Daily Archives: June 14, 2010

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It feels like ages since I've blogged and even longer since I've blogged anything worthwhile. Of course, the longer I leave writing here, the more the self doubt sets in and makes me wonder if I have anything worthy of pushing out to say. So, the counteractive cure to that is put up a grandiose title and have a bit of at length pontification about the current state of play in the edtech world.

I'm sick of Windows' complete vulnerability to trojans, worms and other nasties especially when I'm trying to get mid year reports written on my school XP laptop. Files don't play nice across platforms so doing it all on my favourite MacBook Pro wasn't really an option. Interestingly, I can plug in a USB flashdrive into the Mac and see all these weirdly named folders (Kalba, Doda, Gravity etc.) that I just know shouldn't be there but the Mac won't let me delete them. Plug it back into the XP laptop and they become invisible but the crazy stuff happens then. I have found that I can plug in, see and delete these nasties in my son's Ubuntu netbook. Another win for Open Source, I suppose.

I got another invitation in my inbox to be on one of those Top 100 Edublogs lists that seem to be all the rage. What disinterests me is how many policy, corporate and cause based blogs keep making those lists. I'm only interested in reading edubloggers who write for themselves, that are identifiable individuals with clear personalities and quirks - now that's a list I'd be honoured to be on. I find it hard to take sites that call themselves onlinedegrees or onlinembas seriously, especially when the internet is a great conduit for learners who don't want to follow a traditional credentialling process. Give me an empassioned teacher breaking free of the confines of their classroom over some politically driven ISTE-style bandwagon hopper. Jose sums it up better than I can anyway.

While I've been looking at how one might go about setting up, fund and implementing a 1:1 laptop program, David Truss has introduced a new concept that really resonates - the BYO laptop program. Not sure how it would fly in Australian government schools with the bureaucratic need to cover liability but it is worth considering. And I'm beginning to warm to the idea of iPads in the classroom, especially in the younger years.

Meh.. not really much to say. But it's a start. I'll see what gets my brain churning next.