In this podcast, recorded Friday, I talk a bit about some of the professional development experiences I’ve had recently, as well as some of my thoughts about how we should try to bridge authentic experiences with the institutional experiences that we are, in US schools, required to have.
Links from the ‘cast
Ken Burns on his new WWII movie:
I’m in the memory business, and each time a person dies, it’s a whole library of memories that leave.
I hope we’re all just a little bit in the memory business. This week’s U.S. News & World Report features a collection of WWII memories as well as some information on oral histories for folks interested in recording their own.
I’m sitting in an Internet Safety Summit in Louisville, Colorado, sponsored by the Boulder Valley School District, the Department of Justice, and others. I’ll probably be twittering the event today as long as my battery holds out. Check out my Twitter for updates. As an aside, just met a fellow edublogger, Matthew. There’s a student group called the iCrew involved here (will look for a link) – I’m starting to be impressed.
I’ve been enjoying my coffee a little bit more than usual this week as I’ve had the pleasure of sipping from my neat-o "I am a winner" gift for correctly identifying the secret word inside the last EdTech Posse podcast. Thanks, y’all. Does this mean I’ve been deputized?
In the mug is the device on which I heard the aforementioned podcast – an iPod Nano that I won in a different contest recently. I’m beginning to feel lucky.
I’ll be a guest on the Women of Web 2.0 webcast from EdTechTalk next Tuesday, Sept. 25th. I sure hope you can join us at 7pm Mountain Time for some conversation and chat and fellowship and whatnot. Any suggestions for conversation topics?
A little while back, I was offered some invitations to the collaborative site YouFig, currently in private beta. I was and still am intrigued by the idea of a social network built to foster small group collaboration. I’m not sure, though, if there’s enough within the site to keep me going back, as I wonder if I can accomplish the same work with Google Docs and an e-mail account, especially now that chat is an option in all of my documents there.
The folks over at YouFig have kindly offered my readers more invitations, so I invite you to check out the site. Send an e-mail to budtheteacher {at} youfig.com to get an invitation.
I have a hunch that I won’t really grasp the full potential of the site until I’ve got a real reason to collaborate in a hurry. (Kind of like what happened quite by accident at Vicki’s place today.) In fact, maybe I don’t need a space just for collaboration – I just need the tools available for when the work needs doing.
This month’s English Journal is a themed issue on New Literacies. I’m pleased that a hyperlinked version of our column, entitled "Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks" is available for free via the EJ website. Regular readers of the blog will have seen much of the content before, as some of it originally appeared here, but hey, now it’s in print, so it’s an important text for scholarly perusal, as opposed to just a blog post.
Enjoy.
Dana nails the issue of "excused" technological illiteracy:
Teachers have to realize at some point that exhibiting ignorance with this sort of pride is not OK. It is OK not to know something and to try to fix that, and I would hope that most teachers would do so. I don’t know everything. That’s true. At the end of my life, I still won’t know everything. I would hope, however, that when I reach the end of my life, I will never have exhibited pride about being ignorant of anything.
Dana nails it because she’s not necessarily focusing on a particular skill or skills, but more on the desire of those involved to be in a constant state of learning.
Karl’s post, which inspired Dana’s (and was inspired itself by Terry’s) gets really, really interesting in the comments, particularly as the discussion gets going into literature, and literacy, and technological literacy. You’ve got to read it for yourself, but let me contribute that I love both the words and the ideas of great literature. Particularly poetry, which is, to me, the near-perfect (or completely impossible) marriage of both.
As for technological literacy, the US federal government, via NCLB, now requires that all 8th graders be technologically literate. Well, actually, that’s not true – the federal government has required that all states test 8th graders to measure their technological literacy. Each state gets to define technological literacy, though, as well as the standards that they will use to measure it, which might explain some of the confusion in Karl’s conversation. Neat, huh?
It’s sure hard to teach something that you don’t know yourself. Of course, the question that I’m not going to attempt to answer at the moment is whether or not technology is a content area or something, like reading and writing, that transcends content. That’s a blog post for a different day.
** If you know the definition of technological literacy that your state is using , jot it down in the comments – I’d be curious to see the range of definitions. My fingers are crossed that there’s not much variance from state. I know that Colorado is going with the refreshed ISTE NETS as the state technology standards, with some minor revisions.
The runaway podcast of my summer and soon-to-be-fall is WNYC’s Radiolab. The podcast, a fabulous collection of fun at an editing board mixed in with science and philosophy (or maybe it’s the other way around), has been a must listen whenever it appears in my aggregator. I love how the show’s producers blend interview with narrative to make an enjoyable listen out of sometimes dry, but fascinating information. There are digital storytelling lessons here, I think.
This week’s show should be downright required listening. Here’s the description:
Forensics, archeology, genealogy, and genetics are devoted to figuring
out what really happened. In this hour, we hear surprising stories of
playing detective, and find that what really happened in the past is
not always what you’d expect. We start at a trash dump in Egypt, where
we find Jesus, Satan, sissies, and porn. Next, the mystery of how
hundreds of old letters written to the same woman were discovered on
the side of Route 101. And lastly, a blood sampling tour of Asia
reveals a prolific baby-maker and a potential world conqueror.
The old letters story, my favorite this week, involves a teacher, serendipity, and some intriguing creative writing. What podcasts are you loving that I should know about?
This is a little less timely than I would have liked, but I’ve been working through quite a hefty "to read" pile. (You can check out my online "toread" pile, if you’d like – if anything on there’s no good, let me know so I can save myself the trouble!)
I’ve quite enjoyed reading and re-reading Stephen King’s piece "The last word on Harry Potter" from Entertainment Weekly, where he writes a regular column on pop culture. In the piece, he speaks to the successes of J.K. Rowling’s series as well as her strengths as a writer. (One big one, according to King, is she allowed her characters to get older.) He also writes about how strong many kids’ reading habits actually seem to be, and closes beautifully:
But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire,
right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to
cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious
”literary novels” each year. While the bigheads have been predicting
(and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been
supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the
adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman’s
challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider
adventures, Peter Abrahams’ superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the
stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must
not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants.
Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling’s
jovial John the Baptist?I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids
are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on
writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story
(important) and do it without talking down (more important) or
resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the
field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the
traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.
Worth your time.
