Gene Roche's Bookmarks

Gerard P. O'Sullivan, vice president for academic affairs at Neumann College, in Aston, Pa., is so worried about ChaCha that he is calling on administrators to consider a policy restricting cellphone use during class.

He says a campuswide policy would send a message to students that phone use is not acceptable, and keep instructors from having to seem like the "bad guy" for making students keep their cellphones in their backpacks. "It's better to have a unified policy because it relieves the professor of the onus of enforcement," Mr. O'Sullivan says.

I've been thinking about this recently, in particular what it means for education, educational technology and all the new types of activity and technologies that those of us in the blogosphere are always promoting.  I see one of two responses happening:



• Stick to what we know - in uncertain times an understandable reaction is to retreat into what you know best and what has worked in the past. These are not the times to start experimenting with new, risky approaches. For those in education that translates roughly as "stick with teaching subjects we know work, in a traditional manner. Publish in journals and get research funding in. Don't do anything rash."


• We need to find new models - this takes the opposite view: Now is exactly the time to start experimenting, because the market is tougher and you need to be more flexible. So, finding new ways of teaching, supporting students and disseminating knowledge are the best approaches  to respond to rapidly changing environments.

• The number of individual film titles in the College’s digital video streaming collection: 1,260.


• The number of times these films were watched last year: 20,662.

• Estimated number of hours it would have taken to update the graphics, navigation, and organization of the 2005-2006 College web site (static HTML): 50,000.


• Hours it took to roll out the new web site in August 2008 (database-driven): 3.5.

So this is my challenge to the Web 2.0 community: Solve the personal content and community problem. Take the multi-publishing chops of Ping.fm, the aggregation features of Friendfeed, the republishing capability of Twitterfeed (with more functions, please), and the discussion aggregation of Disqus, and put it all together into one simple, easy-to-maintain product that acts as a hub for publishing, reading, and community in all these services. And while you're at it, make sure you don't steal traffic or community from the services you're front-ending; they all have personalities we want to keep alive.

Start by saving this data into a file named schools.js somewhere that is served by your web server.

   {
       items: [
           {   label:      "MIT",
               type:       "School",
               address:    "77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139",
               subject:    "Computer Science"
           },
           {   label:      "Harvard Medical School",
               type:       "School",
               address:    "25 Shattuck St., Boston, MA 02115",
               subject:    "Medical"
           },
           {   label:      "Stanford",
               type:       "School",
               address:    "Stanford, CA 94305",
               subject:    "Computer Science"
           },
           {   label:      "CMU",
               type:       "School",
               address:    "5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213",
               subject:    "Computer Science"
           }
       ]
   }

And then copy this HTML into a file called schools.html in the same directory: