So, the first part of the assignment involved adding a bunch of sites of interest to your RSS, which I had pretty much covered. I did throw in a couple more. And to add some of the other blogs from the course, which I did. With all of us at different parts of the syllabus at the moment, I don't know how many of these blogs will actually have new content but a few of them are pretty interesting, so it would be nice if they kept going.
The other part of the assignment was more frustrating. We were told to create a custom news search in the google news reader, find a set of search parameters that produced results of interest, and then subscribe to it. The actual process was pretty straightforward, but the results tended to be lousy. With the regular google searches, things are listed in order of likelihood of relevance, based on a nice little mathematical algorithm. The result being that even though a lot of the hits are sort of crappy, there's a very good chance that what you want is near the top of the list. On the news search, things are listed chronologically. Sturgeon's Law (95% of everything is crap) is strictly enforced, and its hard to find a set of search terms that doesn't bury the items of interest in a sea of unrelated nonsense and/or PR puff pieces.
In some ways, the more esoteric and specific the search, the better. There will be less news about it, but on the other hand, no major corporation will be spamming the news feeds with self-promoting "news" (read those as sarcastic air quotes). When I tried doing a news search for Calculus Education, one of the links was actually a political cartoon about obesity. It was in the search because in the comments below it, there was a flame war going on about the posters education or lack thereof, and "calculus" and "education" were mentioned in the flame war. Yay relevance. Finally added "Classical Music Composition" as a news search to my RSS because there were maybe 3-4 really worthwhile and interesting articles on the first page of hits, which is a pretty good yield. My suspicion is that the main use for this sort of feed will be as a wide net to find individual sites of interest, including better site aggregators.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Task 4 - RSS
I was already pretty familiar with RSS. I like it particularly for sites that update on a relatively unpredictable schedule. I'm less attracted to it for sites with a lot of fresh content like say the New York Times. It's not that an RSS aggregator doesn't work pretty well as a way to skim new content on something like a newspaper, but rather that the NYT website itself is already designed to organize and display all the fresh content. It's conveniently laid out in sections, attractively organized on the page. And you know the site is updated every day, so checking it daily isn't ever going to be a waste of time.
Some of the first sites I added were various logic puzzle blogs. For example, I added Grant Fikes' blog, A Cleverly Titled Logic Puzzle Blog . He's been doing at least one "Monday Mutant" puzzle at the beginning of the week, but occasionally does a couple more. That slight irregularity and manageable frequency of updates seemed like a good candidate for RSS.
Another early pick was xkcd . There are new strips on xkcd maybe 3 times a week, and again it seemed like it fit the bill for rss. This week, there's an added bonus in a very cute joke that Math Teachers (more than anyone else) will appreciate:
I had a Calculus student who did this routinely some years back. She'd check the answer in the back of the book and then just sort of morph the problem gradually into the answer on her homework. She seemed confused when this didn't seem to help her on tests. Sigh.
Some of the first sites I added were various logic puzzle blogs. For example, I added Grant Fikes' blog, A Cleverly Titled Logic Puzzle Blog . He's been doing at least one "Monday Mutant" puzzle at the beginning of the week, but occasionally does a couple more. That slight irregularity and manageable frequency of updates seemed like a good candidate for RSS.
Another early pick was xkcd . There are new strips on xkcd maybe 3 times a week, and again it seemed like it fit the bill for rss. This week, there's an added bonus in a very cute joke that Math Teachers (more than anyone else) will appreciate:
I had a Calculus student who did this routinely some years back. She'd check the answer in the back of the book and then just sort of morph the problem gradually into the answer on her homework. She seemed confused when this didn't seem to help her on tests. Sigh.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Task #3
Hey -- what happened to Task 2? Dunno. "Task 2" in the syllabus asked me to title my blog article "Task 1", and now "Task 3" wants it to be "Task 3". Shrug.
Anyway, this is about the nature of blogs. Reading, writing, and so on.
One obvious thing to note about blogs is that any blog post should be reasonably short. That last one (Task 1) was pushing the TLDR envelope, I think. If you've got a lot to say, it probably should be broken up into digestible chunks, because internet readers don't want to be scrolling endlessly down a long stream of text. Breaking the long stream of text up with images or videos probably helps a little, but makes the stream even longer.
Images also help in the "ooh, hey, what's this?" aspect. Obviously, with students, that brings up the question of etiquette on linked images. Most sites hate leeching bandwidth by hotlinking images, there's fair use and copyright issues (creative commons media FTW) and proper attribution to consider. If you make your own images, there's storage and so forth to consider.
The style of blogs tends to represent the creator, and what their own slant on the material is. A couple of blogs I liked from the suggested list were very different in style. Said the Gramophone is fairly abstract -- its a music blog, but it seems to be adding a sort of free-form artistic response to the music. Music appreciation not as abstract criticism, but as personal creative expression. On the other hand, I though Kathy Shrock's Blog was a good example of a blog I might visit for practical purposes. She's got plenty of pragmatic examples of using technology in education, complete with illustrated instructions as necessary.
Anyway, this is about the nature of blogs. Reading, writing, and so on.
One obvious thing to note about blogs is that any blog post should be reasonably short. That last one (Task 1) was pushing the TLDR envelope, I think. If you've got a lot to say, it probably should be broken up into digestible chunks, because internet readers don't want to be scrolling endlessly down a long stream of text. Breaking the long stream of text up with images or videos probably helps a little, but makes the stream even longer.
Images also help in the "ooh, hey, what's this?" aspect. Obviously, with students, that brings up the question of etiquette on linked images. Most sites hate leeching bandwidth by hotlinking images, there's fair use and copyright issues (creative commons media FTW) and proper attribution to consider. If you make your own images, there's storage and so forth to consider.
The style of blogs tends to represent the creator, and what their own slant on the material is. A couple of blogs I liked from the suggested list were very different in style. Said the Gramophone is fairly abstract -- its a music blog, but it seems to be adding a sort of free-form artistic response to the music. Music appreciation not as abstract criticism, but as personal creative expression. On the other hand, I though Kathy Shrock's Blog was a good example of a blog I might visit for practical purposes. She's got plenty of pragmatic examples of using technology in education, complete with illustrated instructions as necessary.
Task #1
This blog is being created in conjunction with a Professional Development course in using Web 2.0 technology in Education. As such, many of these first posts will be assignments for the course. This first post is one of them. The task? To write some general introductory thoughts on the topic.
As part of an earlier assignment, I already created a short Writeboard document in response to an article, so here's a link to that: Classroom Whuffie.
As suggested in those paragraphs, it seems to me that one key part of our job as educator is not so much just telling the kids what resources are out there and how they are used. For one thing, those resources change all the time. For another, the kids are mostly going to know about as much about it as we do. The more important thing is to make kids aware of the larger social considerations of the online resources they use. This includes privacy concerns, as well as the broader issue of online reputation.
Kids tend to view anything they do on the internet as either completely anonymous or as some sort of private conversation with limited group of friends. Sometimes these are even true, but kids need to understand how much of what they do is public, or at least accessible by the public. Conversely, if we are going to set up an environment ourselves for students to operate in (like a Wiki for a class), we need to be conscious about who can access it, and how that information is presented to the students.
Students need to think of their online identity as a valuable resource. Something that they can use to create a social network, and gain (or lose) credibility with people. This is often done in a sort of negative way -- through scare tactics. Students are warned that prospective employers or colleges will see that facebook status reading "totally baked" and that photo of them doing jello shots in Cancun, and the student will lose out on big opportunities in life. What struck me about the article was an example of a teacher essentially making it part of the syllabus to try to earn a positive online reputation. This was done in a slightly artificial, carefully tallied (concrete) way, but I think using straightforward concrete goals to lead students to a broader awareness can be very effective.
As part of an earlier assignment, I already created a short Writeboard document in response to an article, so here's a link to that: Classroom Whuffie.
As suggested in those paragraphs, it seems to me that one key part of our job as educator is not so much just telling the kids what resources are out there and how they are used. For one thing, those resources change all the time. For another, the kids are mostly going to know about as much about it as we do. The more important thing is to make kids aware of the larger social considerations of the online resources they use. This includes privacy concerns, as well as the broader issue of online reputation.
Kids tend to view anything they do on the internet as either completely anonymous or as some sort of private conversation with limited group of friends. Sometimes these are even true, but kids need to understand how much of what they do is public, or at least accessible by the public. Conversely, if we are going to set up an environment ourselves for students to operate in (like a Wiki for a class), we need to be conscious about who can access it, and how that information is presented to the students.
Students need to think of their online identity as a valuable resource. Something that they can use to create a social network, and gain (or lose) credibility with people. This is often done in a sort of negative way -- through scare tactics. Students are warned that prospective employers or colleges will see that facebook status reading "totally baked" and that photo of them doing jello shots in Cancun, and the student will lose out on big opportunities in life. What struck me about the article was an example of a teacher essentially making it part of the syllabus to try to earn a positive online reputation. This was done in a slightly artificial, carefully tallied (concrete) way, but I think using straightforward concrete goals to lead students to a broader awareness can be very effective.
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