let’s understand that students are as likely to be blogging for the class as they are to be pulling their own teeth – they are going to do it because they need to. You might get the odd student who is really digging it and wants to keep reflecting on it once the class is over, but for most, like pulling teeth, they are only going to jump the hoop once. Thirdly, even though blogging has this aura of being able to put the student at the center of the learning experience, it is still very much the case where students are told what to write and how to write it. It still almost has to be this way in order to create a level field on which the student work can be assessed. Finally… if we know that the students are not going to become bloggers on topic X, and we know that they are unlikely to have a portfolio (yet) where the entries that they do make can become part of a greater whole, why not start them with the most baby step of blogging… commenting.
I just had an epiphany (or a moment of Duh! depending on perspective)
I’ve been thinking of the University as a Really Big School with bajillions of faculty and students who are mostly interested in maintaining the status quo (or in not taking risks, which has the same effect).
What if, instead, I ignore the status quo and think of the University as a small school, full of a small group of faculty and students who want to work together to try something new?
I could watch this video all day. The fluid, organic flow of people and machines through the streets of San Francisco in 1905 - before the big fire. There’s something mesmerizing about the way everyone is able to move together. No ring roads. No interchanges. No streetlights. No bike lanes. Just a fluid, organic flow of humanity. I lost count of near-miss collisions, though…
Update: Looks like the video got yanked from YouTube due to copyright issues on the audio. Awesome. So, here’s the version direct from the Prelinger Archives:
I’ve been crafting a fine tinfoil hat in response to thinking more about pervasive third party tracking. And I realized I had been a total hypocrite since I was still running Wordpress.com stats on my blogs. Even though it was “anonymous,” it adds to the pile of third-party data that is tracked for online activity. I’ve now disabled tracking from Wordpress.com stats - and with that, I think, there are no third party trackers tied to my blogs. There could be something through a plugin or something, but nothing I’ve added.
The Wall Street Journal has been on a roll, looking at privacy online. The latest article looks at the trackers, bugs, beacons, and cookies used by various websites to monitor you (and then share that data). For example, the simple site dictionary.com tracks a fair bit of data about visitors:
234 activity trackers. To look up the definition of a word.
The Wall Street Journal took a look at the trackers (cookies, beacons, etc…) used by advertisers to track activity and connect various bits of data (what movies you like, what websites you go to, what music you buy, etc…)
They claim that the data they store is anonymous.
The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.
>Software programmers are taking the displacement of personal agency to a new level. Relentlessly focused on making their programs more “user friendly,” they’re scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment. We follow their scripts when we click on one of Google’s keyword suggestions, and we follow them when we select from a list of categories to describe ourselves and our relationships on Facebook. These choices are convenient, but they’re not our own. They’re generalizations masquerading as personalizations.
I ran EtherApe on my Ubuntu Server system for about 45 minutes this afternoon, sniffing network connections on the office LAN. Nothing snoopy/creepy, just network addresses and protocols. Man, there are a LOT of machines involved…
> My first reaction (as I’m sure it is for many) is that we shouldn’t compel them to do anything. But when you ask the question in the context of formal education, you begin to see how ridiculous it is. Is there anything in education that isn’t compelled? Participation is enforced to the age of 18, college and university courses typically have requirements for graduation. So why should public performance be any different? And - it isn’t! We require singers and actors to perform in public in order to graduate. Lawyers stand in moot court. Interns perform in actual hospitals, apprentices in real garages. Graduate students are frequently reminded that they should have some journal publications to their name. So why the objection to publishing on the web? It’s an irrational objection, when compared with the practices we see everywhere else in education.
