Teach42

Kate took the time to respond to my Wikipedia v. Britannica postJust be careful letting your students use Wikipedia – because it is NOT an acceptable college
resource – so perhaps it is best not to teach your students bad habits.

Want to see an example of the garbage in Wikipedia – go to the entry for the Leonard Peltier
controversy.

I say garbage in, garbage out – and Wikipedia has a wicked propensity for garbage in.

I’m not exactly sure why it’s not an acceptable college source, so long as they cite it properly. I would think that it depends on the professor, the class and the purpose. It is certainly a good place to get broad information about a topic.

The example that Kate brings up is the Leonard Peltier controversy. I’ll trust Kate that it’s absolute garbage, but I’m not really sure why. I must confess that I was ignorant of the issue, somehow I had never heard of Leonard Peltier before. However, now I have a broad idea of who he is, what happened to him, why some people feel he’s guilty and why others feel he’s innocent. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I am definitely much better informed about it than I was now. The description of the actual events sounded slightly skewed toward those who feel he must be guilty, but other than that the article maintains a neutral tone.

Interestingly, when I went to look for further information to compare this entry to, I had a great deal of difficulty finding information from an unbiased source. The vast majority of the sites I found were created by organizations who want to free Peltier, or by sites that support the FBI’s stance. I was unable to find a reasonable description of the events from a neutral standpoint without going to old AP articles.

The weakness of Wikipedia is that anybody can write an article and skew the information to serve their needs. The greatest strength of Wikipedia is that if someone sees a ‘slanted’ entry, they can go in and correct it. If it gets skewed too far the other way, someone else can come back in and correct that. Hopefully, a neutral balance will be achieved.

I’m not exactly sure why Kate thinks that the Peltier entry is garbage, but I hope that she either explains to me why or even better, goes in and corrects the entry herself. Both should take about the same amount of effort.

I’m not going to say that the Wikipedia is the greatest source of information in the world. However, I do believe that it’s considerably better than many web sites on the internet. In the coming years, the definition of an ‘expert’ is being completely rewritten. I hope that colleges are evolving to accommodate the changes in how information is created, modified and distributed.

The problem isn’t sites like Wikipedia, it’s how we teach students to use them. I would admonish any student who solely uses Wikipedia as their only source of information about a topic just as strongly as I would a student who only uses the encyclopedia as their only source. The source isn’t the problem, it’s the critical thinking skills that guide how we use it.

Looks like I’m going to be heading out to PodcasterCon in January! I love the idea. It’s a totally free, Open Space conference. Want to discuss something specific? Then set it up! Right now I’m looking forward to hanging out at Warlick’s session: Podcasting as a Teaching/Learning Strategy, but there’s a few other ideas percolating that I’d love to discuss with other people.

Anybody else in the EduPodoSphere planning on coming by? If so, let me know so we can try to meet up there!

WordPress 2 was released yesterday. I still haven’t gotten my current template to work right in WordPress 1.5 yet! Guess that means there’s no reason not to give it a whirl, eh?

If you already use Yahoo Mail, you’re going to be seriously stoked about this one. If you don’t use it, this could almost be a good enough reason to switch. I’m still a big gmail fan, but this has me drooling

Yahoo announced today that they’ve built an RSS aggregator in to Yahoo Mail. Since it’s only available to people in the Beta, I couldn’t try it out but it looks pretty darn sweet. Yes, you can read your RSS feeds in the same place you read your email. Yes, it’s a full fledged aggregator, so you can just click on a feed and read whatever new content is there. It looks incredibly easy to forward articles on (and obviously you can use your address book and groups to do so), and you can also drag and drop blog posts into your regular mail folders. I dig that feature big time.

I still feel like one of the biggest problems with blogs is that you still need to be mildly geeky to understand RSS and what you do with those cryptic pages of XML code in order to subscribe to a feed. I don’t personally use My Yahoo, but I do love the fact that they created a one-click method to subscribe to blogs and add them to a user’s My Yahoo page. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with something similar to subscribe to blogs in yahoo mail as well (hopefully using the same mechanism so people don’t have to change their buttons).

I wish the screenshots were a bit better. Anyone have access to the Beta and want to get some better shots?

At this point I’ve had to explain to explain so many times what I do during the day that it almost seems redundant to blog about it. It is pretty exciting stuff though, so I figure I should share anyway. Oh, and for the record, this is my general understanding of how things came to be and what my position entails. If I’ve made any mistakes, I’m sure I will be ridiculed mercilessly in our next conference call.

As I’ve said before, I do work for Discovery now. Yes, Discovery as in the Discovery Channel. They have a division called Discovery Education that’s been around for about a year and makes all kinds of cool things for schools, including a huge number of educational DVD’s, laserdiscs and VHS tapes. Discovery also bought unitedstreaming, which if you haven’t heard about yet you really should check into. It’s a massive video library, all online, that can be streamed, downloaded, and many of them can even be edited for use in movies and digital stories. I’m not going to waste time telling you much about that product, but let’s just say that it’s cool enough that New York, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Rhode Island bought state wide licenses for their teachers (so if you’re in those states, you already own it).

Obviously Discovery Education has a vested interested in the educational community and they’ve really tried to take the initiative when it comes to helping teachers get digital media in their classrooms. However, this isn’t really a company that sits back on its laurels and pats itself on the back over a job well done. They like to stay on the cutting edge and tried to figure out what the next step would be.

Since Discovery already has their hands in the digital media pie, it just makes sense to keep moving forward along those lines. As more and more schools have a computer connected to the internet in every classroom, the barriers to teachers using digital media quickly and easily are eroding. From using multimedia to increase understanding and retention to digital storytelling, teachers are jumping at the chance to take advantage of this stuff. Clearly a big deal in the education world right now.

Enter, the Discovery Educator Network. The official description is “The Discovery Educator Network is a global community of educators who are excited by the power of digital media and want to collaborate and share resources with other teachers.” But what does it really mean? We want to provide support to teachers who are using digital media and hook them up with other educators who have a common interest. We want to provide a place for experts to work with each other to blaze a new trail forward. We also want to create a support forum for people who are just getting started. Teachers connecting with teachers. Novel idea, eh?

Anyway, there are two pieces to this. One is creating a network of expert teachers, ‘certified’ teachers who are leading the way when it comes to digital media in the educational environment. We want to recognize their efforts and provide them with opportunities to share their knowledge with other people. It’s not all about us, it’s about finding those heroes of the classroom and giving them a soapbox to hop up on and share their knowledge. That part is going on right now. People can head over to the web site and apply to join the network. Heck, if you use digital media in just about any way at all, I strongly suggest that you throw in an application. You’d be in pretty darn good company.

The second piece is the web site that we’re in the process of building right now. It’s being designed to facilitate conversation, support, and collaboration around the subject of digital media. Sort of a home away from home for 21st century teachers. There’s going to be a message board, a multimedia resource database, a blog engine, and potential for a heck of alot more. It’s just a beginning, a launching point of sorts. We haven’t even launched the new site, but we’re already planning for how we can improve it.

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, that’s where I come in. The official title is “Online Community Manager” and it really encompasses just about all things online related to the Discovery Educator Network. Right now we have a small, but growing network of blogs. Every regional manager that’s hired gets a blog where they can keep people in their state posted about local events, contests, conferences and other tidbits that might interest them. Most of them have never blogged before so they’re busy getting the hang of it and finding their own voices. One thing that definitely comes through as you read through what they have though is that there’s a buzz, a sense of excitement, a clear feeling that something big is in the works. Obviously, another part of my job is going to be supporting our growing blogging community.

So where’s the catch? There really isn’t much of one. Pure and simple, we’ve got one of the best products out there for digital media, unitedstreaming. Bazillions of districts already have bought a subscription, but many of the teachers in those districts don’t even know it! So this will hopefully help prod a few people into trying something new, particularly if their district has already bought into it. If their district hasn’t, maybe this will provide a little impetus to help sell a few more licenses. Regardless though, we figure that if we’re doing something to genuinely help move the world of education forward, nothing but good things can come of it.

The other question I’ve been asked a million times is where the line is being drawn between Teach42 and the Discovery Educator Network. That’s a tough one and I’m still figuring that out. The current plan is to just keep on keeping on. Teach42 will continue on as it has, but I’ll also be blogging on behalf of Discovery Education at the national blog. We’ll see how it goes, but don’t worry about this site selling out. If I can’t be honest and straightforward here, I’d rather hang up the spurs and move on. That much I can promise you.

The thing is, I’m excited about it. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I thought I was going to be turned into a sales agent. Discovery Education is doing some really cool stuff and I’m having a blast just being a part of it. If I share it with you here, it’s because I think it’s something you folks will get a kick out of too. And trust me when I say, there’s plenty of that sort of stuff in the works!

Oh yeah, one other thing, we’re still looking for quite a few Field Managers. So if you do happen to be looking for a new line of work, check out the careers page for more information. Trust me, it’s a heck of a place to work!

The Edublog Awards 2005 have been announced. I think the hard part is going to be narrowing down my nominations to two per catgory. There’s so many good blogs out there that should be recognized.

The best part about the awards are that they let you know about the blogs you should be checking out but didn’t know about yet. It’s a great ‘hit list’ for peopel who are new to the edublogosphere.

Ok, I really shouldn’t get into this one because I know I’m going to wind up on a soap box, but Dean’s post about videoblogging has forced me to comment. He’s actually responding to a post of Alan’s, so you can get all the background you might need!

My two cents on video blogging: It’s cool as all heck, but it ain’t in the form it needs to be yet.

Let me step back to podcasting. We’ve had internet radio for a while. The trouble with it was that nobody wanted to sit at their computer and listen to radio all day. They wanted to hear it in their car or jogging. Same thing with audioblogs. Great idea, but no easy way to take it with you. However, now that everyone has MP3 players and podcatchers have made it easy to subscribe to podcasts, they’ve taken off in popularity. Whether it has staying power is still up in the air, but nobody can deny that there isn’t a ton of potential there. The key is, the right format met up with the right software and the right hardware.

With video blogging, we’re getting the right format, we’re getting the right hardware. But I do not believe the software is there yet. Before you get the wrong idea, let me clarify the hardware comment though. I’m NOT talking about the video iPod or personal media player. Dean is right, “Podcasting is naturally mobile. That is its main advantage. It also allows for multi-tasking.” Videlocasting is NOT naturally mobile. Most of the time, people watch video at home. On the sofa. In front of the TV. And that’s where videocasting has to go.

The right hardware is the DVR, aka Tivo. The right place is the family room. The right software is a versoin of Tivo that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds that contain video’s in them. The Tivo needs to become a Vid-Catcher. I want to see Dave Warlick’s videocasts right next to my episodes of Seinfeld. I want to see the room 202 Videocast listed right next to Sportscenter or Emeril. If I have 10 minutes free, I can see what those crazy kids are up to. I want my children’s ‘newsletter’ to be a news cast that is created quickly, easily and weekly. I want to SEE the drama activity that they did instead of reading about it or hearing them describing it.

See where I’m going with this? So before you denounce videocasting, think of it as an alpha. Version 0.15a. And consider where it might be able to go. We certainly aren’t there yet, but we’re getting there.

I just had to share this one. I was doing some searching around Technorati today (it was work related, I swear), and decided to browse through a few Tag searches. Of course, the first search I did was for the word “Education“.

When you do a Technorati Tag search, it gives you a list of related tags. So I bet you’re wondering what tags are related to education. Let’s see… There’s Politics, Technology and News. Hmmm… What else? Science, Religion, culture and…. Warlick???

Yes that’s right, our good friend Dave Warlick has been promoted to Tag status! Heh, not that he doesn’t deserve it, but I just find it funny that he’s right up there with Politics, News and Science.

In all seriousness though, it really does speak volumes to the importance of appropriate tagging and the effectiveness of doing so. Mental note: Go figure out how to fix my broken Technorati plug in for WordPress.