Viva el Wiki ("Cosa 6")

Establishing a PBWiki is not an "Impossible Dream" worthy of Don Quixote--it is surprisingly easy, as I discovered today. The hard part appears to be making it interesting and managing it well. That is the next phase for my Wiki, "hispanismo" and I welcome ideas from any and all readers.
My goal is have student contributors both create and edit content on topics related to Spanish study, especially topics of value to AP Spanish students. Any ideas for refining this concept?
A student contributed a link for a Wiki site for statewide debate that may be of interest to you: http://wiki.debatecoaches.org/index.php?title=Main_Page. I plan to try and model my Wiki on this.

Gagged by Google?

In a previous post (October 29), I mentioned my concerns about the content editing of search engines, especially Google's. Here is another take on the recent censorship of You Tube (owned by Google) sites that were deemed offensive to Turkish government authorities: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Google&st=cse
Near the end of the article, the author quotes Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School: "If your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."
This would make a great topic for social studies / economics teachers to explore at the high school level, and is even more appropriate to college courses on business ethics. How quickly idealism and transparency can be thwarted!

It Just Keeps Getting Better...(Thing 6)

Now, we may no longer have to search alone--there is a new collaborative tool for group searching, "Search Together." It has features such as a drop-down menu to see (con)current collaborators, and enables a group's members to work together online simultaneously. Another great feature for the average person is allowing users to save their results to share with others in the future.

Rather than recapitulate the recent New York Times article (Sunday, November 23, 2008) where I first learned about this, I suggest that that you take a look for yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/business/23novelties.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=The%20Online%20Search%20Party&st=cse. "Search Together," is in a free test version at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether. I am going to try and think of an application that my students could use. The only potential catch is that it is designed to work within the Internet Explorer 7 browser, so that may be an issue for some users. Talk about productivity plus! Now, it's time to get back to the real world of student projects.

I have succeeded in creating an iGoogle home page that I enjoy for personal communications but prefer to maintain my current school webpage and email for professional communications. In many other countries, especially those in Europe and Latin America, people prefer some degree of separation between work and personal life. That is an approach that has served me well. North Americans tend to conflate jobs and personal identity. My job is what I do, not who I am.

Google docs may eventually help to improve my productivity--it would be ideal if I only taught two classes a day and had time to play around with it to the extent that I would like. I plan to create a Spanish-language wiki in the near future to encourage communication among students and between students and me. I think that it would encourage a degree of candor and greater freedom to share ideas at one's convenience, rather than in a context governed by schoool schedules.

Into the Stacks (Thing 5)

How could anyone who values the pursuit of knowledge not love conventional libraries? They are far more than dusty repositories. Here is a wonderful link for a student poem about libraries and what they can mean to our students:

http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html. If you prefer, here is one in Spanish:

http://www.poemasde.net/la-biblioteca-de-beardsley-domingo-f-failde/

I have constantly used the public library to support my teaching and my own learning, although, as a library patron with advanced research skills in some domains, I generally prefer specialized libraries.

Among the resources that secondary World Language teachers can exploit are: books in other languages at all levels of difficulty; multicultural recorded media; multicultural events; and best of all, "real people" to help with inquiries and to guide our fledgling scholars!

Now that I have an OCD projector in my room, I have been able to demonstrate the resources available to students through local libraries and MnLINK. My experiences with MnLINK have always been extremely positive. I credit my colleagues in other fields, especially those in Social Studies, for their excellent work in orienting students to the treasures that await them, including the use of ILL for the most advanced.

Customizing Transparency (Thing 4)

Customizing home pages: increased productivity or "one more thing to do"? The concept of a customized homepage is exciting in theory. The site Are You Making Your Life Easier...?http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/05/15/are-you-making-your-life-easier-by-using-a-personalized-start-page/ is visually chaotic, and overloaded with choices lacking concrete models for applications. The best summary was on the Online Education Database: http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/top-25-web20-productivity-apps.

Online calendars are wonderful for people who enjoy planning and attending lots of meetings, and they have obvious applications for media specialists who need to maintain schedules for lab and equipment use. They would also be useful for math and science teachers who can assign bookwork and lab reports weeks in advance. They are somewhat less useful for languages, where the communicative outcomes of daily work are less tangible--at least at the lower levels of instruction. As a regular list-maker, I already have the habit of making lists, and model that habit to students in the classroom all the time. The issue is finding the time to update every day. Maybe when these tools evolve a little more and accounts do not get wiped away after two weeks of inactivity (per information posted on that site)?

The MPS network would not let me access a couple of the customizable homepage sites at school, but they certainly are an improvement over the matrix currently in place. They are a constructive tool for teachers to develop a personal "signature" that will attract students and other interested parties to view their practice and to make it more transparent.