Install a Google GMail notifier for Firefox

There is a nice and useful extension for Firefox called GMail Notifier that checks your Gmail.com account and shows the number of unread messages in your inbox. Download it and load it in the Firefox browser via the File -> O... [Mac OS X Hints]

Mac OS X Tip of the Week: Burning a CD from the Finder

What do you do after you’ve loaded a blank CD (or a DVD) into your Mac? Find out on the Apple Pro/ site in the latest Mac OS X killer tip. [Sep 21] [Apple Hot News]

A Computer In Every Classroom

Schools are spending a fortune on technology in the hopes of gaining relevance with Generation I. Bad news--they've already lost. [Kuro5hin.org]

Such Great Heights

Since the release of Give Up early last year, Sub Pop records has offered the Postal Service's two lead singles available as free downloads on their website, and they've sold more than 300,000 copies of their album. Despite the fact that the songs have been downloaded, for free, 1.5 million times since then, Such Great Heights and The District Sleeps Alone have both been in the top 100, sometimes at the same time, on the iTunes Music Store for the past several months.

But I've worked with the music industry in the past... I'm pretty sure they still think we're all a bunch of thieves.

[Anil Dash]

Zuckerman: Wikipedia needs to cover non-nerdy subjects

Cory Doctorow:
Ethan Zuckerman, who founded the GeekCorps org that works to help bring tech to Africa, has created a call-to-arms for the free, collaborative Wikipedia encyclopedia to address its systemic bias towards subjects of interest to white, Anglo-American nerd-boys, expanding its net to cover things like the Congo Civil War, nursing, and agriculture.

Wikipedia is biased toward over-inclusion of certain material pertaining to (for example) science fiction, contemporary youth culture, contemporary U.S. and UK culture in general, and anything already well covered in the English-langauge portion of the Internet. These excessive inclusions are relatively harmless: at worst, people look at some of these articles and say "this is silly, why is it in an encyclopedia?"

Of far greater (and more detrimental) consequence, these same biases lead to minimal or non-existent treatment of topics of great importance. One example is that, as of this writing, the Congo Civil War, possibly the largest war since World War II has claimed over 3 million lives, but one would be hard pressed to learn much about it from Wikipedia. In fact, there is more information on a fictional plant

Link

(via Many2Many) [Boing Boing]

Educational Blogging--Must Read

An exceptional article by Stephen Downes in this month's Educause Review should become, as others have said, must reading for any educator interested in using blogs in the classroom. Stephen does just a great job of giving context to Weblogs as classroom tools, providing an overview of the tools out there, and challenging some of the assumptions that have attached themselves to blogs as they become more and more mainstream.

The best part, however, is that Stephen really sets the stage for where our discussions need to go next.

And herein lies the dilemma for educators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don’t say the wrong things?

That gets to the essence of one of my most closely held beliefs about all of this, that the real power of the tool is in the type of writing it facilitates, namely, blogging. Which in turn leads to the larger question of how do we use Weblogs to nurture blogging? How do we create enough freedom within our curriculum to allow students to write about their passions? How do we find and develop audiences for our students to reach and interact with? How do we use Weblogs to develop lifelong learning skills instead of just making them storehouses of digital paper?

Jeff Rice speaks to this when he asks "What about Weblog pedagogy?"

What I tend to be seeing is a lot of usage of the tool for non-web practices: taking notes, journal writing, etc. Some folks seem surprised that students yawn at this approach. Course, these students were probably yawning when we did the same thing without a weblog, right (and I, too, have been guilty of asking students to use weblogs in such a way for group work or research)? Oh great. Another stupid journal assignment, but now I have to do it on the Web... Weblogs are being used all the time, all over the Web, but in ways which don't mesh with many of these created assignments. Folks want to write. Many find this tool very helpful for writing. Academia is too far behind to understand how to integrate it into the classroom.

I think I've just decided to make that my question/quest for this school year...how do we integrate Weblogs into the classroom in ways that enhance learning instead of just manage practice? The only way to answer that is to focus on what makes a Weblog unique as a writing environment, because everything else could be just as well accomplished with paper and pen or Word or any of those other tools that we've been using.

Anyway, a great article, with another one about wikis in the same issue, and a third by Middlebury's own Bryan Alexander. Good, good stuff...all by bloggers. [Weblogg-ed News]