Deal, Doyle

8 a.m. Sunday morning in Onyang, where Chosun era kings bathed in the local hot springs to cure themselves of all sorts of maladies, and I hope in a few minutes to do the same. (It ain’t all that great a place now, by the way, with its ugly commercial strips and other modern blights.)

Anyway, before I go, I want to quickly note that:

1. I wish there was a way I could keep the last post’s live puppy cam forever atop this blog’s homepage, and keep those six pups forever young, so I could spend as many hours watching them down the years as I have since discovering them a few days ago. They’ve so won me, I now check in with them first thing upon waking, several times during the day, and at night before retiring. (My wife and I had a rear-angle view of one of the pups pooping a couple nights ago, which warmed us almost as much as watching him and his siblings decide to eat it. It did look like a Tootsie Roll.)
2. When I embedded those pups in that post, my mind drifted to Michael Doyle and his science classroom in New Jersey, where I pictured monitors lined along a specimen shelf showing the live puppycam, and imagined live clamcams, chimpcams, sharkcams, and a vast 21st century menagerie of other biological wonders delivered live and free into his students’ lives via the wonders of Ustream.
3. I’ve already plugged Michael here before, and he seems as queasy about the weirdness of mutual admiration societies as I do (though I hope he also values the foundation of them, which is less biological than chemical and secularly spiritual), so I’ll just point to more recent (and excellent) testimonials calling for a wider readership of Michael’s Science Teacher blog at Nashworld and Barry Bachenheimer’s Plethora of Technology, and say that -
4. I follow Nash’s lead by nominating Science Teacher as Best Teacher Blog this year. (I wrote about issues I had with the Eddies last year, and I have issues with their open nomination process this year, but as I said on Nash’s post, in response to Michael’s declining that nomination:

[ Michael:] While I think the Eddies are dubious in many ways (and wrote a post biting the hand that fed me last year, which I linked to under my nomination banner for a few months), putting the damn thing (and Alltop badges, and anything else that communicates to first-time visitors that you’re not some tin-foil-hat-wearing…

Michael

oh, waitaminnit…some dog pawing a keyboard in human underwear) up seems to me worth it, in the balance, since anything that helps a writer’s ideas reach more readers is, um, sort of one of the things most writers want to do.

And I’m going to exit this fine post (it really is fine, Nash) so I can nominate Michael too. Deal, Doyle

I’m nominating Michael for several reasons: I look to science as the only hope we have for getting out of many fateful messes (that, yes, scientists got us into, but largely due to the greedy urgings of commerce and government and pretty much every one of us), so science teaching is important to me; Michael is an edublogger (vile term, said Polonius) who uses technology to write about science and education, not about technology (a meaning-focus, not a tools-focus); he’s whacked-out funny and roots-deep serious by turns, thank god; he is and is not an edublogger; he is and is a writer.

1. A Must-Read Science Teacher
2. Oedipus, the Wordle

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