XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.Alan Levine has gives us a nice list of podcast work over at Maricopa
Community Colleges. His posting provides this nice links to various staff and student projects as well as podcasts from their Honors Forum speakers and samples form their Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom Learnshop. Also, if you’re using Moveable Type and want a nice tutorial on how to create podcasts on that platform, you should definitely check out Alan’s helpful set of podcasting instructions (with suggested ancillary tools).

James Farmer was asked recently for his opinion on about “closed-off journaling tools (limited audiences / student-teacher),” and while he could see little value in it personally, did suggest that both Elgg and Drupal could handle the job. While it makes little sense pedagogically to limit communities (insist on centripetal rather than centrifugal learning momentum), there

Jenny Levine provides a nice overview of catalog tagging at the UPenn library. As Jenny points out, the advantages of this tagging system are 1) Students can rely on their trust networks to locate materials that they
wouldn’t otherwise see, 2) Professors can assign books and tag each one with the course number, and 3) Librarians can easily create online subject oriented reading lists. This is a great example of how community tools like tagging can be used effectively to improve information resources in education.

Will Richardson has been focused on a particular thread of late, with posts on the mashup meme and now this post on teaching students to teach. He writes:

I love that idea of just breaking out of the textbook mold and presenting teachers and students with all sorts of choices from which to cobble together a more relevant and interesting learning experience. (Remember “Teacher as DJ”?) And then having students perform their own mashups to add to the menu. But that is such a different way of approaching the classroom.

Then, a bit later he adds:

But I wonder how much further down the road they’ll be able to run than the kids who aren’t getting the chance to create and connect their own content either because they can’t afford it or their schools can’t see it. When I think about this, I see amazing potential. But I also see a lot of kids getting left further and further behind. For too many, learning is still pre-packaged, and it will remain so for quite some time unless some major changes occur. The same holds true for educators who are unwilling to imagine what could be, much like the Oscar voters who couldn’t bring themselves to see Brokeback Mountain because of the “unsettling” content (at least for them.)

I agree with Will that we are entering a new “great divide” and it’s the difference between read-only and send-receive models. One group will Rip/Mix/Burn and the curriculum will indeed be a mashup, while another will carry on as usual processing static, pre-packaged information. David Warlick addresses this in his post by saying “I think that the problem is that the standards movement is simply a wagon that I’m not riding on.” Such is true for a growing number of educators and students.