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Sabbatical Starts Today

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Today is the first day of my sabbatical. Don’t be fooled by the title of this post: I will not update this blog daily. Especially since most updates would be mind-numbing: read. wrote. thought. But I am posting today to indicate the kind of work I’ll do this semester–and to illustrate how technology has become [...]

Is the Web Getting Thinner?

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Wired just ran a terrific article on the death of the web. Not to worry–the web is not going away anytime soon. Chris Anderson was suggesting, though, that a number of trends have changed the way people are using the Internet. The web browser, according to Anderson, is losing ground to other Internet-utilizing software and [...]

Google Wave Goes Belly Up

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Google just announced that it is no longer actively developing Google Wave–the web-based communication app that was supposed to revolutionize the way we interact online. I was a fairly early user of Wave, but I never really got into it. It was a little strange, a little clunky, and, most significantly, quite unnecessary. In other [...]

Michigan Cut from Race to Top (Again)

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

It looks like Michigan has not made the cut for the second round of Race to the Top funding. A few more details below: Michigan out of running for U.S. education grant Detroit Free Press July 27, 2010 WASHINGTON, D.C. — Michigan failed to make the cut in the second round of competition for federal [...]

Facebook Fatigue Setting In

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Let’s face it: when it comes to social networking, Facebook is the only game in town. MySpace and other early networks are a speck in its rear view mirror. Everyone is on Facebook: your friends, your ex-girlfriend, your mom and dad, the people you went to high school with and never want to see again, [...]

More Paranoia out of Arizona; NCTE Responds

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

First there was the legislation that allowed Arizona police to ask for the papers of anyone they suspected of being illegal. Then, there was the equally idiotic law barring ethnic studies in Arizona public schools. Now, the Arizona Department of Education is prohibiting teachers “with heavy accents” from teaching English language learners. In other words, [...]

Best Explanation Yet of Web 3.0, the Semantic Web

Monday, May 10th, 2010

My class spent about an hour today thinking and talking about Web 2.0. What struck me about our conversation was how much the class already knew about Web 2.0–and how mainstream most Web 2.0 applications have become. The social media, in other words, have become almost transparent. We use them so much, we don’t really [...]

Networking Saved Educational Nings

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

This may be premature, but it seems like the folks at Ning are listening to us. They just announced that Ning would continue to allow educators to use their ad-free service for no charge. What’s cool about this, besides the obvious fact that a bunch of my sites won’t need a new host, is the [...]

Smackdown: What You Know Vs. Who You Know

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

In case you missed it, yesterday marked the beginning of a historic partnership between Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft launched a new service called Docs.com (still in beta) that aims to compete with Google Docs as an online productivity suite. The site looks very sleek–much sleeker than Google Docs–but this is not the big deal. The [...]

Smackdown: Cloud Computing Vs. Apps

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

I see two real trends in web-based technology emerging. The first is cloud computing, which is the movement of all computing to the web. What this means, in economic and practical terms, is a trend away from software packages such as Microsoft Office and toward web-based applications such as Google Docs. For now, these cloud [...]

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