web and technology

During class, someone said that in Minecraft "like in SIMs, you are a person and you are creating a world" while trying to sum up the satisfying appeal to the game.  I completely felt this as well while playing.  There was something satisfying to being able to control my environment and decide my own course.  This is a freedom I don't always have in everyday life because of time constraints, responsibilities, and money.  These constraints don't exist in this game.

This comment also reminded me of a project my placement teacher did last year in his geometry class.  The assignment was similar to a geometry assignment I've seen many times: design your dream house.  The twist was that the class was to use google sketch-up, a google software used to make 3D models (when I worked in a blackbox theater, the set designer did his designs on this).  Using sketch-up, the students would make a virtual 3D model of their (roofless) house, and then decorate it.

Hey everybody, I don't really know if this has any place in this Ecological Imaginings class, but maybe if we can imagine the preservation of women to be a form of ecology, not unlike the preservation of all plant life, animal life.

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to this excellent documentary currently being shown on PBS on Mon & Tues nights at 9:00 PM.  I imagine you guys have lots of time to watch films, yeah!  But this is an amazing series.

"Half the Sky" about gender based violence.

Here's the link to the first & second segment:

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283557115   

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283558278

In class, our group discussed Clark’s cyborg readings and how that played into our feelings towards the class. There was a general consensus amongst the people in our group that the Clark reading was more confusing rather than informative. The main reason I think this is, is the writing style that Clark adopts. In his writing, Clark tends to try to prove concepts by examples rather than solidifying his claims and arguments by using original research. Thus, Clark’s text seems more like a thoughtful muse, rather than a piece of writing meant to prove a certain fact.

I'm still struggling with figuring out what should education provide for humans, considering the new role of technology.  I keep hearing the opinion that with computers around to help us, we can bypass the basics of math/science, depending on the computers for that knowledge, and skip right to the quantum mechanics and other higher-level ideas that we haven't taught computers how to do yet.  My hesitation is that I am not convinced that higher-level ideas can be accessed without an understanding of how the basics work, especially when we want to put our current ideas to the test.  I have trouble imagining a creative scientific process that relies on information feeding from computers.  Also, I think it would be really difficult to solve a higher-level problem without having first grappled with the lower-level ideas first.  Just because a machine can produce relevant information instantaneously doesn't automatically give this information meaning.  What are ways a teacher can facilitate a deeper understanding/meaning to a concept, not burdening the student with calculations that computers can do, but still bearing in mind that any program created to help foster this understanding is a human creation and can still be (and should be) called into question.

I've created an archive of the tweets to #netloged255.  The URL is:

http://bit.ly/Uhb0YA

You can look here to refer back to tweets that are more than 7 days old. The archive will auto-update and collect all the new tweets once a day.

Remember, you have to be tweeting from a public account (not a locked/private one) for your tweets to show up in a search for #netloged255!

INTRODUCTION:  What does it mean to visit an African country with a class from a US college in order to learn?

Alice Lesnick, Term Professor of Education, Bryn Mawr College

July, 2012

360: Learning and Narrating Childhoods (Spring, 2012) was a cluster of three courses, one in Education, one in Literature, and one in Psychology.  15 Students from a broad range of majors, years, and backgrounds undertook a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural study of child development, with a particular focus on the role of language and literacy in forming and channeling personal and group identities.  

LiveJournal is a blogging website founded in March of 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, a student of computer science.  In 2005, it was purchased from Fitzpatrick by the American blogging software company Six Apart, and in 2007 the Russian company SUP purchased it from Six Apart.  Although academic research on LiveJournal is limited, a December of 2008 study ranked it as the sixth most popular website, among American college students.  LiveJournal offers uses personal blogs (or weblogs, online journals) and the option of creating LiveJournal “communities,” which link multiple bloggers together.  One LiveJournal blogger of note is Cleolinda Jones, whose blog is called Occupation: Girl.  Jones began her LiveJournal in 2003, at the age of twenty-four, and is still blogging on it currently.  In her first entry, Jones said, "I swore, when I was in high school, that I was going to grow up but I was never going to grow old, popular cultur

Several people have noticed, and I am feeling it myself as well, that it can be challenging to follow particular conversations within our #BMCed250 hashtag on Twitter.  When Twitter hashtags are used at discrete real-time events (like in-class, at conferences, the scheduled #edchat, etc.) conversations are easier to follow because all the participants are attending to the Tweets at the same time.  With our class we're using the #BMCed250 hashtag to converse over a longer span of time and asynchronously (without all necessarily seeing all the tweets simultaneously), so particular conversations within the hashtag are a little more difficult to manage.

Anyway, here are a few tools/techniques I found that might help you sort it all out if you are finding things chaotic:

Within Twitter

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169582-what-s-where-in-twitter-s-new-design#conversations