Terry Elliott was there at the beginning of this whole blogs in education movement and his posts were always finely crafted, intelligent and thought provoking. Although I think he stayed the course in terms of using the technology in his classroom, his own blogging habit has been more off than on of late. But today, he commented on an “old” post on this site from almost two years ago that I didn’t want to go unread:

My take on blogs has always been that they blow the doors off institutional frameworks, especially moribund ones. Weblogs are a means to an end; and the end is learning not schooling. The strategic student is always looking for the extrinsic reward–the grade–so he or she will use it to get that grade, dust his hands together, and say, “Well, that’s that.” As long as schools consider weblogs as a just another delivery tool for the same old wine then it won’t matter how shiny, cool and new the bottle is. The best weblogs are their own reward. A few students get that right away, then they ask themselves, “What do I need a teacher for?” I am struggling with the same problem although I think what Dennis is talking about is the institutional difference between high school and higher ed. As David Wiley said recently, paraphrasing here, just because you are a good water polo coach doesn’t mean you do the same thing with horses. Chew on that, grasshopper. ;]

Great stuff, and a nice surprise to hear from one of the early adopters once again…
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So here’s Steven’s take on the whole Wikipedia as a source issue:

I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about using Wikipedia as an online resource. Many say that we shouldn’t trust it. My usual replay is that we shouldn’t trust anything both online and off. That includes those ready-reference materials that sit right at the reference desk that we turn to to answer a basic query (are there any basic queries anymore?) We should treat Wikipedia like we treat anything online. With skepticism.

Does anyone know of a Wikipedia article that has been deconstructed for accuracy?

Dan Gillmor gives a look at the future of the Web, as if we’re not already dealing with enough change. Here’s what we have today:

The big change in the read-write sphere came about because of applications such as weblogs, the personal journals that put newer material at the top, and wikis, sites on which anyone can edit any page. Not only could people make their own sites, but they could update them easily and rapidly.

Blogs have been especially important in the world of the read-write web.

They are far more than the “what I ate for breakfast” diaries of cliche; they have become a key part of a growing, complex global conversation.

We are moving quickly beyond text and pictures in this version of the web, to audio and video.

The cost of the gear we need to make high-quality content is plummeting while the power and ease of use continue to grow.

Ok…that’s all good. We’re all up to speed on that, right? RIGHT? But now there is this…

The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we’re learning how to program the web itself.

An operating system offers programmers something called an “applications programming interface,” or API. The APIs are essentially shortcuts for programmers who want to use underlying capabilities of the operating system, such as displaying text or printing, and they help products interoperate with each other.

The electric outlet in the wall is, to stretch the metaphor, an API. A manufacturer making a product that uses electricity can equip it with a plug that fits into the socket.

A variety of web APIs, offered by companies such as Google, Yahoo! Amazon and others, is letting programmers create new kinds of applications by wiring together various functions into what are called “web services”.

E-commerce has always been a web service, but when we can mix and match from various sites, by pulling specific information from their rich databases, we are moving into an entirely new sphere.

Brain. Numb. But working…
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I can’t remember where I got this pointer, but RSS Mix is a tool that will let you “rip” as many different RSS feeds as you like and mix them into one, which, of course, can make for easier learning. It’s in the spirit of Blogdigger Groups and Stephen’s eduRSS, and I’m sure some others. But it’s pretty vanilla, and I like it so far.

Since we’re embarking on our most excellent Tablet PC adventure at our school, I created the following five different search feeds and mixed them into one.