Room With A View

I can see my blog!! I wonder how long this will last? I’ve got my fingers crossed.

My blog has been on again and off again over the last few months. Some days I can access it and other days it’s blocked from here. I’d like to be get some colleagues to start blogging but at the moment it’s too unreliable.

It seems that my blog is blocked again in China. I guess I’ll have to find a new home for it.

The folks at the Bit by Bit podcast referred to the Horizon 2007 Report. It’s written by the The New Media Consortium. I read the report a while ago but the podcast inspired me to go back and have another read. I’ve been holding off writing about it because there’s too much to write and I have too little time. So, I’ve decided to write about the report in stages. Here’s my first post.

The report is “a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education.”

I work in K-12 education and though several of the report’s finding do not apply to my field of education many of the findings do.

The report identifies 6 technologies to watch and a time frame for each.

1. User-Created Content–1 year
2. Social Networking–1 year
3. Mobile Phones–2 to 3 years
4. Virtual Worlds–2 to 3 years
5. The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication–4 to 5 years
6. Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming–4 to 5 years

All but perhaps the fifth technology have direct implications for K-12 education.

It’s well worth a read to learn more.

Marc Prensky coined the terms Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, but this week I felt like a Digital Refugee. I spent time moving and setting up a new bog site because the government here blocked this blog. (I’ll avoid using the county’s name in case some bot trolls through sites looking for it. I don’t know how decisions are made to block sites.) This blog wasn’t blocked per se but the domain edublogs.org was.

While attending EARCOS a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Utecht had tipped me off that edublogs.org had been blocked. I logged on from Thailand and exported my site to my hard drive. I was thankful upon return to find my blog wasn’t blocked. Unfortunately, within a week it was.

I spent a couple of nights this week setting up a new site at http://rcormack.blogsavy.com. Thanks to Wordpress’ ability to export and import files it wasn’t hard. It was just a pain in the neck.

Surprisingly, yesterday I checked my edublogs site and found it accessible so I guess I’ll continue using it. I don’t know how long it will be accessible so I’ll keep the blogsavy site too. If you find this site hasn’t been update in a while, check the blogsavy site. I may be there claiming refugee status.

Several grad students from the University of Alabama are in Antarctica and they’re blogging about their experiences. Also, they’re posting photos of their experiences on Flickr. It may be of interest to some students to see science in action.

On a technical note, their feed shows up in my news reader but the links don’t work. Hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon.

[Links]

Can’t think of much to say except watch this.

The term Web 2.0 gets thrown around a lot. It’s the idea that people can create content and interact with one another. Some people love the term, some people hate the term, some people overuse the term, while others lay claim to the term. Regardless of the hype, The Water Buffalo Movie is what matters.

Robert Thompson read a blog entry by Philip Greenspun where Greenspun wrote about his frustration with a charity that supposedly bought water buffaloes for people. Robert Thompson lives in rural China. He offered to buy Greenspun a water buffalo and give it to a needy family. Greenspun took him up on his offer. The Water Buffalo Movie is Thompson’s account of the story.

I see that Tim Lauer is moving his school to Drupal as a web platform. He says:

Besides using Drupal for internal and external web communication, I am really excited about using Drupal as a basis for web based student and teacher interaction.

I’ve looked at Drupal, Moodle, Elgg, Wordpress and several other CMS, LMS, and blogs over the last year or so. Unfortunately, my school is not ready to support any of these tools at this time. The tech support people are stretched as it is and can’t support one more thing. This may change in time but for now I’ve got a few teachers that are going out on their own and using Wikispaces. A few use PBWiki. It would be nice to have a school-wide system and in time we will but for now teachers are happy to have something they can use easily to communicate with students and parents.

I understand that Firefox 2.0 will support spell checking. That’s great news for those of us that use it to post to blogs and wikis. Last year I had students working on a wiki and spell checking would have made life much easier.