Jason: November 2007 Archives
I recently came across a post at Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog about students exchanging XBox Live gamer tags. Vicki was concerned about allowing students to do this based on safety issues. I posted a comment pointing out that both Microsoft provides a variety of ways to make gaming safe for children. Vicki expressed interest in learning more, and that turned into an email detailing how to enable parental controls. Vicki posted that email with my permission, and I'm cross posting a slightly modified version here as well.
Stanford recently created a directory of campus blogs. Currently the contents of the directory range from academic to personal and the authors include alumni, students, faculty, and staff.
This is interesting because I recently attended a seminar on social software in business sponsored by Six Apart and Forrester. During the session someone asked dealing with people who say inappropriate things in their blogs. The response was that corporate blogs allow you to more closely monitor things that are said in a place where you can respond quickly and manage the situation better. One of the presenters quipped that we don't always know what people are doing with the technology they have access to already. Many employees use instant messenger, email, and more; all of these technologies are difficult to monitor. Schools go through the same thing.
However, when you provide a central space, you can allow for monitoring, governance, etc. Instead of searching for things across multiple other public services, you create an environment where things are more manageable.
Also of interest in the Stanford directory are the many academically oriented blogs. They're certainly something to keep an eye on as we all try to learn from each other how this technology will best work in education.
A new report published by the Urban Institute claims that "U.S. student performance rankings [in science and engineering] are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year."
This is interesting, as many educational thought leaders, business people, and public officials claim the opposite. I remain fascinated by the complex web that binds our country's economic and educational systems.
