Haiku: A Learning System that Builds in Web 2.0 Functionality Topic: Instructional Activities
Haiku has carefully selected applications that respond to learning preferences, so a robust and solidly grounded instructional strategy is possible, as students and teachers incorporate audio, video, images, and other multimedia. The drag-and-drop feature makes it possible to share the resources in many places, including the discussion board.Finally, courses and schools that emphasize mastery learning and portfolios can combine the Web 2.0 applications, even using them in conjunction with Haiku's easy-to-use assessment, dropbox, gradebook, and calendar functions.
A new book, just released by Packt Publishing, can help make elearning solutions more efficient by using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. The book, which is intended for users who have a basic familiarity with the framework, and who wish to develop their own applications or enterprise solutions, contains valuable guidance and insight. It is not intended for users who want to develop exotic uses, nor does it require users to be familiar with more complex web-based applications. It is most valuable for the ways in which it instructs users in the planning, development, and deployment processes. The book is entitled Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend.
Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Courtney Love - the commodification of personal disaster is discussed from the point of view of a postmodern media confessional. This is a variant of the genre of the confession or confessional.
Susan discusses how the tabloid / media spectator confessional differs from that of, say, St. Augustine, or Rousseau, or even Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The tabloid confessional creates a false catharsis within the viewer that drives a hunger for another catharsis. It engenders addiction.
We can apply the ideas of Baudrillard or Lyotard quite nicely to this; also Richard Rorty.
Each paparazzi shot of Britney is a treasure trove of "what's wrong with this picture" -- and, while it's fun to try to pick out all the things that are a stylist's nightmare -- it's also instructive. In a single Britney pic, one might find ill-fitting wig over shaved head, a shirt worn as a dress (revealing fleshy buttocks), a miniature Yorkshire terrier wearing a cast on its leg, a crying child, assorted "wardrobe malfunctions," and assorted food and grease stains on expensive fabrics.
With Britney, we get to hone our skills at being social beings and identifying non-verbal communication and symbol interpretation. We recognize that people convey images with their appearance, and their acts. Britney shows how quickly people turn vicious when their expectations have been dashed, and how they attack people who do not fit the norm (whatever the "norm" is for the category the person seems to fit in).
With Britney, we get to see the unraveled costume, which in unraveling, reveals itself to be a costume, rather than the wardrobe the real person would wear.
Further, Britney's own (probably unintentional) deconstructions of a pop star image make the construction process transparent. It's Frankenstein's monster with the thick stitching hanging out for everyone to see that he is not the creation of a real god, nor is he, a real monster. Like Frankenstein's monster, who was given to eloquent soliloquies and exquisite pathos, Britney Spears shows her humanity as she rages against her Frankenstein (her mother?) and the loutish or greedy villagers who seek to devour and destroy (K-Fed? Perez Hilton and other bloggers?).
For full story, click here: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2007/08/britney-spears-construct-constantly.html
This podcast proposes solutons for small colleges and universities that find themselves in dire straits. Some of the colleges suffering from rising costs, declining enrollments, and declining contributions and endowments may have actually experienced a turnaround in the 1990s, but, due to circumstances, find themselves in trouble again. This article, by Susan Smith Nash, helps identify problems and proposes solutions.
By now, everyone is familiar with the attributes of the iPhone, but what about the smartphones?Let’s look at the Blackberry, the Blackjack, the T-Mobile Sidekick, Samsung, and others.With the ability to download, store, and play mp3 files, video files, and images, the competition has heated up.Smartphones are starting to have the functionality of handheld devices such as the Dell Axim.
New infrastructure and information architectures make downloading largerfiles and sending movies / images possible.Here are a few innovations around the corner:
HSUPA: High Speed Uplink Packet Access. 1.5 Mbps up to 5.76 Mbps
HSDPA:High Speed Downlink Packet Access, with 3 Mbps up to 14.4 Mbps.
This is an improvement over the current method, WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) because it will be fully 5 times the speed of WCDMA.
Future possibilities include:
Delivery of Instructional Content to Massive Multi-User Groups
Uniform, low cost, highly effective test preparation
Virtual study groups
Multi-user webinars via Elluminate or other conferencing software
Synchronous professional development using polling and interactivity
Learners can now can take the complete Myers-Briggs personality type assessment, verify their types, and receive a high-quality interpretation at one place, completely online through CPP, Inc, at http://www.mbticomplete.com. While personality tests have been widely available on the Internet for years, some of the more complicated, more statistically valid ones, have been costly, or have required one to hire an expensive service for evaluation of the results.
For decades, individuals, corporations, the military, and other organizations have used personality tests, usually in the form of questionnaires, or “inventories,” to determine an individual’s personality profile. Matching a personality profile with a job can result in a better “fit” between the tasks and an individual’s interests. Creating teams with individuals who have complementary personality traits can lead to enhanced productivity. Finally, supervisors and fellow team members can begin to understand, and have more tolerance for, trait differences.
I sometimes wonder if we're running the risk of forgetting how similar the stories of those who came to the U.S. in the early years of the 20th century are to many of today's immigrants. We like to think that arriving in the U.S. means instant American Dream, but for many, it's a life of fear, secrecy, discrimination, and low-wage work.
One writer whose story is often overlooked, is that of Carlos Bulosan (1911?-1956), who came to the United States from the Philippines. A dedicated reader, Bulosan completed a book a day. He translated his passion for the written word into poetry and prose.
Perhaps his most celebrated work is his memoir, America is in the Heart, published in 1946, which details his experiences of work, love, and life in California. Bulosan is the outsider’s outsider who does not feel a sense of belonging, even within certain ethnic subgroups. No matter how much he may yearn for his family and his home country, Bulosan cannot return to the Philippines, due to violence and threats to his personal safety. Yet, America has not been the safe, comfortable dream he had hoped for. Instead, his experience of America is that of a series of menial jobs, short-term friendships, jail, marginalization, and economic insecurity.
Bulosan describes his mindset during the first years of life in the U.S. as one of confusion and defiance. He feels himself to be voiceless and powerless, and the world around him refuses to acknowledge his viewpoint. He dislikes the labels society has put in place, and in one instance, while he is working at a restaurant in Buellton, California, he reacts: “When a Filipino and a white woman came to the restaurant to eat and were refused, I flung my apron away and attacked the headwaiter with my fists” (America is in the Heart).
He was fired. No one bothered to ask, however, why he erupted in anger. Some of the history of Filipinos in the U.S. can be found at an online exhibit for Carlos Bulosan.
Bulosan writes to inform readers of the experiences of Filipino immigrants, and the sadness that accompanies a longing for home. Bulosan believes he has a common bond with other immigrants – he describes a conversation with a French immigrant who became sad upon hearing the wind through peach trees because it reminded him of the sounds of his native Normandy. There are life lessons to be learned in this. One of the most compelling is that bonds are remarkably difficult to forge once one considers oneself ostracized or outgrouped.
Yet, it is precisely the sense of longing, nostalgia, loneliness, and the seeming randomness of one’s own existence that unites individuals. Bulosan speaks to the fact that individuals can find kindred spirits and thus bond in that way. S
hort Answer Questions: Carlos Bulosan
1. How did the author’s environment affect his mindset?
2. What community has the author identified himself with, and how?
3. How did the author’s ethnic background influence his mindset?
4. Why did the author continue to work at trying to rehabilitate his brother when he admits that he felt that it was futile?
5. Explain the stereotyping that accompanied the author’s brother and the effect on both his brother’s and his own life.
6. Although Carlos seemed to have a sense of loyalty to his brother, Amado did not seem to share the same sense of loyalty. How did Amado’s sense of connection with a particular group or community effect where his loyalties lied?
7. Why would a man who came to America to make his fortune, and apparently succeeded, advise Carlos to go back home?
8. Why wouldn’t the author take the man’s advice and go home even when he was continuously discriminated against in the US?
9. List all of the ways in which the author and others of his same ethnicity were discriminated against in this reading.
For more information and instructional materials, please contact Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. and Elaine Bontempi, Ph.D.
Effective Annotated Bibliographies: Virginia Tech example
This video discusses how to develop an effective annotated bibliography. Included is a step-by-step approach applied to the example of paper that is investigating school violence, and the examples of Virginia Tech, Columbine, and theories of emulatory violence (Bandura), sociological pressures, psychological consequences of abuse, etc. How to develop categories for your annotated bibliography is discussed.
One of the Marshalls needs to come forward and settle it once and for all that J. Howard Marshall II's frozen sperm was used to impregnate Anna Nicole Smith, and the father was not one of the twenty or so pretenders, even if one is Zsa Zsa Gabor's Prince (formerly known as Hans Robert Lichtenberg). ...
[cut]
...Anna Nicole Smith utterly effaced the boundary between the real and the unreal, the constructed and the re-constructed. She embarked on an endless reification process, an ourobourous-like self-swallowing, self-devouring metamorphosis. We could see the transformations occur as she bloated, shrank, bloated and shrank again, and as she slurred, stumbled, and drooped her eyes.
In the end, though, something strange happened. Anna Nicole Smith, although she was ostensibly simply a self-constructed copy of a self-construction (the Gatsby-esque Marilyn), seemed more real.
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