Attention to Attention

Twitter tweet Fleep Tuque (Chris Collins) shared this out at her own blogsite today and posted a link to it in Twitter, which I pursued: Fleep's the real deal when it comes to passion for teaching and learning and I like to see what she's seeing. What do ya know, it's another video from webpundit Howard Rheingold (aside: I'm reading Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life and Rheingold was a fundamental consulting resource during SL's formative years--he reportedly saw the 3Di as promising fulfillment of some key predictions he had made for society's future), whom I featured here just a few posts ago.

Here's a great review of Au's book from Daniel Terdiman at cNet News.

At the risk of becoming a mirror site for Howard, I'm also sharesharing. This is good, ya'll, real good:

My "Little" School in the Top 60 College Prep Schools Nationwide

University School of Nashville fared well in an admittedly not-that-scientific survey of eight top colleges, according to a Wall Street Journal report from December 2007. The report, compiled by the Journal's "Weekend Journal" staff, looked at freshman classes at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins to see how many independent school students were enrolled from various schools in 2007, then divided that number by the number of graduates at the high school.

USN was the only southeastern school in the list.

Yay. Now the disclaimer from the announcement:

Of course, college placement is only one measure of a high school's success, and varies from year to year. Many high schools emphasized to us that they strive to find the right match for each student, not the college with the most cachet.

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Still, a nice little gem for a unique school that attempts to do more than it has the money to do. I'm proud.

New Moo Cards!

Hey, all,

Toward preparing for NECC in San Antonio, I've created new mini-bizcards at moo.com, where I ordered 100 to have on hand for the week. This has also made it possible to upload the cards' image to Second Life and create business cards there! There's a little stack on the table in the Bloggers' Hut and the Podcasters' Place. Feel free to take a copy so you can always have my websites in your pocket (or at least most of them :).

Here's the image:

How Connected _is_ One?

Snow in Nashville March 2008

The Cost of War

My dear friend James Morrison sent me an email this morning that directed me to the Quaker's American Friends Service Committee website, where one may download .jpg or .pdf versions of images that relate the terrible economic cost of the war in Iraq in comparative terms. Eveready for the learning moment, I fired up Adobe Fireworks and noodled with turning these into an animated gif, something I have only limited experience doing. Here's the result. Once you have absorbed the message, click on over to the Friends site and sign the letter to congress imploring them to defund the war. It's killing us.

Will Richardson Live Blogging from New York

Silvia Martinez added the comment "It’s fascinating - a civil discussion between two educators about the essence of what we need to do to improve schools in the US." to educational innovator Will Richardson's "Live Blog" post from Teaching and Learning's "thirteencelebration.com" conference in NYC. More and more, it's becoming possible to "attend" to these events online in between classes and as one can. Travel? Certainly necessary, so there can be a strong diverse local audience. Participation? At will and as needed and justified. Learning? Anytime.

Catch up on the Live Blog post after the fact. Join Twitter or another educational network to build a set of resources to allow you access to live presentations. You can't attend if you don't know about 'em!

Attending a conference? Use CoverItLive, Twitter, or ustream.tv to share out. WOW!

Why Let Our Students Blog?

Forgive me if this is old news to you but it's new news to me. Connecting the dots from twitter to email to internet this morning (not an unusual pathway for me) I came across a video I'd like to share. It's from New Zealand teacher Rachel Boyd and I find it rather eloquent. Enjoy:

The Quality of "Many"...

Will Richardson blogged about Chris Jordan today, and it's such an amazing visual treat that I have to share out. It's also a fiercely coincidental koinkidink: Our school is hosting bead artist (don't discount that description because of the words used to compose it) David Chatt's incredible work this month. See a Nashville Tennessean article about that and also his own website.

Chris Jordan's "An American Self-portrait: Running the Numbers" visually depicts the statistics we may not otherwise appreciate. 1,000,000 (the number of plastic cups used on U.S. air flights ever 6 hours), 32,000 Barbie dolls (the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. in 2006), the 2,000,000 plastic beverage bottles used in the U.S. every 5 minutes. Wow.

Curiously enough, Chatt and Jordan are both Seattle artists. Hmmmmmm...

Jordan's two million plastic bottles:


David Chatt's "Portable Pink Parts"

Playing around with flauntr!

Free online image editor. Will the free stuff never end??? :)

flauntr.com

"Lives" -- Kindle Edition Now Available!

Yippee! Not that anyone loves me enough to have gifted me a new Amazon Kindle book reader, but if you're one of the lucky ones who does have anyone who loves you enough to buy you one, my little "pretty good American novel," Lives, is now available not only on Amazon.com in its print edition, and at Lulu.com in both trade paperback and .pdf download formats, but also as an electronic download for your oh-I'm-so-jealous ebook reader.

Here's what the new sales page looks like, and please note the next-to-nothing price. Instant gratification has never been cheaper! Enjoy!