So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, we all want to be at the top of search results, but…

So the New York Times has an editorial about blogs today.

It’s natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it’s also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.

Nice! And check out the new Blog Stamp from Cafepress. I think we’ve officially arrived…
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Jimmy Wales (the creator of Wikipedia) is guest posting over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog on “Ten Things That Will Be Free.” Today’s installment is a free curriculum:

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

And you can hear the chorus of “Butwhatabout”s from educators of every stripe who have yet to understand what’s happening “out there.” It’s like I tell those who are the vicitims of my blogvangelizing, it’s not that you necessarily have to use all of these tools (though that would be nice because kids need models for how to use them well,) but it is that you have got to get your brain to recognize what social, collaborative, easy content creation and publishing means to our classrooms and to our practice. It is transformational, and to not take the time to at least consider the potential could very well render you irrelevant in short order.

If you do read the whole post, make sure you read the discussion that follows as well.
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I’m becoming more and more enamored with Moodle the more I dig into it. And the discussion of late on the Moodle blogs forum has been nothing short of amazing, I think. (Here’s the feed address if you want to follow it.) For instance, the idea that we could use Moodle as a platform for eportfolios has been making the rounds of late, and Eastern Kentucky University is doing just that. Here’s a snippet of the conversation:

When trying to envision how to set-up an eportfolio for students from within Moodle, I kept running into problems until I stopped thinking about how to set this up for Moodle “students” and started thinking about setting it up for Moodle “teachers”.

What we will be doing this Fall is creating a Moodle course for each of our students to use to create their eportfolio. We will make each student a “teacher” in his/her own course and will not enroll students…access to the eportfolios will be via guest access and each eportfolio owner can require an enrollment key or not to view their eportfolio. We are in the process of customizing the language files…renaming “course” to “eportfolio”, “Teacher” to “Portfolio Owner”, “Student” to “Portfolio Visitor” etc.

Now I know that may not have much relevance if you’re not a Moodleite (Moodleist? Moodler?), but the semantics just blow me away. It comes close, I think, to this new model of learning that we’re looking at, the idea that as learners, we are all to some extent going to be the teachers of our own courses, take ownership of our own learning within the context of a larger social network that supports us.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the transparency of all of this early thinking about how we can use these tools in new and interesting ways? Way too much fun.