Category — Teaching

LAMPPIX // Welcome!:
This is the website of LAMPPIX, the Linux Live CD booting a webserver. LAMPPIX allows you to burn your web projects (i.e. PHP presentations or Perl scripts) onto a CD-ROM and give them away to others. They will only have to insert the CD and reboot — if you configured LAMPPIX right (and this is really easy!) they can view your project.

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this could be an excellent tool for distributing student projects for digital archives.

I think arguments found in classic philosophical books… the canonical ones that I teach end up concretized in students minds as valid and real arguments and models for arguments. I am not convinced that understanding these arguments as fixed and real and powerful is a good thing for anyone. I think they need to know that arguments are fluid, ephemeral and frequently surreal in relation to the world that exists.

What Kind of Insects Are Those Buffalo?:

Quote of the day from a page entitled "Perceptual Fallacies":

There is a tribe called the Ba Mbuti that provide evidence that size
constancy is learned. This tribe lives in a thick jungle where they
never are able to see more than a few yards away. When taken into a
field and shown Buffalo in the distance, they asked what kind of
insects they were. When told that the animals were buffalo, the
tribespeople thought it was witchcraft.

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this a great example of something that is universal in some sense, that we all live in our own contexts and reality outside of those contexts seems to be as much of a fiction as anything.

The Illuminated Middle Ages
:

The Illuminated Middle Ages database presents several hundred recently digitized illuminated texts from French national library collections. While the full collection, in even higher resolution, is available for purchase on DVD-ROM, this web site gives access to the entire database. Only a portion of the full collection has been translated into English for the web site, but visitors may also view the French-language galleries in the site, where a dozen texts from each of the ten themes are presented daily. To see every text in high resolution, you will have have to either visit the site daily or order the DVD. In the meantime, the search interface allows you to perform full-text searches across the complete database. You are sure to enjoy this collection of breathtaking texts dating from the year 500 through the 1400s.

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this is pretty good

Ethiopian Distance Learning:
Andrew Heavens has a short but interesting blip on his blog ‘Meskel Square’ about this Ethiopian classroom’s distance learning set-up, consisting of a satellite dish picking up Digital Video Broadcasts (DVB) from Addis Ababa that then outputs to a generously-sized Samsung plasma screen television. The schools next step is to get online using a satellite connection—cool stuff.
The shock of the new [MeskelSquare]

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if they didn’t use the plasma screen….. this would be so much less expensive.

Literary tests for a digital world:
The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages.
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is this something we really want measured by testing?

Weblogs as Pedagogy:

Barbara Ganley’s recent post about how the tool is becoming indistinguishable from the course makes it clear just how far down the blog road she has travelled.

snip

As both Aaron and Barbara ask, however, which comes first, the tools or the pedagogy? The easy answer is that the pedagogy should drive the decisions about tools. But these days, the tools offer ways to really transform the pedagogy in ways we haven’t even begun to think about yet. That’s what Barbara is immersed in. And that’s what we’ll need more of to realize whatever potential there is.

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i think this is the wrong question to ask. the question to ask is “what can i do next?”, and then use whatever tools you have. pedagogies are tools; are technologies. when you start saying which determines which, you start dismissing the key point/fulcrum of learning, which is the student, the learner. that person or those people determine both the technologies and pedagogies. (note: i put this into a form closer to english on 1-18)

Facilitation: the Anti-Lecture – Kaarin Record, techLearning: “The best of online classrooms intelligently employ a discussion board to foster a sense of community and to become a vehicle for sharing and learning. The role of the facilitator is to enable groups of people to work cooperatively and effectively. T”

(Via Online Learning Update.)

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this is a key point that people need to pay attention to.

The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome: “The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome. n. 1. Named for the Hollywood director famous for his casts of thousands–The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Cleopatra, and many others. 2. The tendency of student writers to begin their essays, no matter how…”

(Via Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.)

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i still do this, and i think it is justified to some extent.

Global Learn Day Framewok: “”

(Via .)

global learn day is worth doing