I got a little bored spending the holiday at the office so I decided to take a break to see if I could get this to work. The idea is to add a collection of images – an image gallery – to a Word Press post (the directions). Click a thumbnail to see larger image.
A short article in THE summarizes data from Turnitin on secondary and higher education plagiarism. This is interesting.
I am attempting to approach this topic with an open mind. Let me begin with this – the big winners online are the content creators. Facebook, Google, Bing – make the big bucks by “bringing value” to the content generated by others. For this most part, these companies return little to the creators. Google might be the exception if the content creators add ads to their material.
Social bookmarking when used in a social way allows all of us to curate content. We can organize content to meet personal needs and share this effort in case others want to try to benefit from our efforts.
Educators now are getting into the content creation game. Ed bloggers for example may focus their blogs on identifying a certain category of resource and offer the link this material with a short description of the purpose this resource might serve. I guess this is what I had originally intended to do with this site.
I have read that the number of active bloggers or at least posts is declining. Perhaps the role these individuals served is being taken up by commercial content which comes with its own price and biases. Blogging is also on the decline among younger users of the Internet unless you count Facebook activity as content creation.
Is it possible things are getting out of balance? We convince ourselves we are making a contribution by posting interesting links via Twitter or a social bookmarking service. A little of this, while valuable, goes a long way.
I think there are too many curators and not enough creators.
This summary regarding the practice of moving under-performing students from poorly performing schools resulted from research from the RAND corporation. This study addresses the extreme case – schools that have been closed.
Students transferred to another school after their earlier school shut down performed worse on reading and math tests–even if the new school performed better overall in academic terms than the former one had. The study did find at least that a higher performing school would minimize a student’s drop in test scores–but the drop still occurred.
So what does this mean – perhaps that the school itself was only part of the problem. Now what?
A new report is just out concerning K-12 online learning. Big policy names (at least I know Gene Glass by reputation) behind the report. “Uncertain private ventures in need of public regulation” (from the title). There is that government regulatory thing again. So corporations are not people capable of regulating themselves after all?
The title was just a test of sensitivity to our political climate. If you came here hoping for me to complain about Republicans, I do that on my other blog.
The issue here concerns interpretation of the obligation of schools to protect students from “bad” online content and inappropriate experiences. Here is an interpretation of expectations offered by Tina Barseghian interpreting Karen Cator. If concerned about CIPA, read carefully. Interpretation is they key term here and interpretation is always the challenge in implementation. Hence, this is why the meaning of legislation is often generated via case law. I realize this does not help those just wanting to know the rules. Legislation will not include the list of sites your school must block.
The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet access or internal network connections with E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ access to content that may be harmful to minors, including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities.
It is worth reading the comments to the Barseghian post.
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