPress, but not every host will support it. Lucky for me it only took a quick search on del.icio.us to find something that would suit my needs … for now.

You see, right now all I need is a sandbox to flesh things out. I’ve had others offer space on their own servers, but I don’t like to impose when I don’t have to.

My experiments will not stay on that server for long. Once I’m comfortable enough with everything I’ll be moving it over to a paid server.

EDIT: I should specify that my wordpress blog right now is JUST an expiriment. This will continue to be my main site and when I’m ready to move it I’ll be sure to let you know.

1. Days so far: 2
2. Days until inventory is due: 3 school days
3. # of items on inventory: @300 (so far)
4. # of trips to the dumpster: 4, plus a computer monitor box full of garbage that I haven’t taken out yet.
5. % completed: 40
6. Weirdest item found: rubber snake, complete with plastic rattling tail
7. Weirdest thought while working: I can see the foot wide stain on the carpet for the first time in months, and I’m oddly satisfied by that.
8. Number of bugs seen scurrying for cover: 1
9. Glad I’m done counting: acrylic paints
10. Not looking forward to counting: 50-100 books, each of which is unique. (I may end up donating some of the more damaged books, as they were for the most part all donated to me in the first place.)
11. I didn’t know I had so much: white paper (That’s not a complaint.)
12. Sanity maintained by: podcasts, educational and otherwise.

…I needed a break, so I took stock of my accomplishments so far.

In my 61st podcast I’m starting my end-of-year inventory and talking about the difference between message boards and blogs.

Not much in the way of show notes for this one, I was just talking while I worked on organizing the things in my office.

Looks like my favorite photo sharing website has made some recent changes, replacing the “beta” in their logo with “gamma” to show just how far they’ve come.

The first thing I said to myself when loading up Flickr this morning was “Holy cow, I’ve got a LOT of photos on each page here!” Yep, by abandoning the Yahoo! ads (Which I never paid attention to, anyway) and doing some other adjustments, they’ve managed to give me two columns of photos on the first page of my photostream. (So now it looks like all of the other pages in my photostream.)

I’m curious as to why they abandoned the ads altogether, though. I mean, sure, I didn’t use them … but Yahoo! isn’t exactly making money off of Flickr as it is.

In any case, they’re also posting more TOS notices, in particular the reminder I see after clicking on “all sizes.” You’re not supposed to put Flickr hosted images on your website/blog/etc. unless they link back to that image’s Flickr page. This could mean trouble for a lot of Google Earth enthusiasts, including myself, who like to embed images in their maps.

I’ll be renting server space from a 3rd party soon, so hopefully it won’t bother me so much.

Soon.

Did you know Baltimore has its own World Trade Center? Well it does, and here it is.

Learn what Wikipedia has to say about this building.

Do you?

Seriously though, I was hoping to record a podcast tonight but my voice just isn’t into it right now. Instead, how about you listen to Steve’s latest endeavor? He even has his PowerPoint online for you.

During his presentation he makes a good point about starting off with a strictly controlled environment, then opening it up slowly as the students become more responsible. I’ve been thinking for a while now about moving this blog to a server capable of handling WordPress this summer, and depending on the server space I rent I could probably host just such an environment for my students using Moodle or another fun tool.

If not, there’s still Class Blogmeister, Gaggle.net, and Think.com. Anyone out there have good/bad experiences with those last two?

Blogs in education are endagered. Why? Read what Weblogg-ed has to say about it. Then get ahold of your representatives in Congress and tell them how you feel.

Yes, I know they’re mainly targeting MySpace. Unfortunately, the bill is so broadly written that most if not all blogs will have to be banned at school.

I’ll have more to say about this later, when I’ve had time to collect my thoughts.

EDIT: A wiki has been set up to create a collaborative letter to our congresspeople. I’ve already added my (minor) contributions and sent one to my Representative. A link is included near the top to allow you to contact your Representative quickly and easily.

“I don’t like it when people read what I write.”
That’s a direct quote from one of my Art Club kids. I’ve met many students (and adults) who had that same opinion, but this particular student had just finished posting to her Art Club blog.

And she was very surprised when she walked over to me and saw her words on my screen. (I was in the process of approving it for publication on the web.)

We had a nice little conversation about how we should always assume everything we write will be read by somebody, and I think it’s finally sinking in that her actions on a web site make her part of a larger community. Not only that, but now she also knows things she wants to be private should not be placed in a public forum. (No, she didn’t put private stuff in her blog.)

At least, it’s a start.