While I work on revising this site, here are a couple of videos in support of Barack Obama. The first is an inspiring music video from MC Yogi, the second is a well-reasoned and powerful argument from General Colin Powell.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

This site is being rebuilt. Please excuse the mess.

This morning, Doug Noon shared a post entitled “The Fiction of Intellectual Property.” The post and the comments are thoughtful, but ultimately frustrating. What follows isn’t a direct response (hence, I didn’t leave a comment), but just some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for a while related to that post and many others like it.

For a while now, it has seemed to me that the two “sides” of the IP/copyright debate have made little progress with the other side mainly because of fear. Each side is unwilling to admit compromise out of the fear that the other side will be unwilling to admit compromise, resulting, stupidly and predictably, in a stalemate.

If IP supporters could admit that the law unfairly benefits the corporations and that those laws need to change, and if the IP opponents could admit that a change in the law does not mean an overthrow of all laws, then both sides might be able to actually have a conversation about the best ways to bring fair and balanced change, rather than just screaming at each other across an imaginary line.

The founders were concerned with having a system in place that would encourage the sharing of ideas and thus established a “limited monopoly” on those ideas to provide the creators of those ideas the chance to profit from them. The system in which ideas are shared is certainly more complex now, but the basic principle is unchanged: a society that wants to encourage the sharing of ideas must provide those who are creating those ideas the chance (not guarantee, and only for a limited time) to profit from their work. Why is this position so hard to agree upon as a starting point for moving forward with the details?

The most reasoned discussion I’ve found on this topic so far is still Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, in which he argues that the laws must change, but never argues for lawlessness or the denial of creators to profit from their creations.

If we continue to argue about this issue, can we at least let go of our fear of “the other” and argue about the specifics of proposed solutions that might bring us closer to a fair and balanced compromise?

It seems like the last week or so has been filled with some great updates to some of my favorite online (or online-related) services. Admittedly, they’re not all directly related to education, but good news is good news.

Here are the highlights:

• Wordpress is updating to version 2.5, and it looks pretty sweet! (I don’t want to think about plugin compatibility yet … just let me enjoy the buzz.)
• The Vertov plugin adds video annotation to Zotero. Zotero is an awesome research tool, and adding video to its list of impressive features is a big step.
• Digsby adds Twitter to its list of social networks! Digsby is a great and easy way to keep track of the major IM platforms, webmail providers, and social networks, and now Twitter joins the Digsby collection.
• Diigo improves its look and its toolbar! Already a great way to archive and annotate online pages, Diigo’s update makes using the service even easier.
• Mytopia brings cross-network gaming, which means you can waste time with friends all over the place, even if they’re not on the same network!
• Facebook adds more nuanced privacy options, giving users more control over who can see what.
• And earlier in the week, Flock released version 1.1, adding webmail to its slew of social-goodness.

I added a post on this topic to the TeachEng.us blog.  Here’s the teaser:

… if I were in the classroom right now, and had students with consistent Internet access, I think I’d ask them to keep a few different writing spaces: a private journal, a public journal, a blog “notebook” or two, and a personal wiki.

Here’s the rest of the post.

I delivered a presentation last night to teachers who work in a county that only allows them to use Blackboard.  Given that, I saw no point to going in and talking about the possibilities that other tools and services make available, or complaining about the limitations of Blackboard.¹  That’s a presentation for the administration.  Instead, I tried to think of some suggestions to help teachers get the most out of Blackboard.

I discussed forums, blogs, and wikis–first in general, then in Blackboard specifically.  My main point was that the two most powerful elements "Web 2.0" technologies bring to the classroom are audience and ownership.  It’s these elements, and not the tools themselves, that are significant and that can result in genuine learning if teachers know how to respect and protect these elements, take advantage of them, and guide students to opportunities for discovery.

The notes are available on my wiki: "Working with Blackboard."  Feel free to edit the pages or to argue/expand in the comments here or the discussion tab there.

1. Not to mention it’s questionable legal tactics.

I mentioned the notebook/textbook approach in my previous post, so I thought I’d take a minute here to explain it further.  The idea is pretty basic, and something a lot of people already do without necessarily calling it that.  To me, it’s just an approach to these tools that integrates blogs and wikis into a continual (and transparent, interactive) aspect of learning by:

1. maintaining a blog (or a few blogs) as a "notebook":¹ a place to record notes and think through their implications, with little concern for whether or not there is an "audience" and without an emphasis on timeliness or polemics
2. maintaining a wiki as a "textbook": a place to attempt some synthesis of thoughts and ideas over time, with the added benefit of minimizing redundancy and forgetfulness that can happen on a blog

Where the blog tracks fragmented thoughts and hypotheses over time, the wiki attempts to build some cohesive, connected (and still tentative) conclusions.

Certainly, there are more ways to use blogs and wikis, but this personal approach appeals to me right now as I seek to dig deeper into a few topics.  I’ll probably be keeping some notes here about how this experiment is going.

1. a thought inspired by Christopher Sessums’ post

This is a quick post to welcome myself (and any readers) to the new home for my education-related blog “notebook.”

A few words of explanation:

• First, if you subscribed to my old blog “Sicheii Yazhi,” you’re probably getting this post. That’s because I moved the feed from that blog to this one, assuming that most people who subscribed to that blog did so for the education-related content. You’ll also find that all the education-related posts from “Sicheii Yazhi” are now archived on this blog.

  If you want to jump feeds, the new feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/seemsliketeaching

• Second, I say “notebook” because I plan to use this blog (and a few others) as just that–a place to collect notes and reflections on readings, research, and experiences (as opposed to the timeliness and polemics of a more traditional blog).  I also plan to work with a wiki to attempt to draw some synthesis from the various notes over time.
• Third, the entries in this notebook will, at least initially, be a bit sporadic.  As I explained in my farewell post on Sicheii Yazhi, I’m slowing down my time online to focus more on some offline activities.  However, education is still a topic about which I’m passionate, so I established this space as a way to keep track of related notes.

Regardless of how you found your way here–stumbling on accident or dragged forcibly through the feed–welcome.  I hope you’ll decide to hang around and leave a comment or two on any notes you find interesting.  If not … no hard feelings.  I wish you well.

From Cognitive Daily’s “Does test-taking help students learn?”

Practice tests need not duplicate the format of the final test. Instead, practice tests should require as much effort as possible from the test taker. If the goal is long-term retention, final tests should also be in a free-recall format rather than, say, choosing from a list of possible answers.

If this is true, and holds up under long-term studies, then it’s another powerful argument against the typical multiple-choice standardized test.

Of course, memorizing lists of words is about as far from “learning” as you can get and still be on the same continent.  Interesting study nonetheless.

Peter Rock has been graciously helping me continue to think about copyright over on his blog.  It started with his post "sharing denies nothing" in which he says:

Most certainly, file sharing does not include payment (hence “sharing”), but that’s very different than an active “denying” of payment. While the difference is subtle, it is significant and skews any copyright argument if not acknowledged.

My response started a back-and-forth which, I’m sure, wouldn’t suffer from other voices …

Care to join?