XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.I really liked Darren Kuropatwa’s post yesterday on encouraging excellence. In it, he talks about a mentors blog he has set up and describes the work three of his volunteer mentors are doing for his AP Calculus class students. I agree with Dean — this is precisely how blogging becomes transformational. It allows connectedness (apologies to George Siemens) and the creation of distributed informal communities.

Tim Stahmer writes about the high cost of testing. Referencing an article in the NY Times, Tim points out that students will take 45 million exams this year, and that doesn’t include the SAT and similar college gateway tests. Problems with the setup and scoring of these tests may be bad, but they do not compare those being introduced due to the high costs associated with administering and scoring all of these tests. “Rather than trying to teach kids to understand, analyze, and evaluate
information, the underfunded requirements of NCLB are rapidly leading to
assessments asking them only to spit back facts.” This makes a nice setup for Miguel Guhlin’s post about cool things related to Digital Storytelling projects and how kids learn much more with these than through standard assessment practices. Of course, this is all related to NCLB in the United States and Wesley Fryer also weighs in on this subject referring to quotes form President bush.

When it comes to the incessant debate about whether Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica is more accurate, Dave Cormier gets it right. The argument is…

“Irrelevant. There are no gatekeepers protecting knowledge. Or at least, the
gatekeepers are very difficult to find and/or they can’t do their jobs very well anymore. What we have now are salespeople, they are selling particular brands of knowledge and we need to teach our students to be good consumers.”

Jay Cross looks at RSS feeds and the various views available in aggregators and discusses how we can best manage and see information the way we need it. This is an interesting post because of the bigger issue it touches — personal information management. Honestly, I don’t know how people not using aggregators, and/or tagging systems manage their time or Web information at all. This is definitely one of those important skills we need to be teaching students.

Finally, a number of faithful edubloggers have been recording events from this week’s FETC sessions. Check out:

• Wesley Fryer blogging “The Old is New: Television, the Internet and Students by Peter Grunwald”
• Will Richardson blogging “21st Century Skills as Transformation in K-12 Schools–Ken Kay”
• Will Richardson blogging David Warlick’s keynote on podcasting.