enviable stuff

Sure, Wave is big. It’s probably going to be useful. But for now, it’s really just a glorified, collaborative, polysynchronous “Hello World!” generator. Yes, you can embed Gadgets/Doodads/Whatnots. Yes, you can make it convert your text into Pirate Speak. Very cool. Awesome. I can feel the future changing.

So far, from my limited experimentation with it, it is too confusing to use as a conversation space. It’s too disconnected to use as a publishing medium. So, its real functions have yet to be discovered. It’s not email. It’s not the web as we know it. It’s something different. But that doesn’t mean there is anything necessarily wrong or broken about what we have now.

If I want to communicate, I’ll talk to people. Or IM. Or email. Or write a blog post. Or post a tweet. Or any of an uncountable list of other activities, none of which are replaced by Wave. And that’s OK. It’s not going to absorb and consume all online interaction. It’s not going to change the world. It doesn’t have to.

Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland _small_?
Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliche corner
To a fool who cries "Nothing but heather!" Where in September another
Sitting there and resting and gazing around
Sees not only heather but blaeberries
With bright green leaves and leaves already turned scarlet,
Hiding ripe blue berries; and amongst the sage-green leaves
Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the tormentil shining;
And on the small bare places, where the little Blackface sheep
Found grazing, milkworts blue as summer skies;
And down in neglected peat-hags, not worked
In living memory, sphagnum moss in pastel shades
Of yellow, green and pink; sundew and butterwort
And nodding harebells vying in their colour
With the blue butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon them,
And stunted rowans with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour
"Nothing but heather!" -- How marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!
-- Hugh MacDiarmid

I am not a political nationalist and I know this exercise could be repeated anywhere, but I love this poem's sense of place and this place.

The BBC today reports the Cambridge Primary Review.

There are many good bits and this fills me with hope: Children should not start formal learning until they are six, a review of primary education in England says. Instead the kind of play-based learning featured in nurseries and reception classes should go on for another year. There is no evidence that an early introduction to formal learning has any benefit, the review says, but there are suggestions it can do some harm.

So a big YES, YES, YES from me !! At last … but will politics get in the way of educational sesnse?

Glow will soon support user blogs and wikis, allowing pupils and classes to create web pages and online diaries to showcase their work to other schools across Scotland. Promoting individualised learning and collaboration, this will be the first time Scotland has had access to a national education blog and wiki service.

This sounds like the best glow news I have heard

I have never felt particularly comfortable with Marc Prensky’s Digital Immigrants or Natives (PDF Download). Something about the term has always struck me as not quite right, maybe the realisation that I wasn’t really seeing any influx of media savvy youngsters hitting the schools who showed a greater understanding of the power of the technology…

I've never felt comfortable with it either, Neil goes on to combat the technophobes.

I could go on and rant about the inherent inelegance of storing two essential pieces of a file’s metadata, name and type, in a single field — shackling what Apple proclaims to be “the world’s most advanced operating system” to a metadata limitation of MS-DOS from 1981 — but there’s no use crying over spilled milk.

I am going to miss creator codes.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

via Ewan Young and addicted to social networks: and they've never written so much - edublogs

The title of John’s talk by the way comes from Ivan Illich’s ‘Tools for Conviviality’. A copy of the text is here for you to read. John pointed out that he re-reads it regularly and some times he agrees, other times he disagrees with what Illich says. Conviviality, according to Illich is seen as individual freedom and personal interdependence, which sounds oppositional but in fact is exactly what education should be about too.

love the 'some times he agrees, other times he disagrees with what Illich says'