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An Invasion of Armies Can be Resisted…

…but not an idea whose time has come, wrote Victor Hugo.

I just read a wonderful post over on the Fischbowl blog about a school ban on the use of certain “electronic devices” in class. The school I’m currently teaching at has just implemented a similar policy… and I think it sucks.

I was quite horrified when I heard the “new rule” for the start of the school year at my school here in Canada…

“No iPods, Cellphones or other electronic devices in class at any time”.

I can see little point in introducing rules that clearly cannot be enforced. I approached the vice principal after our first staff meeting and quizzed him about it, pointing out that I felt there were many educationally sound uses of an iPod in class, from class podcast projects to their use as a portable harddrive to some quiet private music to work to without bothering the rest of the class. He nodded sagely and said that of course, if it was for educational purposes it would be ok.

So what constitutes an “educational use” of these devices in the eyes of the administration? Apparently not very much, as we get reminded every morning that these devices of the devil are NOT to be in any classrooms.  In my opinion, any use of these devices that makes the classroom a better place to be or for learning to be made more effective, relevant or just plain enjoyable counts as an educational use. I really don’t think many teachers would be prepared to tolerate too many ongoing “un-educational” uses of them, such as having kids blasting music into their heads while the teacher was trying to explain something to the class.

But other than that, what really is the problem? Can’t teachers, if they see the MP3 player being used in a disruptive or annoying way, just say so to the kid and use it as a chance to impart a little “learning experience” about appropriate behaviour and appropriate uses of the device?

By placing a blanket ban on iPods and cell phones and “any other electronic device” (whatever that means), the administration sets themselves up for failure, or at least an ongoing battle that they will ever really win.

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Extra, Extra, Read all about it!

As my reliance on RSS feeds has increased lately I’ve outgrown my ability, or willingness, to manually keep track of the blogs that I like to follow. From initially wanting to keep up with a small handful of blogs from a few people I know, my needs have now grown to include a much larger number of blogs and feeds that I like to keep up with. Seems that there are lots of folk I know who are now blogging, as well as there being a number of “professional” blogs which I find interesting so the idea of automating the process of tracking them is definitely something I’m interested in.

Fortunately every blog comes with the built-in technology for doing exactly this – RSS. RSS (an acronym for Really Simple Syndication) creates a feed using XML which can be read and regularly checked by software designed to do just that. In effect, it’s a bit like managing email in that I have a list of blogs and websites that I’vesubscribed to, and the updates appear in my reader as soon as an update happens to any of them. I no longer need to remember to check all these sites to see if they’ve been updated – my feed reader does it for me.

On the Mac, I’ve been using a free open source RSS reader called Vienna, and I really like it. Very simple, easy to use and works well. There are a bunch of others of course – I tried NetNewsWire for a while, and although it was pretty good, it wasn’t free whereas Vienna was. I actually prefer Vienna’s interface more too.

On Windows, I hear that FeedReader or FeedDemon are pretty good, but I haven’t tried them. FeedReader looks quite good from the screenshots I’ve seen.

There are also a few web-based feedreaders such as Bloglines that work through the browser directly, but I’ve not really played with them very much. I guess I’m still an applications kinda guy 🙂

Either way, an RSS feed aggregator of some sort is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already done so. Managing all my blog and other feeds are so much simpler now that my software does the heavy lifting for me.

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Move over Lonelygirl, here comes Jo

Well, the big story on YouTube recently was that of Lonelygirl15, a supposed teenage girl named Bree who was videoblogging her life story on YouTube. I watched a couple of episodes and although it was interesting I couldn’t help thinking that it was an overly-slick production for a teenage girl to be making alone in her bedroom. As it turns out, lonelygirl did indeed turn out to be a hoaxygirl, and the whole thing was in fact made up by a couple of screenwriters looking to get some hype… For a while there, Bree was the most popular channel on YouTube.

But let me introduce you to some real YouTube videos made by Jo, a friend of mine back in Australia, and I think they are far more interesting than Bree and her made-up adventures. I worked with Jo on a couple of writing projects… at the time, she was head-over-heels in love with a new man in her life. Since then, well, things seem to have gone a bit pear shaped and Jo decided to vent her thoughts as a YouTube videoblog.

Jo muses about life and love, and gives us a little peek into her internet dating forays. I’ve enjoyed watching them, and think they deserve a look. Heck, they beat television anytime! You go girl!

Check them out at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Sassenech2