Odds and Ends - Spring thaw 08

Been a busy, busy time for me with trips to Iowa to see my mom who is on the mend from hip surgery, to the state legislature where it is still on the waiting list for a brain donor, and to the DuKane Library Institute near Chicago where I had a chance work with outstanding area school library media specialist. (Pam Kramer runs a class act!) School board reports, workshop handouts and a column are sort of rounding out my evenings.

But the weather seems to be moderating! 

Anyway, I've not had the chance to explore entries in my GoogleReader as deeply as I'd like. Here are a few I need to get back to soon:

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Sorry to start with a negative, but Seth Godin is overrated. But now and then he does peak my interest. Like in this post:

Encyclopedia salesmen hate wikipedia...

And CNET hates Google
And newspapers hate Craigslist
And music labels hate Napster
And used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores.

Dating services hate Plenty of Fish
And the local shoe store hates Zappos
And courier services hate fax machines
And monks hate Gutenberg

Apparently, technology doesn't care who you hate.

LMSs and TLCs (Technology and Learning Coordinators) whom do we hate? Or do we just hate anything that asks us to examine what value we add to education - and then realize we must change as a result of what we find?

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 Wonderful blog entry by Pete Reilly on the need and content for a Students Bill of Rights. Check it out.

I took a little softer approach on this topic when second grandson Miles was born a couple years ago. Here are his "Bill of Rights."

Miles will start school in 2010 or 2011. Here’s what I hope he finds:

1. A place that cares as much about his happiness as his education.
2. A place that cares more about his love of learning than his test scores.
3. A place where he feels safe and welcome and can’t wait to get to every morning.
4. A place that honors creativity more than memorization.
5. A place that has a library full of stories and a librarian who makes them come alive.
6. A place where technology hasn’t taken the place of playing with blocks, finger-painting, naps, graham crackers, or a teacher’s soft encouragement.
7. A place where he learns to work and play with kids who make not have been given the blessings of a middle-class lifestyle or a fully-functioning body or brain.
8. A place that teaches kindness along with math, tolerance along with history, and conservation along with science.
9. A place where teachers are excited about teaching and passionate about encouraging the passions in their students.
10. A place where he is never compared to his older brother, Paul.

What would you put on a Students Bill of Rights?

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NCTE is going high tech on us! From its Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies.

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
  cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
  purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
  information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
  

Sound like any other sets of standards you've been reading lately??? Looks good, English majors!

(Full disclosure - I was an English teacher in my career's larval stage.)

Still have found no organization adopt my Bullshit Literacy Standards and I don't quite understand why. 

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I was very flattered to be tagged for a Blogs That Make Me Think Award by Carolyn Foote at A Not So Distant Future.

The rules of the meme are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote

In addition there is a note: “Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking! ”

Thanks, Carolyn. My guess is that what most people think while reading the Blue Skunk is "Why am I wasting my time reading this stuff?" Anyway, here are 5 folks who, as much as it makes my head hurt, really make me think:

1. Pete Reilly at Ed Tech Journeys
   
2. Paul at quoteflections 
3. Joyce Valenza at A Never Ending Search
4. Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog. (Recent observation: Women prefer taller men. That’s probably a good thing from an evolutionary perspective. If the preference worked in the other direction, eventually our descendants would evolve smaller and smaller until squirrels ate them.)
5. Stephen Abrams at Stephen's Lighthouse. 

 Ok, I actually have 68 subscriptions in my Reader and if all of them didn't make think at least once in a while, I wouldn't still be subscribed. Thanks to everyone who writes and shares...

 

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Two good posts this week with more realistic takes on Internet dangers:

• Nancy Willard"s  Social Networking Risks: The Myths and Realities
• David Pogue's How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?

Worth reading and sharing with the person who controls your Internet filter.

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And finally, I'll leave you with this inspirational quote: 

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks! - Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, authors of Animal Crossing: Wild World

Comments

[pete]

Doug,
Thanks for mentioning me in blogs that make your head hurt. Is there something I can do to ease the pain? :-)

pete

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Pete,

I hope you keep up your thoughtful and compassionate writing, despite it straining my brain!

All the best,

Doug