Beyond School

Tuur Demester in Belgium sent me the link to this netroots Ron Paul for US President video. It’s very well-done.

I’m vexed. I’ve never voted Republican, but see little to no difference between the front-running Democrats or Republicans these days in political courage or will. I don’t get the hype about Obama or Hillary, for example, when I hear their punch-pulling sound-bites about our invasion of Iraq, our crumbling constitution, or our need to confront the creeping religious fundamentalism that threatens our environment, our education system, and more. They seem afraid to speak with courage.

But I’ve got problems with Paul too: his views on gun control and reproductive rights, as well as on trusting the “free market” to self-regulate its pollution output, frankly disturb me. But in so many other ways, I have to admit Paul seems shockingly - a sad but accurate adverb - intelligent, rational, educated, knowledgeable.

I’d be really curious, as an American abroad, to read any comments from my compatriots at home, as well as others around the world. This election, in the age of a disastrous American Empire, is fatefully important.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: ronpaul, politics

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

[Update: I notice that I could have saved money by getting a FREE domain name when signing up with PowWeb, instead of paying $20 for two years with GoDaddy. Live and learn. Also, PowWeb needs 24 hours to set up my account before I can install WordPress MU, so hold tight. More: you can’t hear my students on this screencast - it didn’t record the Yugma-Skype conference audio. Even more: you’ll see Diigo website highlighting and annotating at work when you watch the screencast. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. It auto-forwards your bookmarks and tags to del.icio.us (if you set it up to in preferences), and gives you annotating and highlighting and sharing power that del.icio.us itself doesn’t give. Finally *pant* - thanks to Wesley Fryer for the PowWeb tip and other advice he gave in Shanghai.)

If you’re interested in how to buy your own domain name (web address), and buy a webhost server package so you can run your own website, here’s the first of two screencasts walking Christina and Daniel, two of the Project Global Cooling members at my school, through setting up our Project Global Cooling website with WordPress MU at http://projectglobalcooling.org. The site won’t be up until we install WPMU, which we’re about to do. (Do yourself a favor and watch the large size on the Screencast-o-matic.com channel. Much easier on the eyes, and you can leave comments.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0:

And Graham Wegner’s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts to transform Learning 2.0. I found his critiques of e-portfolio’s particularly interesting: too much work for teachers, not enough audience for students. In Shanghai recently, I was asking about the value of online student work without actual (as opposed to theoretically possible) audiences. (Non-Aussies and Kiwis, are you grokking my drumbeat about the value of Antipodean perspectives on education yet?)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Back in August, I posted a screencast called “What is Blogging?” for audiences, educational and otherwise, needing a basic introduction to the read/write aspects of this new world.

Since I’m sponsoring a Web 2.0 club at school this year, and also setting my AP Literature students up with their own WordPress MU blogs on our school’s site, I made a follow-up: “What is Blogging? Part 2: Using Technorati to Connect with Your Readers.” As the title suggests, this one addresses the connectivity afforded by Technorati, and walks viewers through creating a Technorati account, claiming a blog, linking to the Technorati blog page, and so forth. It also discusses Technorati authority, rankings, and other minutiae. I had a bit of fun modeling the real-world connectivity and wonderfully unpredictable networking by following Norwegian blogger Jan-Arve Overland’s link to the first “What is Blogging?” tutorial back to his blog, and modeling the real-world process by leaving a comment there.

In case you want a glimpse of my AP Literature classes’ blended learning slice, which is only now beginning to take shape on our class blog, I take a brief detour in the screencast. Feel free to visit the class blog and see the constellation of tools we’re starting to deploy - Diigo Group, ToonDo, Scribe Blogs (so far artless and shameful, but give us time - and if nothing else, admire the beautiful WordPress theme I installed by Sadish at WP Themeshop), individual blogs, Moodle, Quotiki, wikis, Bloglines, and more.

Too much, you say? I would have feared the same last year, but not this year, thanks to another takeaway from the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last week - Alan November’s argument to throw our schoolified youngsters into the icy seas of info-glut that are the realities of this century, and force them to learn to swim now - rather than damn them to drowning, unprepared, after they graduate.

So here it is. I know it’s basic, but haven’t found a resource introducing this essential Technorati piece to students and teachers, so figured I’d just make one. For a larger, clearer, annotated version, click the video to go to my Screencast-o-matic Edtech tutorials channel. (I also uploaded it to Google Video for embedding in sites that don’t accept SOM’s iframes format.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I stumbled upon this. I’ve seen text versions in chain emails, which always struck me as slightly sappy. Not so with the performance version. Love the buildup and conclusion.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)