Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn. It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, [...]

Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science [...]

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think. I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list [...]

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a [...]

Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes – current events, politics, science and math news, more – that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. [...]

A little behind-the-scenes glimpse at the bridge-building I’ve been doing to market my tutoring service, and at the same time to share another Web 2.0 offering with teeth: the video-subtitling site called dotSUB. One of the biggest challenges I face on this limb is communicating with Korean parents who I am, and how I’m different [...]

Contents: 1) Dry but necessary (and interesting, really) background to computer-assisted “corpus linguistics”; 2) Application of Vocab Profiler to a little “Scribe 2.0″ medieval satire I had fun writing way back when; 3) Tutorial on some uses of Vocab Profiler to aid in scaffolding classroom reading comprehension; 4) Caveats and Take-Aways Dan Meyer just posted [...]

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our [...]

I’ve been a Diigo user for two years come July. Seems like everybody and their grannies have adopted it in a Twitter-induced stampede over the last two days (I think Will had something to do with it). As I said on Twitter, the flood of emails requesting “friendship” on Diigo sort of shocked me (I [...]

This is the excellent foppery of the world. –Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the [...]