It Was 20 Years Ago Today ...

No, wait. It was only about four years ago and it was 20 things, or something.  I've been noodling on the interweb now since 1995 (remember Mirsky's Worst of the Web?), reading articles in PC magazines, trying to find relevant sites.  I was navigating Yahoo! on a dumb terminal with ascii characters.  But I was determined!  I signed up for listservs, bulletin boards, you name it.  So, when our whole library attended that Drag You Kicking and Screaming Into Web 2.0 seminar (and, seeing the size of the conference room, headed right for the front and center table), I was all excited.  We were lucky (and still are) to have a director who encouraged us to do the 23 thangs that this blog was originally set up to chronicle.

And I may have gone a bit farther.  There was nothing on that list about Second Life, but I was so excited to see there was a library there (Thank a lot, Michael Stephens, for introducing me to that time-sucker) and, possibly, librarians, that I logged on 15 September of 2006.

Things are different now.  I'm still spread as thin as a 'possum on I-95, but slowly some of my regular sites have dried up.  Just recently Ning, where I hosted a ... ning on library programs for children went for the monetized model on me.  This was at a time when I no longer had the disposable income to support it as I did when I had to go pay on Flickr to support my burgeoning screen-shot habit.  And, besides, that pissed me off.  Then Vox collapsed - but offered to transfer hosting to TypePad.  Right after that, I received the message that Bloglines was quitting.

Bloglines was a mainstay of my Web 2.0 experience.  My daily cartoons were there, and all my blog subscriptions.  Bloglines was my Daily.  I am very, very sorry to see it close, but I guess "free" is a business model a tad ahead of its time. 

I am curious that this is happening at this particular point in time.  It's as if some loans have come due at about the same time and Ning opted to try to stay afloat while Vox and Bloglines threw in the towel. Vox was apparently under pressure from WordPress and Bloglines was done in by the ubiquitous and evil Google with the Google Reader.  I hate Google Reader.  Yes, Bloglines was often down, but I went there so often that I'd catch everything eventually.  And it was familiar, like a comfy old shoe.  That needed to be thrown away.  Oh well.

This is the End of an Era - and who will be next? Hmmmm?

It's Not About Making It Fun

Educating the Net Generation: How to Engage Students in the 21st Century by Bob Pletka

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The NetGen are even harder to engage than their predecessors, but, aside from adding technology to the mix, what's needed to engage them is less "teaching to the test" and more complex, relevant projects that challenges different skills (language, a subject such as math or history, technology) at the same time.  They need to go at their own pace and I know from experience even as an adult that classes only go as fast as the slowest student.  Technology can actually help in those instances, because a student can get instant feedback in how they are doing and then get one-on-one tutoring either from the program or the teacher.

I wasn't terribly impressed with the writings of the students themselves - maybe I need to go back and read some of my scribblings (GAH! NOOOOO!!!).



View all my reviews

Cross Posting

Grizzy has issued a statement on how she plans to commemorate 9/11 this year in SL, and I thought I would go along with it - I have put this picture and the following statement on my profile:

"To show solidarity with my Islamic brothers and sisters who have had their faith vilified as a result of the actions of extremists, I will be dressing my avatar in the traditional Islamic hijab for Tues - Sat this week."