If you’re new here and like what you read, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Thank you for visiting!

Graeme Thickins reminds us that the Minnebar barcamp is coming up on Saturday, May 10! As noted a couple months ago, barcamps are open access, user-generated conferences. Aside from all the great discussion and networking to be had, MinneBar includes free breakfast, lunch, afternoon appetizers, evening drinks, and a commemorative t-shirt.

The list of sessions is available here.

As touched upon lightly a couple weeks ago, the blogosphere is getting easier to navigate. Both Alltop and Blogged offer editor-picked/-rated indices of blogs, sorted by topic. These goes beyond the usual scope of blog/news aggregators by incorporating human elements of review.

1. Receiving generally-positive initial reviews (including a thumbs-up from me), Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop venture provides a consolidated “magazine rack” of many of the top blogs, editor-picked, and sorted by subject. (For education-related blogs, click here.)

   

2. Another resource, blogged.com, launched last month, and provides editor reviews as well as allowing registered users to post reviews. This allows for weighted crowdsourcing of ratings and reviews, which helps to filter out blogs that are used for spam or are simply outdated. The site also provides recommendations for related blogs to readers that might not otherwise be visible through a traditional blog search, based on its categorization system. (Thanks to the editor who gave Education Futures a 9.0/10!)

   

From the slightly off-topic department…

After laughing with Idiocracy’s critiques of anti-intellectual culture in American society, this quote from Bill Maher hit home (via Crooks and Liars):

Maher: “New rule, politicians must stop saying, ‘the American people are smarter than that.’ No they aren’t! If the Bush era has taught us anything, it’s that voters want a president carved in their own image. Someone who doesn’t like to read or believe anything he’s told, and is easily distracted by bright, shiny objects.”

The good news is that a new chief executive is coming, providing an opportunity to break from anti-intellectual variants of populism. Why aren’t education leaders talking about what to do when our next president enters office?

(I couldn’t resist posting this…)

That’s right. I’m going to grow out my solidarity beard until the Minnesota Supreme Court decides what to do with us country bumpkin bloggers. From the Minnesota Lawyers Blog, the court is afraid of:

the specter of the “unshaven blogger” coming in with cell phone camera at the ready. Apparently the judges are worried about being made to look sinister or downright ridiculous by a slip of the tongue or out-of-context snippet of dialogue winding up as a video posted on a blog or YouTube.

Robin Marty asks, “What if I promise to brush my hair?“

Version 2.0 of the open seminar/co-seminar “From information to innovative knowledge: Tools and skills for adaptive leadership” kicked off this evening with its first meetings. The second version of this training program continues the main characteristics of co-seminars: international, bilingual, and supported with Web 2.0 technologies. The course is designed to enhance learning, utilizing methodologies based on the principles of collective intelligence, troubleshooting in complex environments, and the intelligent and purposive use of information technology.

More at the Open Seminar 2.0 website (View English translation)…

Caption: Working late into this evening, the instructional team in Minnesota, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile (that’s a span of nearly 9,000 km among the conferencing sites!) tests various video and audio conferencing connections.

The co-seminar “From information to innovative knowledge: Tools and skills for adaptive leadership” begins this Thursday evening. Our first open conference with three FLACSOs and UTPL will take place on January 31, and additional conferences will take place every other Thursday evening through May. Minnesota students can contact us for details on the course and for information on how to register.

Clearly, students who bring in a 2-liter bottle of Coke will outperform the 16-oz. Coke-toting students. How long will teachers play these cat-and-mouse games before they give up on traditional tests altogether?

This is a little bit off topic; but having just experienced a month-and-a-half-long ordeal where my moravec.us domain was taken hostage by “investors,” I believe it’s important to build awareness of this disturbing trend. Jay Westerdal writes at the DomainTools Blog on how Network Solutions, a company entrusted to manage Internet top level domains, is entering the namespace piracy market:

If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution (sic) they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.

Wicked.