Bud the Teacher

    DOPA’s back.  Sort of.  Only worse.
    Andy Carvin’s got a round up on the new version of the legislation that would put an end to much of the work that I’m doing online with students while doing nothing to improve the online landscape.
    This is ignorant legislation that solves zero real problems.  I urge the  Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to ignore this legislation and to focus on other stuff.
    I don’t actually see this passing the Senate — but I do think Brian’s right that we should be paying attention and sharing our feelings.  Here’s a link to his handy "talk to the committee" applet.
    I sent multiple e-mails to representatives and senators when DOPA was first making the rounds, and didn’t get one single response.  Not one.
    When/if I get a minute, I’ll pull up those e-mails and name some names.

Barbara, can you tell us anything more about the Middlebury College’s history department faculty barring the use of Wikipedia as a source in academic work?  (I’m sure you’re busy — but any insights or pointers would be much appreciated.)  (Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.)

    A few months back, I switched from Furl to Del.icio.us (username: budtheteacher).  I wasn’t eager to make the move, as I’ve always liked Furl, but newer versions of Firefox didn’t handle the Furl toolbar as well as I liked.  Also, working from multiple computers with different levels of user access required that I find a few different ways to access my bookmarks.  The multiple Del.icio.us Firefox extensions helped.  (I also really like the feature in Del.icio.us that allows me to send a link to someone else.  That’s just neat.)
     Does anyone know of a good way to move all of my Furl bookmarks into my Del.icio.us account? 
    Thanks in advance. 

    A click through Wes’s post on his son’s improvement in and excitement for reading (congratulations, Alexander!) took me back to Stephen Krashen’s website, where I rediscovered his "88 Generalizations about Free Voluntary Reading", a handy one pager of research findings on how and why we should be using SSR (that’s sustained silent reading) in school. 
    Starting this year, we begin almost every morning with SSR, followed by a building wide writing prompt — and sometimes I need to remind staff why that’s important.  It never ceases to amaze me just how hard teachers have to fight for time to simply read and write, but we do.  This’ll help.   Thanks, Dr. Krashen.
    PS — For those of you who’d like to hear more about SSR and why it’s a good thing, you might want to give a listen to this podcast, recorded by Wes, of Dr. Krashen from a while back.