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

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for weighted crowdsourcing of ratings and reviews, which helps to filter out blogs that are used for spam or are simply outdated.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!)

   

With many folks away at SXSW, CIES and AERA, the next couple weeks are going to be quiet. What better time than now to catch-up on the mail!

First, Elaine Wooton sent a note a couple weeks ago in regard to my chart of Education 1.0/2.0/3.0:

I am part of a group starting a school outside D.C. called The Freedom School (www.freedomschoolMD.com). Modeled after the Subdury Valley School (sudval.org) and sort of Summerhill in England. Democratic. Kids do whatever they want all day (in an environment the adults try to ensure is “rich” with opportunities) as long as they follow the rules that they made. Total age-mixing, no curriculum unless they want it… We are actually a homeschool coop that looks just like a school, because Maryland is “complicated” (the complication is about building codes, not about starting a “school”). (Next year, the co-op will run 5 days/week with a paid staff person.)

Holy cow! …a school/coop that tries to embrace the creativity inherent in kids rather than beating it out is worth following!

She also wrote:

Strangely, the kids have had “school” 3x week since September, and have formulated many, many rules about computer access. As it stands right now, they made a rule that they can only use the computers for play from 10-12 (academics are fine any time), so that they are entirely available for other activities in the afternoon. There have also been rules about time on/time off. Also, in this environment, the computer is a social thing, usually functioning as a triangle – two kids/one computer. One kid as the user and one as a coach (or backseat driver). The typical computer lab situation in schools is totally different, 25 headphoned kids on 25 machines. I think the public school computers should always have 2 jacks, so there can be that triangle. But I digress…

That is a fascinating example of a self-organizing system. I’ve seen this happen in other classrooms where adults make an effort to step aside, too. Kids are much better at teaching each other about technology and “managing” technology than adults. What would happen if these kids worked with each other (and with adults) to develop new technologies to support their learning and knowledge-producing environments?

Second, Mark Surman posted a critique of my critique of the Cape Town Declaration, where I “worry” that “open course materials will do little to change education.” I had asked: Is there something else that we should focus on where we can use new technological and social models to develop innovative tools for education? Mark responds:

The answer is: of course! There are dozens of things that pop to mind immediately: Tools that capture, share and evolve the tacit knowledge involved in teaching practices (LAMS). Peer-to-peer learning platforms where students support each other and teachers become more like facilitators (Kusasa). Sites that connect ‘amateur’ teachers with interested learners (The School of Everything). For-credit classes that embed students in the real time, hands on learning environment of an open source software community (Seneca College). Or simply DIY learning by doing, which is the point of the web and open source in the first place (Wikipedia). While most of these are nascent examples yet to scale or even prove themselves, they hint at where things are going.

It surprises me how many people jump to the conclusion that the Cape Town Declaration ignores all this. The people who wrote the Declaration — and I suspect most people who signed it — totally get how education can and is changing.

The problem is that the Cape Town Declaration doesn’t say any of that. Maybe a new declaration is needed?

Finally, Guy Kawasaki dropped me a line to alert me that Education Futures is listed on his feed aggregator, Alltop, located at: http://education.alltop.com

Alltop is organized as a dashboard with not only education news, but also: autos, career, design, food, gadgets, humor, journalism, religion, social media, sports, venture capital, and much, much more…

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?“

Maya Frost has put together an interesting blog to help promote ideas she’s assembling for a book: The world is your campus: How to skip the SAT, save thousands on tuition, and get an outrageously relevant global education. Her take is that people need to balance education with creative life experiences. Why learn about the world in a classroom when there’s a world to explore nearby? Here comes do-it-yourself education!

A few interesting, recent posts:

• Dad sues Wheaton College for unfair study abroad charges: somebody’s putting up the good fight against service fees that don’t return services
• Study abroad programs at 15 universities investigated–Bring on the shakedown! …including my alma mater…
• Personal U: How to create your own university: She argues we have a responsibility to educate ourselves

Since I work in a department that trains study abroad advisors, here’s my question for the day:  In a Web 2.0 world of knowledge sharing, do students and youth need study abroad advisors?  Or, is there a better solution?

Following-up from yesterday’s post on the characteristics of co-seminars, here’s a taste of what they look like.

This joint co-seminar, organized between the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Chile and the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja is an “open seminar” – that is, with permission from the students and collaborating institutions, all course content and most of the interactions are available online through the course content management system and blogs for each of the participating institutions (see the class blogs for UMN, FLACSO-Mex, FLACSO-Chile, and UTPL).

The four institutions connected each work through a different syllabus, but we meet virtually to discuss intersecting points of interest related to various knowledge formats, knowledge management, etc. In this co-seminar, we chose to post mini-lectures online, which are available in both English and Spanish (see Spanish and English examples of this week’s video). Students then bring their questions to a bi-weekly video conference (and Skypecast) for discussion. To compensate for instances where technology breaks down, podcasts of recorded discussions are made available for download, and instructor responses students’ questions are made available as YouTube or Google Video:

So, what makes co-seminar experiences different from other online or in-person learning options? I’ll post more reflections as the seminar continues, but several key areas have already emerged:

1. Student work (posted on the blogs) is phenomenally improved over what typically is produced in courses. What has been posted so far in the past two weeks has been refreshing in terms of thoughtfulness and academic scope – is this because they know other people are viewing and reviewing their writing as professional work?
2. Without a shared, core “empirical reality” of what knowledge is among the cultures represented, participants at each institution are beginning to learn to embrace and attend to the chaos and ambiguities that emerge in such a course.
3. The amount of coordination among international partners required by instructors is tremendous –but, it’s all worthwhile as we are all learning new things and making new contacts.

More on co-seminars coming up over the next few months…

Danah Boyd joined the call for reforming how academics publish their work by calling for a boycott of non-open-access journals …and, provided a list of suggestions on what needs to be done now:

• Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals.
• Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction.
• Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow.
• Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you’re in a new field.
• More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure.
• All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals.
• All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals.
• Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue.
• Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains.
• Academic publishers: Wake up or get out.

(The above list is abstracted from her original post.)

I probably fall under the “young punk” category in her list, and publish in both traditional and new media as an attempt to compromise and appeal to both conservative and cutting-edge scholars. How can we move away from a culture of appeasement of 20th century academic culture and refocus our knowledge diffusion toward media formats that are more appealing to younger and more tech-savvy academics –such as blogs, and the spaces where open access journals and other, new, open media interface? How long until the academy will finally accept highly commented and linked blog posts as legitimate, peer-reviewed articles in a tenure review?

As a follow-up to last week’s posts by Ai Takeuchi with Japanese perspectives on global education, I wanted to comment on Steve Jobs’ claim that nobody reads books anymore –and counter his claim by pointing out that books are alive and well in Japan because the Japanese are embracing the distribution possibilities provided by new media and new technologies.

Mike Elgan beat me to the punch, though, and posted this article at Computer World. An excerpt:

Half of Japan’s top 10 best-selling books last year — half! — started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

In this brave new world of literature where anybody can become a best-selling author using mobile technologies, we need to rethink what a “book” really is. Instead of blocking mobile technologies in schools, what if schools allowed them so that kids could produce their own books?

Blackboard Beyond’s Greg Ritter sent me a note announcing that “the issue [I] experienced with SafeAssign that enabled [me] to gain access to a SafeAssign user’s paper has been resolved. Blackboard released a new version of the SafeAssign central service as well as a new version of the SafeAssign Building Block last Tuesday, November 20.”

Since the issue has been fixed, I am now de-redacting my previous post on the issue.

After reading yesterday’s post on SafeAssign at least 31 times today, Blackboard Beyond Initiative product director Greg Ritter (who also blogs) called me to voice Blackboard’s objections over sharing information on the software flaw that broadcasts submitted students’ papers across the Internet. I thought a personal call from the company was much better than receiving an intimidating letter from Sutherland, Asbill, & Brennan (check out what they sent to others in the past!). Kudos go to Blackboard for this new approach to public engagement.

During our conversation, it occurred to me that due to the longstanding flaw, Blackboard might be violating students’ rights (inadvertently) under FERPA. Rather than become an accessory, I decided to temporarily redact information in the post until Blackboard implements a fix (next week, they promise). Once the problem is fixed, the redacted text will be restored.

The cheerfulness among undergraduates at my institution has transformed suddenly into overt displays of despair and depression. This can only signal one thing: midterm grades are coming in.

Another sign midterms are being graded: the Education Futures access.log has been receiving many referral hits from websites claiming to thwart plagiarism.

Students, please note that submitting your papers on sites such as SafeAssign (by Blackboard) is not safe, and in no way protects your privacy. Why? Because I can read your papers by visiting referral URLs left by your instructors on this site’s log. SafeAssign does nothing to hinder me from reading your work. It’s all open for the world to view. The SafeAssign FAQ states, “Blackboard does not claim any ownership rights on the content submitted to SafeAssign.” So, why do they redistribute it to the world?

A student at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Nursing wrote an outstanding community health assessment of a Chicago neighborhood. I got to read her work in its entirety because SafeAssign has assigned a 7% chance that she lifted the following text from an EF post on China:

Healthy People 2010. (2007). Adults with Congestive Heart Failure as Principal Diagnosis, 1997. National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS), Retrieved November 1, 2007, from http://www.healthyPeople.gov/Document/HTML/Volume1/12Heart.htm.

Hozawa, A., Folsom, A., Sharrett A., Chambless L. (2007). Absolute and attributable risks of cardiovascular disease incidence in relation to optimal and borderline risk factors: comparison of African American with White subjects- Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study [Electronic Version]. Archives Of Internal Medicine , 167(6), 537-539.

Sharma, S., O’Keefe, SJ. (2007). Environmental influences on the high mortality from colorectal cancer in African Americans[ Electronic Version]. Postgraduate Medical Journal, 83(983), 583-589.

Why SafeAssign thinks there’s a 7% chance she plagiarized that from EF baffles me.

The student gets an A from EF for her outstanding work. SafeAssign gets an F for failing to protect students’ best interests through a shoddy, insecure product.