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So this is what happens when you go away for a few days without a great connection and you have over 600 posts to read in your aggregator when you get back and despite your best efforts to file stuff away or blog about it as you’re cranking through the heap you find way, way too much good knowledge to manage and when you shut everything down you realize that you’d have to be Wes Freyer to write about it all before your wife files for divorce.

Oy.

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David Warlick:

No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.

Whoa!
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From Alex Halavais:

At some point, the spy v. spy effort to contain cheating seems to occupy far more time than it is worth, and you fear you are neglecting the students who really are there to learn. In many ways, the propensity for students to cheat on the exams is a symptom of an educational system that has failed. If we cannot teach our students the value of learning, rather than the value of the GPA, we really are not very good at our job.

Read the comments thread too…

From the “Churning Through my Overloaded Aggregator Department” comes this discussion over at D’Arcy Norman’s blog about the ways in which tagging and aggregating via “EduGlu” can start bringing all sorts of content together. Now I’m a little slow on the machinations of all of this, but the basic idea here (I think) is that we can give our students a unique tag for any interesting content they find that’s relevant to a course, get them to start collecting that content in their blogs, on Flickr, in del.icio.us and anywhere else where tagging is allowed, and then pump the RSS feeds for that tag from all of those sites into a SuprGlu type page to create quite the extensive “River of News.” (And even if that’s not what they’re talking about, it’s a pretty cool idea just by itself.)

Which reminds me, I gotta remember to tag these posts. Another reason to get off of Manila which doesn’t have a form field for it. So here:

Tags: RSS, Tags, SuperGlu

When I read the Ewan had accidentally deleted his blog I literally felt sick to my stomach. I can’t imagine what I would do if that happened to me. (Actually, today I tweaked the template a bit and accidentally hit the “Restore Default Template” button. Oy. Luckily there was a confirm message, but that was enough to get my heart beating a bit faster.) I know that my blog host makes backups of everything, but still. I’m sure until I got it recontructed I’d be in agony.

But isn’t that the way we would want our students to feel if they suddenly lost the work that they had created? I wonder how many of them would. How many of them feel enough connection and ownership to the work they do to literally mourn the loss of that work? What does that say about what happens when you build a portfolio of conversations and ideas in this way, so that when you lose it you’ll spend hours, maybe days, trying to recreate it? What does that say about the work we’re giving them to do?

This is a bit different, isn’t it?

I love this comment that Ewan leaves at the end of the thread:

Thankfully I’ve managed to go back through the archive and save large number of the conversations I’ve valued in shaping my own opinions. Time to write a book, I think, and get them all on static (safe) paper

He’s kidding, of course, but he’s also making an important point. All of this, from the technology to the transparency to the unknowable audience is more of a risk. And that’s of course what makes it difficult for many to take on. The good news is, the reward for this risk is well worth it, at least for me. And I’m guessing Ewan would still agree.